 Undoubtedly Croce was influenced by his lifelong immersion in literature in his proclamation that all language is poetry. And perhaps it is true that all language has some poetic qualities, and perhaps it is true that language ‘in its actuality’ consists of sentential utterances. But as Bosanquet pointed out in 1919, this does not mean that language is only poetry, or that the referential dimension of language does not exist. It must have something that distinguishes a scientific treatise from a tune—in fact it must be the same thing, which we are calling the referential dimension, that serves to distinguish poetry from a tune (it has to have sound and sense, as we say). So to say that drawings and tunes are equally good examples of language seems, at best, strained. Perhaps Croce would have said that the referential dimension does not exist, or is a false abstraction; but his general philosophical views may be forcing him down an unprepossessing path. More promising would be a formalist endeavor to try to isolate the pure sonic aspect of poetry—comprising metre, alliteration and so on—and then to search for instantiations or at least analogies in the other arts.