Ron, helping out a student with an assignment about language poetry objects to "purify the language of the tribe" as a cliché. What he could have pointed out was that Carl Dennis uses this phrase in a way antithetical to its origin in Mallarmé's "Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe":

Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis l'ange
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu,
Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu
Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.

[More or less: a vile crowd of people like a multi-headed hydra having heard the angel give a purer sense to the words of the tribe, proclaimed very loudly that the spell had been imbibed in the honorless vessel of some black mixture]

This is Mallarmé's protest against people like Carl Dennis, who think poetry should speak "clearly," and who were presumably objecting to Poe on similar grounds. Anyone who associates Mallarmé with some plain-spoken Wordsworthian idea of poetic language, as Dennis seems to be doing, is deeply confused about literary history. Mon dieu.