How poetry can make us better thinkers

In a volume dedicated to the influential Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), modern linguist Tyler James Bennett explains how the ambiguity of meaning in poetic metaphor opens the mind to development of creative potential in a way that literal writing cannot. 

Roman Jakobson was a pioneer in the field of semiotics, the study of how systems of signs and symbols, including language, convey meaning. 

Jakobson was especially interested in applying semiotic techniques to the investigation of poetry, music and the visual arts. His theory of “distinctive features” exerted a decisive influence on the young Noam Chomsky, who became the leading figure in modern theoretical linguistics.

Bennett’s “Incompatibility, unlimited semiosis, aesthetic function” essay appears in the book (Re)Considering Roman Jakobson, published this year by the University of Tartu, Estonia. 

To examine the working of metaphor, Bennett uses the example of Ezra Pound’s 2-line poem “In a Station of the Metro,” (1913): 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

petals on a wet black bough.

A literal interpretation, Bennett notes, gives us a meaningless statement. “Faces" are not “petals.” This violates the principle of non-contradiction, required for literal interpretation. 

However, when interpreted figuratively, as by metaphor, multiple possible meanings emerge. 

Linguistic Recoding

Bennett sees this as an example of the principle of linguistic recoding, first stated by American philosopher and semiotics pioneer Charles S. Peirce (1839-1910), whose work exerted a profound influence on Jakobson. 

Peirce, explains Bennett, understands meaning as the translation of a sign into another system of signs. 

“A sign is not a sign unless it translates itself into another sign in which it is more fully developed,” Peirce wrote.

Bennett views this translation of a sign into another more fully developed sign as the operative principle in poetic metaphor, as illustrated by the Ezra Pound couplet where “faces in the crowd” become “petals on a wet black bough.” 

The reader's mind is necessary to make the translation of sign into sign, and to impose upon it their own subjective connections. The poet's work was necessary to provoke such a process.

Sign systems that do not provoke such a process of translation are dead in Jakobson’s view. 

“Rather than revealing the world,” Bennett states, “they are those wherein [as Jakobson writes] ‘activity comes to a halt, and the awareness of reality dies out.'” 

Poetry is alive, insofar as it can engender this process of semiotic translation, and thus stimulate the creative process.