I find it curious that he utilizes a telepathic poet as a protagonist for the novel. In both cases, the protagonist is using a means to communicate beyond the ordinary limits of language. Via telepathy (in the text) it's a direct, unmediated understanding that circumvents language. With poetry, the protagonist is contorting and stretching language to express a feeling beyond the normal denotative meanings of the words. In both cases, thought is going outside the normal constrains of language and expressing something. It's as if Delaney needs to have the Babel-17 language exist to linguistically "reconfine" thought from its avenues of escape from language.

In the related novella, Empire Star, one character pontificates that "the only important elements in any society are the artistic and criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society's values, can force it to change." It's no coincidence that the two characters in Babel-17 that have a working knowledge of the fictional language are a poet and criminal. Ultimately, Wong comes to restructure the language with a first person pronoun, making Babel-18, a language that will grant the speakers extraordinary thought speed without the downsides of Babel-17.

At the end of the book, after she states she will be composing a poem and her fellow Babel-17 speaker muses on doing necessary crimes to end the war, Wong remarks, "The whole mechanism of guilt as a deterrent to right action is just as much a linguistic fault." For Delaney it seems criminality is somehow tied intrinsically to language's limitations. Even when language is distilled and confined to something as narrow as math, it can't be complete and consistent. No language would be, not even this perfected "Babel-18." I'm going to have a hard time reading future books by Delaney without this lens of language, criminality, and art. It doubtless will inform some of his less savory views. Maybe I should read Hogg next.