In line with the proposal of de Roder (1999), an analogy is drawn between the structure of ritual, poetic language and natural language, exploiting Frits Staal’s conception of ritual as a set of recursively applicable formal procedures, and the biological ramifications of the Chomskyan postulate of Universal Grammar. The central hypothesis is that, in terms of evolution, poetry takes a position between age-old rituals and natural languages, as a sort of missing link. The paper thus focuses on the ritualistic substrate of language, not on the synchronic role of ritual in language. Neurological evidence, which independently supports this idea, is also discussed.