A Haunted Language

William Keckler has theory that so many poets explore the Underworld because our language is haunted by the ghosts of other cultures:

Poets tend to get lost in dictionaries more than other writers, I think. . . . Is it a coincidence that the poets who are obsessed with etymologies are often the poets skewed towards the Occult, or spiritual intelligences? . . . One could argue a rational basis for this seemingly irrational drift of thought. Linguistic analysis would say these poets were seeing hauntings within language because they're there. The ghosts of other cultures and their values (spiritual, political, praxeological) are still markers in the cultures which absorb them. Talking heads like the metal head that supposedly spoke oracles.