Abstract:
The thesis of Revolution in Poetic Language is that the works of literary avant-garde writers produce a ‘‘revolution in poetic language," that is they have elements that shatter the way we think the text are meaningful. Meaning is not made just denotatively, but it is made in large part by the poetic and affective aspects of the texts as well. Kristeva does not treat language as a separate entity but rather as a part of dynamic signifying process which means the ways in which bodily drives and energy are expressed, literally discharged through our use of language. This signifying process has two modes: the semiotic and the symbolic. Kristeva believes a text operates in two levels: at the semiotic-genotext level and the symbolic-phenotext level. However, according to her a language that is either exclusively semiotic or exclusively symbolic is impossible. The semiotic is, however, sometimes explained as a precondition of the symbolic, but still the total absence of the symbolic would be chaos or psychoses. Herbert’s poems are the dialectic of semiotic and the symbolic. Semiotic level is revealed in dispersing the subject in various pronouns, rhyme and meter and using metonymies, metaphors and puns which are signs with multiple layers of signification.
(
, 
, 
)
