On the Metapsychology of Poetic Language: Modal Ambiguity

The psychological insights of literary men are rarely phrased in conceptual terms precise enough to warrant calling them scientific hypotheses, though they may possess as much heuristic value. One such insight about the nature of imagination centres on the idea of a mysterious dualism in poetic language. Shakespeare tells us in A Midsummer Night's Dream that the poet has 'seething brains' and 'shaping fantasies' which apprehend 'more than cool reason ever comprehends'—a fantasy-reason dualism. Coleridge calls attention to certain complementary forms of mental activity when he mentions 'the streamy nature of association, which thinking curbs and rudders'. And in a recent address Robert Penn Warren (1971) touches on a similar dichotomy of fantasy and ratiocination. He speaks of the writer's endeavour to create a new language 'that unites the primitive density of meaning and depth of feeling with the civilized man's power of abstraction'. He speaks in the same vein of a 'naked language'—a 'primary language of imagery … a preverbal "language" that reaches back to infancy and the primitive dark'. This language, he says, not only recalls us to the depths of our being but at the same time can embody such unprimitive entities as ideas and values.

In his own literary terminology Warren hints at what the analyst knows as the regressive elements of metaphoric language. Ella Freeman Sharpe describes these aspects of metaphor in her classic paper (1940). She notes that a metaphorical statement such as 'I am sodde