Abstract

Contemporary Criticism and Theory have been at pains to come to grips with the specificity of poetic language. After a short review of the different ways in which the language of poetry has been studied, I propose a new perspective for its study. This approach consists of a philosophical understanding of the way language works in poetry. In chapter 1 I explore Wittgenstein's theory of language, especially as it is developed in the Philosophical Investigations, to arrive at both a model of "ordinary language" and a preliminary sketch of the mechanisms of poetic language. In chapters 2 and 3, I further specify the features of poetry according to Karl Kraus's conception of language as creation and Valery's views of poetry as a specific form of language combination. In chapter 4, all these approaches are refined and organized coherently into a paradigm for poetic language. This paradigm is then approached from several perspectives: the process of writing and reading, the mechanisms of language combination, the "ideational" content of its crystalizations and the implications of their materiality. At the end, I offer some remarks on the philosophical import of poetry in general as a form-of-life inextricably attached to forms of language