Responding to Lorde - Kendal

Language is undoubtedly a powerful tool in communication. Audre Lorde considers language to be the bridge between dreams and action (37). Language helps convey what we think into what we do or share with others. Without language, human interaction would be changed irrevocably. Specific to language is vocabulary. If language is a tool of communication, then vocabulary is a tool of language. The choice of words provides a desired specificity to language. The specific use of words can lend itself to communicative elements ranging from repetition to hyperbole. In each case, the particular use words convey the desired effect. In her essay entitled “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde employs a specific vocabulary to create the effect of contrast.

Throughout the article, there is a repetition of “light” and related terms. There is also a repetition of “dark” and related terms. This contrast between light and dark is one of the fundamental literary elements of the essay. She uses these two specific terms to underscore her theme. In the essay, Lorde describes poetry as an essential, rather than a luxury. She considers it to be one of the primary sources of communication when she writes, “[p]oetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought” (37). Also, she argues poetry to be that bridge between internal ideas and external expression. To contrast this internality and externality, Lorde describes the internal as dark and the external as light. She says “there is a dark place within” (36) each person that is the source of ideas and thoughts. Poetry, then, is “the quality of light” (37) that transfers these internal ideas into external “tangible action.” Thus, the specific use of light and dark vocabulary helps convey Lorde’s message by relating her concept of internality and externality to visually recognizable references. The vocabulary made her message more understandable and therefore more powerful.

Another example of Lorde’s deliberate use of specific vocabulary can be seen in the repetition of “dreams.” With the repetition of “dream” or “dreams” fourteen times in the essay, Lorde emphasizes this term. Throughout the essay, Lorde refers to dreams in the familiar sense of dreaming during sleep. However, she also uses the term in the amiable light of ideas. In these instances, there is a positive connotation of dreams meaning hopeful ideas. She says everyone has these hopes and dreams, and that they are simply a result of living (38).

Overall, this emphasis on dreams supports Lorde’s argument of the necessity of poetry. She states poetry is a tool by which people express their “hopes and dreams” (37). In conjunction with the concept of internal ideas and external communication, dreams constitute internal ideas while poetry represents the external expression of those ideas. Also, she avers poetry itself is a dream (38). In this instance, the term is in reference to creative imagination and a vision for the future. To Lorde, poetry is the expression of creativity that is unique to each person.


Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Sister Outsider. The Crossing Press, 1984. 36-39. Print.