The Poetics of Language and the Poetics of Denotation; Reading in the Essence of the Modern Poem

Abstract

Language is considered as the basis and essence of the poetic process as it represents a deviation from the norm of natural language.  It produces its own new denotations in various ways seeking to create as much aesthetic excitement through it, which can depict the poetic language state. Therefore, poetic language could be described as synthetic brand-new creative language. Thus, the poet creates his own poetic language from the natural language elements, as he creates new relationships that are surrogated to conventional ones in order to build another structure, path and vision that are customized for the poetry with its own new concept, expressive contexts and symbolic connotations, which are poised to build up the poetic language. The language according to poetic description is analogous to fertile idle land waiting for an unconventional farmer who is to be the talented poet who is up to grow plants so that he could reap infinite fruits that are not only confined in one figure and form because the poetic language is not an ordinary expression aiming only to convey a specific address but it is imbued with hints and connotations that bloom in various ways like variety of fresh fruits. The usage of references in the new poem is a form of investing the power of the poetic language and its denotations to borrow images, fairytales, allegories and myths so that it can be subjected to a poetic policy that seeks to build a dialectical relationship between the language of anecdotes, symbols, myths and the poetic language and its denotation. The intertextuality is perhaps the appropriate term to describe this relationship between ancient and modern poetic text, where the modern poetic text taps the potentialities stored in ancient texts to re-represent and produce them as a core in both linguistic and connotation.