Poetry as Fiction

Abstract

p RADOXES make intriguing titles, but I am not otherwise fond of them and intend, by the end of this article, to dissolve the one that entitles it. I mean to do this by elaborating the proposition that fictiveness is the characteristic quality of what we call when we use the term in the broad sense bequeathed by Aristotle, i.e., to refer to the general class of verbal artworks. My primary concern will be to develop a conception of poetry that allows us to distinguish it from and relate it to both nonpoetic discourse and other artforms. The view presented here was initially, but rather incidentally, proposed elsewhere.' I have found the elaboration of it of continuing interest, however, especially since the grounds for those distinctions and the nature of those relationships remain, to my mind, extremely problematic in contemporary linguistic and aesthetic theory. Since my procedure in what follows may seem initially perplexing, some prefatory remarks may prevent confusion. First of all, I shall be saying a good deal about language in general before I say anything at all about poetry. Any theory of poetry inevitably, though not always explicitly, presupposes a theory of language. Thus, those who have at various times regarded poetry as inspired speech, or embellished prose, or the language of passion, or emotive statements, have obviously had somewhat different notions of what language is when it is not poetrye.g., uninspired speech, plain prose, the language of reason, or verifiable statements. Since, moreover, linguistic theory is now in a very volatile state, no general propositions concerning language can be offered casually or taken for granted. (One can often tell more about a man's politics and metaphysics now from his views of language than one once could from his class or religion.) In any case, although I am by no means offering here anything that could be called a theory of language, the first section of this article will develop some general observations on nonpoetic or what I call natural discourse, particularly in those respects that are most significant in distinguishing it from