Postmodernist Lyric and the Ontology of Poetry

Over every poem which looks like a poem is a sign which reads: This road does not go through to action: fictitious. The wit here is John Crowe Ransom's (1938:131), but the concept is a commonplace of poetics, traceable in the Anglo-American tradition at least as far back as Sir Philip Sidney-and Sidney, we know, only relayed what was already a commonplace of Continental poetics. The world of the poem is separate from the real world of experience, constituting a heterocosm: this principle, along with the principle of mimesis, has been the mainstay of theories of poetic ontology since the Renaissance. Indeed, the two principles are mutually dependent and mutually implicating. For the real world to be reflected in the mirror of literary mimesis, the imitation must be distinguishable from the imitated: the mirror of Art must stand apart from and opposite to the Nature to be mirrored. The heterocosm theory draws a sharp boundary around the fictional projected world, but by the same gesture it denies the possibility of ontological difference within the fiction. A mirror must have a frame, but it will reflect better without any ripples or scorings across its surface. Thomas Pavel reiterates this orthodoxy when he writes that