Defining Poetry - Establishing Structure

At this point, I want to lay out what my goals are for this project:

- To explore, using specific examples, what it feels like to understand poetry and explain how this experience compares to what the same works are like when lacking the faculties necessary in order for this to happen - so that the differences between the kind of comprehension that is possible in each case becomes clearer. Then I want to show how this manifests in biases which lead a person to interpret specific kinds of structures as being meaningful where they previously would not have been.

- To show why I believe that the mental structures that enable the comprehension of a symphony, those that become active on gaining SGP, are fundamentally the same in kind as those which allow the total apprehension of poetry. I will try to do this by showing how the basic processes of Variant Addition (covered here and here) can also potentially be applied to language that provides a metric structure as a basis to enable poetic forms that extend the scope of how a given person can perceive grammar.

- To illustrate how the meters of verse forms are apprehended such that they only possible in general through SGP, are actually experienced primarily as high level variant structure, and seemingly aren't the same as the low level, regular rhythms that are the basis for most music. Following this, I want to divide language constructs, with respect to a given language, into canonical, variant and divergent categories. This should show why, in principal, variant poetic sentences which are alterations of canonical sentences (i.e. by swapping around the orders of words, "daisies pied" as opposed to "pied daisies") can still comprehended as making sense poetically, and how this is different from sentences which may be felt to simply be entirely grammatically wrong, even if their intended meaning might be clear.

- To show that SGP and VI respectively (the combination of which that allows the full scope of poetry being called the super-eidosic faculty) provide the structural and metaphoric possibilities that allow unified Ideas to be composed through language. In doing this, I hope to revive an older tradition of linguistics that attempted to find ways of delineating poetic language from normal language. I argue that, for a certain definition of poetic language, such delineation is very much in principal possible (save that a certain amount of cultural context that is relative will inevitably affect any attempt to do this).

- To demonstrate how poetic language extends beyond the limitations 'ordinary' language would otherwise have and how it is meaningfully freer in form and expression, while also showing how the possibilities of these forms are still meaningfully constrained by the capabilities of the human mind. This should provide an argument as to how texts as unconstrained as what is called 'free verse' can meaningfully be poetic, as opposed to poetic possibilities being restricted to particular pre-prescribed forms, even though there do seem to be real constraints on what the human mind will perceive as being poetic.

- To explain why I believe that Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar, which covers the structures which are deemed to be necessary to allow a given person (ideally a 'native speaker') to learn which sentences feel grammatical or non-grammatical in a given language, does not actually cover the constructs that Super Grammatical Perception does which extend the capability of the language faculty to allow for the additional structural significance of poetic form. I will do this by assuming a restricted conception of UG, the 'default' language processing ability that everyone who is capable of learning a native language possesses [1] , that only covers constructs that do not require SGP to intuitively comprehend (which may or may not differ from what Chomsky actually holds to be the case). In addition, I also posit that it's possible that such structures are limited to context-free [2] constructs, and that all language constructs of greater complexity are either apprehended poetically (with SGP providing intuitive comprehension of parallel structures in a unified way) or analytically (implying they are outside the scope of a given person's normal grammatical intuition and rely on cultural convention despite this).

---


I will now begin my exposition of what it might mean to understand poetry.

I first off stress that the apprehension of repetition and the intuitive sense that this is significant in general is something that, for the vast majority of people, is not dependent on any modal faculty that requires any effort to acquire. At the very least, it seems that the majority of people are able to appreciate rhythm, the effects of timed metre in music, end-line rhyming in poetry and literal repetitions of sentences, along with many other phenomena that rely on the perception of repetition in time. That this occurs implies a certain peculiarity of our mode of cognition. This peculiarity can be expressed by the idea of "continuity through difference" i.e. that we experience reality not simply as an immediate moment in time, but also through a dynamically generated 'memory' of a sequence through time, which might be considered the "working memory" ¹, through which our attention is drawn to and allowed to apprehend distinctions and similarities of structures as they appear. This apprehension is not completely universal in all respects, some people experience difficult perceiving rhythm in the same way that most people are normally ² expected to be able to [3], and the nature of this kind of perception and what may bias a given being to take note of particular kinds of repetitive similarities seems to differ in different species of animals.

But let us assume as given that a particular person perceives these above mentioned qualities and feels beats and 'immediate' repetitions as significant things their attention is drawn to. Now, as I've already explained in detail, the modal faculties EVP and SGP are effectively binary parameters of a given person's mind, which respectively enable the perception of particular kinds of structures within particular modalities of experience. Each of these structures may become active in a given person in which they were previously inactive at (as far as I can tell) any stage in their life, and I believe that specific kinds of training can help improve the likelihood that this may occur earlier. Encompassing Voice Perception (EVP) causes arbitrary sounds to be perceived as if they were a human voice, and in doing so allows the language faculty and the kinds of structural biases it can learn to recognize to operate on music, resulting in the perception of musical 'themes' and their transformations, which are otherwise not a meaningful object of perception or imagination. Super-Grammatical Perception (SGP) enables Variant Construction and Vitalistic Imagination (VI), which allows for the perception of extended, layered hierarchies of form over artworks that utilize the language faculty and possess a beat structure, which includes both music and poetry.

As I've mentioned before, it is possible even for an EVN-SGN to comprehend particular forms of poetry, specifically those which have end line rhyming, a regular, sing-song beat structure to them and which don't rely on any aspect of SGP or VI to be apprehended (e.i. neither the line structure nor the rhyming scheme are enjambed or break over a concrete thought). The following limerick should be accessible to anyone with competence in English:

There was an Old Man who supposed,
That the street door was partially closed;
But some very large rats,
Ate his coats and his hats,
While that futile old gentleman dozed.
-Edward Lear

The things that make such limericks accessible to such a large number of people seem to be shared in common with poetry that is similarly easy to comprehend; end stop rhyme, clear and concrete thoughts, regular patterns that don't use - let alone rely on - structural exceptions. You can see more examples demonstrating this in the following poems:

https://allpoetry.com/poem/8497229-The-Highwayman-by-Alfred-Noyes

But this isn't what all poetry is like. I've already written about how I apprehend particular cases of 'advanced' poetry, so I will again use one of the simplest examples I'm aware of actually being advanced.

http://chromaticproduction.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/looking-at-poetry-1-in-station-of-metro.html

In particular I want special attention to be paid to what Ezra Pound actually said about the insights that lead to his composition of the poem and his thoughts about the nature of what he wanted to capture and what kinds of experiences and thought processes he believed this ought to be compared to.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/metro.htm

First, I will highlight a particular statement:

"When I find people ridiculing the new arts, or making fun of the clumsy odd terms that we use in trying to talk of them amongst ourselves; when they laugh at our talking about the "ice-block quality" in Picasso, I think it is only because they do not know what thought is like, and they are familiar only with argument and gibe and opinion. That is to say, they can only enjoy what they have been brought up to consider enjoyable, or what some essayist has talked about in mellifluous phrases. They think only "the shells of thought," as de Gourmont calls them; the thoughts that have been already thought out by others

Any mind that is worth calling a mind must have needs beyond the existing categories of language".

If you've read my previous articles you can probably guess where I am going with this. That is, this line of thought shows that Pound is aware that he and the artists and art appreciators seem to think in a way that many people commonly do not, that is, they are capable of dynamically reworking ideas and impressions into new thoughts in order to express particular things, and see art as a tool that allows them to do this. Conversely, those without this artistic drive seemingly do not think like this and either are incapable of doing so, have no desire to or have no knowledge of how or why they ought to. I will claim that it is likely that the bulk of people (the portion depending on the society in question) are genuinely not capable of understanding such thought, or more accurately they are not yet capable of understanding such thought, as I also believe that most humans possess the latent potential to activate the dormant imaginations that make this possible, re-realizing thought as being capable of dynamically remolding itself and inhabiting a new mode of consciousness.

To look into the fundamentals of this thought activity, and understand how it is built up in the mind, we can again revisit Pound's poem:

---

In a Station of the Metro

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals, on a wet, black bough."

---

And again, revisiting his own comments:

"The "one image poem" is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another."

"In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective."

The overall structure of this poem is very simple, and that is why I have chosen it, as I will demonstrate how poetry can build up and make use of greater complexity later. But in its essence, this deliberately haiku like poem can be used to show the fundamental movement of a particular kind of thought activity. The movement is the contrast of two separate expression forms, placed together to that they parallel each other, in order to join the thought content of both into a single Idea. This act of creation is important to understand as something that is not specifically like other particular ways of joining two phrases. The poem does not specifically say that, or how, the "apparition" is like the 'petals', nor that, or how, it is different from the 'petals', the two idea forms are simply set against each other, each being and remaining itself, and each being part of the other within the unity of the poem, with the imagination free to grasp at how that might be realized. Many critics in the above link mention this same quality in different terms. And it is this specific quality, this direct contrasting together by parallel juxtaposition of structures that I again claim is beyond 'ordinary' language and is only specifically perceived by SGPAs.

So, if we accept this where can we go from here? We can take this atomic contrasting/unification of parallel structures/fragments-of-imagination and use it to demonstrate a part of a principal that allows SGP to generate larger structures of significance. This principal aspect is one that I have talked about before - Variant Addition. Variant Addition is that aspect of Variant Construction that I isolated in this article, in which I showed how it applied to examples in music. I will iterate what qualities distinguish it:

- It allows you to build up the perception of a hierarchy of parallel structures, each potentially embedded within another, higher layer. With Variant Construction in general, structures can parallel each other in numerous ways (depending on the particular medium, the structural differences of which I will detail later), but Variant Addition covers the restricted case where the substructures do actually parallel each other fully.
- This structure can (and generally does) take place within and as part of the context of a larger continuous structure. Variant structures take part in continuations of canonical structures (i.e. sentences in the case of poetry, but themes in the case of music). This is the most crucial part of understanding what makes variant structure special and not trivially apparent to people without SGP. SGP is necessary in order to have active mental processes that bias one to perceiving variant structure as something through which canonical structures flow, meaning that sentences can have parts that are not within a given section of a variant structure, but then become part of it when they flow into it; or conversely, they can begin in a given section and flow out of it. The canonical aspects of structure speak, flow and join, while the variant aspects parallel, frame and extend.

I will immediately demonstrate this with an example before continuing further analysis.

---

BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

-T.S. Eliot

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                           But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                         Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

---

Here is a fragment of the first section of Eliot's 'Burnt Norton' Quartet, parts of which I have highlighted in different colors to illustrate a particular pattern. It is through the re-cognition³ of this pattern that Variant Addition can operate, producing a sense of a parallel block structure overlaying the opening lines of the poem, connecting their meaning and feeling into something larger. In the first instance, we can see a sentence spanning over three lines, to be followed by a two line statement, punctuating it. The second set of five lines again uses this structure, paralleling the first, creating a duplicity of this structure, the line breaks deliberately drawing the attention to this quality. But this will feel meaningless if SGP is absent from a mind seeking meaning from such form, and this should become especially apparent when we get to the lines following the tenth. You see, the lines beneath break the pattern that began before—or, at least, they break through it. Instead of spanning just three lines, the next sentence continues on into the fourth, to stop part way through. I mark this part in gold, not to force the structure of the previous part onto it, but to show how it distinguishes itself from that structure and what aspects of it would otherwise have continued that line by line parallel. Instead, it follows on differently, enjambing itself across the lines, inviting, extending to the reader a desire to be swept through to the garden beyond ordinary time. You may perceive that this kind of structure is similar in principal to the overlapping that occurred with the Bach example in part three of Variant Construction, in which two different structures can join, spliced together, and overlap in doing so, without the first part having a distinct ending, or the second necessarily having a clearly distinct start.⁴

But why should the structure work out like this at all? What a priori reason is there to feel that this is meaningful, that this particular combination of parallelism and 'ensplicement' is something that should guide our apprehension of poetry? After all, if you went through with the specific intention of fitting the poem into a predefined structure, you would turn up empty, as the exceptions would not 'prove the rule' so much as they would make you question why you were trying to seek it in the work the first place; the total number of structural possibilities you could be analyzing instead is limitless. If a pattern seemingly only applies to a part of the work, then so what? Why would that not make the pattern only meaningful to the parts where it clearly does apply, as opposed to in some sense carrying through a structure that breaks it? And even then, why this particular parallelism, as opposed to any other kind of arbitrary structure that a student of poetry could be taught to consider significant instead?

This is why I have worked on defining SGP, to show that there seemingly is an aspect of the mind that is simply absent in some people which otherwise draws the attention to and enables the experience of these kinds of structures, explaining why some people seems to be able to intuitively understand high level poetic structure, while others seems to consider it pretentious gibberish no matter how much effort or intelligence they are willing to actually put into it.

Now, I have brought up Variant Addition to try to demonstrate an element which is seemingly similar between the variant structure of music and of poetry. But even just from the example I've used so far, there seems to be some difference in the way the structures manifest themselves in context. A key thing you might notice is that, in the first example I used to demonstrate Variant Addition in music, the parallel structures operated inside of a single canonical structure; the effect was to extend and drag out the perception of a musical theme so that each new subsection was perceived to carry it forward, finishing totally only when finally coming to rest by filling out a whole bar with a note of the tonic. Most tonal music of the western classical tradition follows these basic principals, a set of musical themes is created that generates and is sustained through a tension leading to a given tonic note/chord. Then the thematic material can be further developed and extended through Variant Construction, while maintaining the tonic key as a goal that needs to be aimed for in order to properly complete the expression of the theme. This effectively drags out what amounts to something that is perceived as the equivalent of a single sentence across a whole section of a musical movement.

This, however, is not quite the case in poetry. Instead, multiple sentences frequently seem to occur within the context of a subsection of a variant structure (as seen in the first quartet above). The variant construction in poems occurs around blocks of sentences that can bleed into one another, but which establish a kind of stability over a perceived metric structure despite this. This is actually structurally closer to some of Stravinsky's works, such as the Rite of Spring, in which local block structures, with possibly different metres, are brocaded together into a larger sequence thought Variant Construction without independently establishing themes with distinct keys over a single time signature. Variant structure can, with Variant Addition, hierarchically duplicate structural elements of a sentence in the context of a poem, and extend the sentence out through parallelism in doing so, similarly to how this occurred in the modifications of the Zefiro Torna example given before. But unlike such music, poetry doesn't occur in the context of a key tension that is ultimately resolved through a particular tonic, and isn't based around thematic material possessing this quality, such that it needs to stretch itself as a canonical sequence across this tension. Instead poetry consists of sentences laid together that conspire to unify into the expression of an Idea or image, with the closest equivalent to musical motifs and themes being thematic concepts and images that pop up throughout the work to create conceptual coherence and join together metaphorically. So the element of each art form are based in canonical sequences which posses fundamentally different properties, but which can be rendered through Variant constructs. This constitutes what I claim to be evidence that such constructs in multiple art forms are enabled through SGP in similar ways, along with that of my own personal experience. It should then in principal be possible to categorize people based in their perception of this and show that this correlates across these different media.

---

It may be noted that none of the 'advanced' poems I've used in this post so far have regular line lengths, and in fact rely heavily on their line breaking conventions to define their patterns. This is convenient, because I have yet to properly talk about how I have experienced the sense of metre arise in different kinds of poetry, as I do not feel it arises in the same way in each case. Like I've discussed before, the metre in 'non-advanced' poetry tends to have a stable, song-like quality to, where each line is clearly enunciated. However this is not always the case in poems, and to understand this better I will try to describe another aspect of my change of perception.

There are many aspects of my perception of blank verse and free poetry that changed through gaining SGP. One of the more notable was how my perception of beats and 'lines' in such poetry (to the extent that 'lines' can explicitly be said to exist in the hearing of spoken verse) arose. As I have mentioned before, I did not actually naturally perceive 'high poetry' to have a metre of any kind prior to SPG, poetry did actually need rhythm and rhyme in order for me to intuitively perceive it as having a poetic form. Even trying to artificially scan for iambs or dactyls barely lead to me feeling any kind of underlying beat that meant anything except in the most rigid and regular examples of verse, and even then it didn't have quite the same feeling it now has to me. The kind of feeling I do have for its structure though, is still different in kind from sing-song-y poetry, and that I will explain.

You see, when I read through a line of 'high poetry' now, my mind now seems to subconsciously scan it, perceiving a kind of corresponding block structure (depending on how the words are packed into the metre and line length) and how individual sentences fit into it. So, reading through a block of iambic pentameter, I will generally feel that a row of five iambs will create a single block, that can then be paralleled by the next line, and so on, as long as there are regular, conventional patterns running through it that establish this. If sentences run off the line in ways such that their pauses don't correspond to the line ends, this isn't a problem for me even if I simply read through the line ends as if they were prose sentences; I don't need to fit strong and weak syllables into a music-like rhythm or hear line ends marked with rhyme in order to perceive them as having the metric structure of iambic beats, as I would have before SGP. When enjambments⁵ and caesuras occur, my mind essentially takes them in stride, I recognize intuitively that they are off-kilter from the block structure, and this will affect the way I perceive them and their relation to other canonical sequences within the iambic block structure (which needs to be 'filled in' to properly make sense), but this perception is based around a feeling of how the words 'fit into' the continuously parallel block structure that defines the form, as opposed to the kind of consistently timed pulsing beats that persist through most music⁶. On top of this, alterations to the structure of the line, shortening or extending the number of syllables, or replacing a masculine ending with a feminine one, are things I now register has making sense and having a functional purpose within the context of a given verse work, as opposed to completely breaking my sense of a scannable running line structure existing. I'll use an iconic scene from Hamlet to demonstrate some of these things.

...

HORATIO

[Tush, tush, 'twill not appear.~

BERNARDO

~Sit down awhile;]
And let us once again assail your ears,
That are so fortified against our story*
[What we have two nights seen.~

HORATIO

~Well, sit we down,]
And let us hear Bernardo speak of this.

BERNARDO

~Last night of all,]
When yond same star that's westward from the pole
Had made his course to illume that part of heaven*
Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself,
[The bell then beating one,-- ~
Enter Ghost

MARCELLUS

~Peace, break thee off;] look, (?) where it comes again!

BERNARDO

In the same figure, like the king that's dead.

MARCELLUS

Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.

BERNARDO

Looks it not like the king? mark it, Horatio.

HORATIO

Most like: it harrows me with fear and wonder.*

BERNARDO

[It would be spoke to.

MARCELLUS

Question it, Horatio.]

...

Here I've marked out several significant features through colour and added punctuation. I've highlighted sections that parallel each other in what I feel is a notable way in a given color (showing that, say, the parts in green relate to each other because they share certain similarities) - with lighter shades being used to indicate 'extra' syllables and feet, and asterisks for feminine endings. Importantly, I want to draw attention to the blue brackets and tildes, which I've used to show how a given actor can continue on and complete the block structure of a line that was started by another character.

Most of the text in black here is in pentameter, and along with the lines beforehand which I've omitted, these lines establish the regular structure that other parts can diverge from. But as you can see, many of the 'lines' are started and completed by different characters, and this seems to have a special perceptual quality to it; as if the 'incomplete' lines feel like they are a part of a block puzzle, which the characters pick up the construction of in turn as line structures are left unfinished by the character who previously finished speaking. While this aspect of the text is something that can be seen by deliberately scanning and analyzing it syllable by syllable, this is not something I deliberately try to keep track of in a logical manner when I read for the effect of it, instead the feeling that the lines do constitute this block structure seems to arise out of mental processes caused by SGP.

Even here we can see 'exceptions' that wouldn't make sense in such a logical view, such as Bernardo's "Last night of all", which here lacks a line immediately before from which to continue on, but from which we step back into the base pentameter anyway. These exceptional breaks in structure tend to be put in for the sake of attaining a deliberate effect, shaping expressions in such a way that they otherwise wouldn't be if the structure was totally consistent. But it's when the ghost finally appears that things get really interesting. We see Bernardo strongly anticipating the event he is predicting, and being cut off without finishing when what he is expecting, the apparition of the king, does actually show up, leaving us with a truly broken line. Then Marcellus picks up, filling out a new line anyway, but now in a completely different register, each part of the line ending and beginning the different patterns it is broken across, and so beginning a series of utterances that completely casts aside the mold and disregards the conventions that had been established up til here. Bernardo and Marcellus speak as if with a unified mind, repeating and completing utterances begun by the other, all in awe. It's the way the whole structure breaks off and diverges from its incompleteness into something completely different when the ghost appears that characterizes it, and this seems to account for the otherworldly effect it has on me now, the feeling of mystic horror breaking out of the regular order of the world.

But, conversely, when I had tried reading this before gaining SGP, the whole scenario, and the ways the characters repeated aspects of their lines, only ever struck me as being ridiculously written, as silliness that made no sense and added nothing of worth to the experience.


In the lowest comment of the following link a similar example occurs:

http://ask.metafilter.com/173323/Blank-Verse-Feminine-Endings

Note how in between the lines where the "character swapping" occurs, the number of full lines of iambic pentameter that carry through to the next 'swap' is seemingly arbitrary. Again this is close in spirit to the way that I have tried to demonstrate how variant structure can 'fold' over metric structure so that is can drag out sections of a canonical sequence before a given structure succeeds that then punctuates and unfolds, and hence either ends that line of thought or has it carry on in a different way (such as when the 'swaps' between Jessica and Lorenzo occur). Many more examples that demonstrate the various effects that such verse can achieve in deliberately choosing to vary its patterns are illustrated in the book "Shakespeare's Metrical Art" [4]. This book discusses how it is possible to create particular expressions of emotion and feeling via variation of the number of syllables of a line and stresses within feet, yet still have this feel like it fits into a meaningful variant structure. Moreover, on chapter six there is a short discussion of the kinds of ambiguous hinge-like structures that I have been talking about as being characteristic of variant structure, where part of one structure seems to be an integral part of multiple structures surrounding it (p 103-104).

Blank verse isn't the only form built out of feet that I can perceive through SGP though, it is possible to dynamically construct sequences with lines of differing lengths and fit them together in ways that allow different parts parallel each other, so long as they ultimately provide some sort of hierarchy of parallels that can be joined through the linking and extending of sentences (as canonical sequences) and through expressions of related ideas. Certain 'decorative' features are involved in the apprehension of the total variant structure of a poem that enables this. The decorative features (which are similar to the kinds of features involved in the grouping preference rules of the GTTM) include things like whole repetition of lines, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, consonance etc. which will influence the perception of structural parallels in that order of strength by biasing the mind to perceive the aspects that are shared in common as relating to one another. This I intend to discuss in more detail in further articles.

---


¹ The working memory as a scientific abstraction is something that I have brought up before. The kinds of phenomena that are held in the working memory are seemingly similar to that which are stored in the long term memory, which seems to be able to allow the recall of structures and relations between them in many modalities. Exactly how these various memories relate, how their storage is different or similar, and how this is substantiated through structure are open questions. At the very least, the faculties of memory seem to operate to allow me to compare and contrast the difference between experiences that I have have before and after developing both EVP and SGP, preserving the memory of when I lacked their perception to a certain extent in long term memory.

² What it means to be considered normal is naturally a conventional quality that depends on what society deems to be normal in a given environment. Whether the possession of a given modal faculty is 'normal', or will be deemed to be normal if society becomes aware that it is a meaningful phenomena, will depend on that society and it's culture and makeup.

³ I use the word re-cognition as such to highlight a particular aspect of its nature. To re-cognize is to apprehend some object, and then to perceive it as taking part in some particular identity, being 'the same' as some particular thing. You not only perceive what is taken to be that that particular object again, but you also add to the otherwise immediate perception of the object an association with this identity. It is this second aspect that I want to deliberately highlight. Note that when you are overly familiar with something, or seldom part with it, you would rarely use the term recognize to describe your apprehension of it, as the identity is taken for granted. It is only in doing something like looking as a photo that you could have mistaken for another that you might say you "recognize yourself", projecting identity into a complex with this other. You re-cognize identity into an association with a perception in this case. Likewise, you can re-cognize a structure by identifying apparent similarities it has in common with other structures and then perceiving it to be alike. This can change your perception of the structure and how it is constituted and add associations to its particular manifestation.

⁴ How might it be that the line breaks in Eliot's quartet here might register as being meaningful? To a certain extent, the line breaks as they are presented on the page visually may themselves be the main guide to a reader engaging with the poem, though they will not show up in speech unless a reader deliberately stresses them through pauses. However, if we accept repetition as a driver for lineation, the sense of line forming, there may be some further clues to point us in the right direction. We can see that the first and third lines each end with 'time past' (with the line in between having 'time future'), and the sixth and eighth with '-tion'. These are the clearest example of a direct pattern forming that matches the larger structural parallels.

⁵ Enjambment is also something that will only have structural significance and meaning in verse to SGPAs. I must note that I still have not seen any attempt at a rigorous definition of what an enjambment actually is in grammatical or even conceptual terms beyond the general principal that the expression of an idea is broken across lines. It seems to me like it is something you "know when you feel it" if you have the ability to, but which otherwise may be difficult to define strictly. Like with Zen koans, I identify enjambment based around the feelings I experience in common when they occur. I have reason to suspect that perception of this feeling of enjambment may require EVP, as I could perceive enjambment in poems that made use of line-end rhymes prior to developing SGP, but this feeling never occurred before I gained EVP. If this is the case, and it is true that EVP is needed to understand enjambment, then what it is like for someone without EVP to 'feel' enjambment is likely closer to how I currently perceive visual significant form, i.e. by recognizing that I am being presented with a kind of thing that I cannot comprehend because it contains elements that seems to conflict with themselves in a particular way.

⁶ Iambic pentameter shows that there is the possibility of naturally perceiving a metric structure that is a multiple of five, rather than two or three (assuming that the poetic lines are read straight through, rather than having an extra, silent pause between lines implying an extra beat). Whereas, according to Jackendoff and Lerdahl's GTTM model of music, metric structures are limited to those that are only divisible by the numbers two and three. This seemingly implies that the basic mechanisms involved in the perception of certain poetic metrics are likely distinct from that which allows the perception of metric patterns and their varied structure of strong and weak beats in music.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(linguistics)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar
[3] https://www.cne.psychol.cam.ac.uk/pdfs/NuffieldBriefing
[4] "Shakespeare's Metrical Art", George T. Wright University of California Press, 1988

Poetic Imagination

"Sen no Rikyu, a tea-master, wished to hang a flower basket on a column. He asked a carpenter to help him, directing the man to place it a little higher or lower, to the right or left, until he had found exactly the right spot. "That's the place," said Sen no Rikyu finally.

The carpenter, to test the master, marked the spot and then pretended he had forgotten. Was this the place? "Was this the place, perhaps?" the carpenter kept asking, pointing to various places on the column.

But so accurate was the tea-master's sense of proportion that it was not until the carpenter reached the identical spot again that its location was approved."

- Zen Koan ¹

This article is dedicated to what I have decided to call Vitalistic Imagination (VI)². This is a mental process which I am going to give special attention, that arose in my mind at the same time as SGP and a number of other effects, all of which seem to be integrated aspects of the same phenomena.


But what does it mean to say that an 'imagination' has arisen in my mind? I mean, this seems like it would be an incredibly odd thing to simply say, to announce to the world that a whole new kind of imagination has been born in you, especially one that, as I will claim, is different from imaginations that concern sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. The key thing to understand is that VI is a unique kind of imaginative faculty and form of perception³ that, from what I gather from my experience, not everyone will possess (given, as far as I can tell, it is intimately connected with SGP and won't exist in those without it), distinct from the imaginative abilities involving the 'typical' Aristotelian sense modalities. It is not a different sense or modality itself, but it allows anyone possessing it to experience entirely different kinds of thoughts that otherwise are not possible without it by extending the mind's abilities to synthesize Ideas⁴, and I want to make it clear exactly what the significance of this is. Where normally, various kinds of thought involving both concrete imagination (i.e. the ability to imagine an image or scene in your head or hear a tune playing in your mind) and abstract imaginations (i.e. mathematical structures and symbolic relations that are semi-independent of specific modality) are possible, Vitalistic Imagination adds additional possibilities, new categories of thought synthesis, over what is imaginable without it.

At the core of Vitalistic Imagination is a particular kind of comprehension that is achieved through metaphor. I want to make it clear that, even without SGP and VI, a certain, more limited, kind of metaphorical understanding is still possible, which I will term conceptual metaphor⁵. I want to make this point early because I really need to make sure that people aren't confused but what I'm going to say, which is that certain kinds of metaphor, vital metaphors, can only be properly experienced or understood by a person with VI. This is important, because otherwise people may think that because they do have the capacity to understand metaphorical ideas, as most people likely can (even if they do so only conceptually), that they actually have Vitalistic Imagination. But it was not until I gained SGP/VI that I experienced vital metaphors in full (meaning including both the vitalistic and conceptual aspects). Prior to that point there were certain kinds of experiences that I had not developed the capacity for, and certain aspects of language were hence comparatively lacking in significance.

I naturally understand why someone might be critical of this idea, given that in many ways it might seem to be unjustified. Why should I claim that the experience of metaphor is delineated into distinct types like this in the first place? The core reason, is that along with the ability to understand poetic metaphor in the context of 'high verse' due to the fact that SGP allowed me to understand the structure of such writing, I also found myself experiencing feelings similar in kind to what I felt reading poetry where I didn't before, even in language that didn't have any discernible poetic form like daily speech, thought and literary works in prose, along with poetry 'proper'. 'Stock phrases' became vividly alive within my imagination when I heard or used them, in contrast to before where I had always accepted them unrelentingly as simply additional 'parts of speech' that happen to possess a particular meaning. The metaphoric elements of language that would otherwise be 'hidden in plain sight' became apparent, so that the total multiplicity of the background of a word's meaning would hover around it within my mind whenever I encountered it.

To begin with an initial example take the word 'slacker'. Hearing the word in a modern context, it's generally immediately obvious what it means and its association with laziness should be readily apparent. Likewise, we can hear similarly derived phrases like "slack off" and understand what they mean. However the word 'slack' itself has another, quite different meaning, referring to the lack of tightness of a rope. Think about it a bit and you can understand how the former meaning might have come from the latter. You might imagine a sailor being berated for not pulling his line fast or hard enough, and hence such lack of grit becoming known as 'slackness' in a natural way. I'm not actually claiming that this is the actual etymology of the meaning though (which may be debatable[2]), simply that this kind of thought is likely to naturally arise unprompted in the mind of someone with VI due to the relation of meaning, as they will more readily feel the apparent connection between the meanings of words and phrases in disparate contexts and how they might be metaphorically reunited.

I feel at this point that it is appropriate to introduce Owen Barfield's relevant writing. Barfield is a writer who's philosophical works I happened to stumble upon after developing SGP/VI, and who I found had deeply penetrating insight into the nature of what I felt. Because he speaks of having similar experiences to my own in his own development of metaphoric understanding, and makes similar points about how metaphorical thinking may relate to the meaning of phrases as they are handed down through the generations (a thing which, as he himself points out, many people prior to him have also discussed), I intend to use his work in order to better reinforce my own ideas. Specifically, in his article The Origin of Language [3], Barfield makes this particular point, that many phrases have deadened or dried out metaphorical meanings which were likely what begat their origin and which were what was originally intended for the hearer of them to imagine. For a 'live' example of such an origin that's close to our current cultural understanding, the phrase "the bottom line" used specifically to refer to monetary earnings or otherwise the most crucial element of something that best sums it up, outside of the context of any specific document is essentially metaphoric, but it's generally fairly clear to most people who use it what actual potential context it is referring to. As a further contrasting example, we can see that phrases such as "toe the line" (another allusion with seemingly nautical origin), which may otherwise by misinterpreted by a modern person on hearing it to be the contextually arbitrary phrase "tow the line", may be used in complete ignorance as to its relevance by someone, and yet they will likely not care until this is pointed out to them.

Now, the key thing is, anyone who is only capable of understanding metaphor merely conceptually⁵ will still be able to grasp the meanings of many these metaphoric aspects of language, especially if this is first pointed out to them. This should be apparent to people reading this who suspect they lack VI and yet can understand the reasoning behind these allusions. They may intelligibly be able to comprehend that a word might have had a given origin (or at least could be argued to have an apparent connection between its multiple senses even if they do not relate to how it originated), and that in using it they're using something which perhaps happened to be a metaphor that came from a source that's generally distant from whatever context they are actually using it in now. ⁶ But they typically won't feel the full force and effect of the metaphorical origination, nor will they be fully aware of this at the same time as they use it in their new context in a unified way; that won't come naturally at all, nor do I believe it is really possible to the same extent. So both the unprompted, subconscious 'picking out' of (apparent) original metaphorical feelings from existing language in the act of use, and the simultaneous realization of the vitalistic feeling that this knowledge imparts in the act of using it, are things that those lacking VI are locked out of in general, even if they can otherwise be made aware of these etymological aspects of language in conceptual form.

In respect to this particular kind of thought experience though, I must point out again that the actual history of a given phrase is largely incidental. It doesn't matter strictly what the etymology of a word actually is or how it might have arisen as a metaphor as such (though this is often relevant in practice), what matters is this this sense is communicable in some way through a language/culture such that it engages a given person's Vitalistic Imagination and allows them to feel this particular multiplicity of meaning. It is this natural sense of multiplicity of meaning on encountering implicit metaphors, which are felt to be alive and vital in one's mind and which is the essence of the vitalistic metaphor when felt in non-poetic language. Without this, people will naturally use stock phrases without being consciousness of how they might have come about.

---

There may be things you might be wondering about at this point though, particular implicit questions that haven't been adequately addressed so far. For instance, if many of these decayed metaphorical aspects of words are in some sense ordinary (visceral⁷ or simply otherwise non-vital) metaphors, ones that - in contrast to largely poetic metaphor that is very much dependent on vitalistic imagination - can be imagined chiefly through conceptual thought if your mind is put to it, then why would the perception of them as such still not be as apparent to those without VI? I mean, it wouldn't be unusual for someone who might have used a phrase like "out of left field" for most of their life without thinking about it to realize that it is a baseball metaphor would it?  So surely, someone should still be able to randomly recognize the metaphorical nature of a phrase even if they don't appreciate it aesthetically as long at its conceptual integrity remains intelligible.

I don't at all deny that this is possible, but I will claim it is probably much less likely to happen as frequently when lacking VI without prompting and that it won't happen in quite the same way. But in this case can I actually provide reasons beyond personal anecdote for this? To clarify and address this, I will first say that when I lacked VI and encountered a dried metaphor in the form of a stock phrase, I did not have the same impulse in me that would make me consider the meaning behind the phrase, no subconscious mental process that would inadvertently search through alternate meanings while I recalled the phrase in the same fashion. Whereas, in contrast, once I had developed Vitalistic Imagination, the mental processes this introduced created such impulses where they weren't there before, their aesthetic aspect popping up in my mind and causing me to pay attention to these elements of meaning and perceive how they might connect. We humans seem to process language in such a way that we can produce elaborate sentences without understanding why we have composed them as we have, blindly copying phrases wholesale from the contexts in which they are used and unthinking accepting that this is just a way of saying a particular thing. But VI draws my attention to the construction of phrases and makes it natural to dynamically reconstruct their meanings 'on the fly'.

To provide evidence that I'm not the only one this is the case for, we can look back at the Barfield essay and see that in considering the "excessit e vita"/"walked out of life" example, the author/subject recognizes this mental development occurring at some point during his teenage years, noting that he he went from having little reason to care about such metaphorical aspects of language, to considering them, as they are used in poetic language, the greatest form of art by the time he was 20. That Barfield recognizes that this particular metaphoric aspect of ordinary language, which he did not appreciate as a younger boy, was the same in kind as the metaphoric aspect that he came to appreciate in poetry as an adult, is crucial evidence that the phenomena he experienced is likely the same as what I am calling Vitalistic Imagination. My justification for this claim rests on the experience that while I could certainly understand metaphorical ideas in certain respects, there were particular aspects of metaphor that I simply did not experience until awakening the thought complex consisting of SGP and VI together. I will assume that the same was the case for the young Barfield, that he was very much aware that "excessit e vita" was in fact a metaphor for death, even one that other people might consider beautiful, and why this would make sense conceptually.  Yet despite this, he would not yet be capable of experiencing or appreciating it as a vital metaphor until years later, when he specifically notes the new sense of beauty he feels for it. So VI is essentially a part of a unified thought complex that provides the metaphorical aspect of language and poetry, and in which SGP provides a corresponding structural component to poetry (and music if Encompassing Voice is also active, given that seems to allow musical form to be processed by the parts of the mind that parse the structure of language). In particular, it is the triggering of new, original thoughts and crafting of deliberately elaborate metaphoric constructions that make use of this faculty of Vitalistic Imagination through carefully structured language which takes advantage of SGP that is the main task of the poet who aims to write 'high poetry'.

---

Now I want to explain how I came to be aware of this particular aspect of what we might now call the SGP/VI complex and why I am so confident of VI's nature being what have I described.

Around a year ago, I was reading through Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, an edition containing the introduction by the author written in 1831 [4]. In it, Shelley describes how the novel's conception came about, how she and three other writers came to take part in a competition on Lord Byron's estate to create rival horror stories and how this lead to the idea of Frankenstein's monster being born out of her imagination.

'We will each write a ghost story,' said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more adept to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole - what to see I forgot -something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place to which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task.

Here Mary Shelley expresses this particular idea, though not for the first or last time, that 'mere' prose writing, though adequate for writing novels, setting out plots, describing things and so on, even quite beautifully, was seen by a significant group of of people (including her husband) as being fundamentally limited compared to what was possible with poetry. She is just one example among many who have held the view that even grand and cleverly constructed stories could be lacking in comparison to what could be achieved with heightened language of a purportedly purer form. To them, prose could so express 'platitudes', but not the profound insights and original expressions that poetic language was capable of. There are many other examples of this line of thought, and among those who represent it, undoubtedly along with countless poets themselves, many philosophers.

Take this as an example:

“Poetry is related to philosophy as experience is related to empirical science. Experience makes us acquainted with the phenomenon in the particular and by means of examples, science embraces the whole of phenomena by means of general conceptions. So poetry seeks to make us acquainted with the Platonic Ideas through the particular and by means of examples. Philosophy aims at teaching, as a whole and in general, the inner nature of things which expresses itself in these. One sees even here that poetry bears more the character of youth, philosophy that of old age.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol 1 [5]

Schopenhauer here, if I interpret him correctly, suggests that the function of poetry extends well beyond being a pretty or clever expression of something in a regular pattern, but that it can allow you to familiarize yourself with the fundamental, underlying Ideas behind reality through direct experience with them.

There are many more myriad examples of how people say poetry can overcome the limitations of ordinary language:

http://everything2.com/title/The+difference+between+poetry+and+prose [6]

I bring all this up because, at this point, beginning to read through Frankenstein, I simply had no experience of any of this sort of thing what so ever as far as I knew. The apparently deep and penetrating power of poetry that people spoke of  was a mystery to me, and had been so for years. I had dabbled in various ways trying to make sense of it, looking up what blank verse actually was and how it was meant to be structured (something which was never mentioned during my time in school), trying to scan the lines of various poems to attempt to mark out an understanding of their rhythm. But this was frustrating to me as I mostly got little out it, though there were a few poems I found I could somewhat grapple with in this way. Even then, the small pleasure I felt when I did find something I could understand was apparently of little meaning anyway, the few poems in which something aesthetically meaningful in an 'advanced' way was faintly comprehensible to me (specifically, verse poetry with entirely strict adherence to a given metre) were supposedly 'rigid' in form, while I was assured that truly great and creative poets made use of breaks, alterations and flourishes that broke any of my attempts to follow their beat. In the cases of simpler and more popular forms of poetry, the ones which fit into simple rhyming schemes and complete their thoughts on line breaks, including limericks and assorted song lyrics, I found I had little issue comprehending them. But the 'freer' poetry that critics exalted, Shakespeare especially and particularly, irked me; it didn't matter what I did, or how many times I went over the lines I wanted to honestly feel the effect of, no understanding came, no matter how much I looked up dictionary terms, or saw things acted out in films or on the stage. But it wasn't simply that I didn't 'get it' that bothered me, it's that, on top of me finding the material incomprehensible, it also just disgusted and bored me.

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
- Hamlet

Reading this, it was difficult to imagine how could anyone find such language to be anything but repulsive.

We can also look at poetry that makes use of rhyme too and come up with examples that are similarly viscerally off-putting.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

-T.S. Eliot, Burn Norton Quartet II
[7]

With the two instances above, I'd expect the average person without VI is unlikely to get much pleasure out of reading either. For such a person, it will not at all be clear, even in context, why anyone would want to read the language employed in these works, and save for the person developing VI and SGP for themselves this will remain a mystery to their experience. An unfortunate effect of this it that it will likely leave them with a false impression of the nature of this kind of art. They will generally see this kind of poetic language as being dull, depressing and overly serious, something that you would only subject yourself to because, like eating bitter vegetables, they are "good for you" somehow but otherwise offer little positive experience directly, even if this is not actually characteristic of the full experience of the works as intended by their authors.

But naturally as you might guess there is a solution to all this. One of the greatest aspects of gaining VI, with regards to the experience of art, is that it not only makes certain aspects of language pleasurable where they weren't before, but it also makes particular other aspects, which can otherwise be actively disturbing, disgusting and simply unpleasant in general, loose these qualities. It's not quite like these aspects disappear outright, but rather, the vitality of meaning that arises acts like a bright light and outshines the negativity of experience that might otherwise occur, turning art that would be experienced as something depressing and horrid into a thing of beauty. The effective experience of language, metaphor and meaning becomes vivid in a way it was not before. Experiencing the vital is in many ways comparable to having a lamplight shone onto language that at last reveals its full pallet of colors and how they can mix together to form new ones dynamically.

The vital is hence an abstract building up of meaning that is experienced vividly and with strong, positive emotion despite begin abstract in nature. It is not experienced directly as sight, or sound, or touch or as any kind of related sense or how each of the senses are felt when they directly affect a person, despite being able to metaphorically 'borrow' other peripheral feelings that might relate to phenomena experienced through these senses in order to build up metaphor. Reading a word relating to light may actual give the impression the word mentally radiates a kind of brightness if it tickles the vitalistic imagination, even if it appears no more luminous in the visual field. In contrast, the negative feelings that can otherwise stem from experiencing certain passages and the concrete things they portray in the absence of this vitality are often experienced in a particularly more grounded, visceral way, as being directly related to the feelings of a given sense experience in ways that feel like a more fundamentally gut based reaction. It is natural to be disgusted in being confronted with the impression of feeling flesh melting, being torn and disturbed, and contrasted with rotten vegetation, at least before ascending to a different level of imaginatory power.

---

It was while I was nearing the very end of reading Frankenstein, during the last couple of chapters specifically, that the activation of SGP/VI actually occurred. It is because of this particular case, in which there is a clear contrast between how I experienced the language in it before and immediately after the activation, that I have a ready example to illustrate this conceptual framework. As I mentioned before, vital impressions and feelings can come from language that isn't restricted to any particular form. So there is a sense in which any kind of language can potentially be said to be poetic in this specific way, to the extent that it makes use of these vital impressions, and this naturally includes literary works of all kinds, including novels like Frankenstein which make use of flowery descriptive language.

In re-reading the 1931 preface after attaining SGP/VI I found a clear difference in my own apprehension compared to my first reading. It was not what I felt to be the usual effect of going back over something you've read before to find you understand it better, like in the normal case where your mind has simply had more time to grasp the whole of it and hence now pay better attention to more details. Instead, I clearly felt a difference in the kinds of feelings that arose and were available to me. Not only did I understand what the author was talking about in explicitly mentioning poetic feelings, speaking of how Lord Byron's writing "clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth", as I had experienced this in actual works of poetry by then, but I also felt similarly poetic feelings rise from parts of Mary Shelley's prose itself where I couldn't before. The following passage is where the difference caused by the perception of new vitality within it was particularly noticeable:

"I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them; they were not so to me then. They were the eyrie of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy. I wrote then - but in a most commonplace style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true companions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered."
-Frankenstein 1831 Intro: Paragraph 3 Excerpt

You see, when reading descriptive text in a novel, what would typically happen was that, in order for me to properly immerse myself in it, I would visualize a given scene as best as I could in my "mind's eye", giving concrete form to it in my visual imagination.⁹ This was the means by which I felt and experienced scenes as described in novels which I chiefly relied upon to immerse myself in them. But now, reading over the same passages, I find that, while I can still imagine scenes in the same old way, I now have the option of imagining passages in terms of the vitalistic imagination, feeling out the descriptions of the scenery in a way that is abstracted from direct imagery. This is not strictly better in every way, but often it seems clear to me now that a given author, in writing such descriptive prose, will tailor descriptions to their own imaginative ability, and if they are immersed in vitalistic sensibilities they are likely to write for an audience who possesses this imagination and can take advantage of the possibilities this offers.

There are a couple of notable advantages of realizing textual descriptions in this way. One is that, given that such imagination deals directly with Ideas and their relations, you are freed from having to build up a specific concrete visualization at any given point, which may have to be 'rebuilt' if more descriptive information is given that subsequently changes the way you imagine something. With vitalistic imagination, Ideas more or less directly interact and combine with each other and so your conception and impression of the whole can be updated as you read through a description that is written with such imaginatory capacity in mind. It isn't always difficult to 'rebuild' part of a visual impression, especially if a description simply talks about different objects in turn or progressively adds details to small parts of something, but sometimes a description will be particularly hazy about details that would enable the buildup of a specific visual image or will recast significant parts of it seemingly arbitrarily. It is in these instances that it is often preferable that VI is used instead.

The second is something that lies specifically in this haziness. Part of the nature of VI is that it allows statements to be 'specifically ambiguous' in complex and elaborate ways, to ambiguously cover a certain area of possibilities, in a highly deliberate fashion. The use of metaphor is frequently a tool used in order to do this, to redirect the imagination's specific conception of an idea so that parts of it are drawn out or retracted, or split up or smoothly integrated with other aspects depending on how parts of a given idea are made to relate to a thing it is being compared to and unified with through the metaphor. Like with abstract, conceptual thinking, this kind of thing is still possible when experiencing language in a way that doesn't make use of VI, but the ease through which the specific scope of the various aspects of ideas can dynamically and fluidly form in a given mind is distinctly enhanced by VI. To properly discuss this topic in the appropriate detail that it deserves would require a broad survey of many philosophers of language and linguistics that I do not want to burden this article with, so I will leave an in depth discussion of this aspect for further writing and get back to my example.

Paragraph 3, quoted in part above, has details that illustrate these aspects. First there is how the terms blank and dreary are actually used in context. They in some sense describe the scene of her childhood home situated next to the River Tay, but as soon as that description is granted, the sentence after immediately modifies the initial impression of its sense. Then the words blank and dreary become qualified as aspects of the author's present retrospection of the reality of the past, allowing her adult judgement of the scene and her subjective recollection of her past experiences to become separate approaches to memories from that time. Then the vital takes off, her home becomes an eyrie of freedom, and pleasant region in her recollection, a nest where aspects of her imagination are born to speak and fly with her in metaphor. On the whole, it is notable how sparse of actual concrete, visceral description the text is. Aside from knowing of the trees of the grounds and the bleak sides of the contrastingly woodless mountains, all that we find out about about her old residence is that it is on the aforementioned blank and dreary river and not so picturesque. Any specific picture you might build up of it from this highly abstracted description alone is going to consist largely of details that you yourself have furnished it with. But in being able to vividly experience the whole scene through its metaphorical aspects, of imaginative freedom soaring, and illuminating the dreary and visceral with its vitality, this ceases to be a negative. It is, as I have stressed before, not impossible to apprehend these metaphorical aspects in a merely conceptual way even if you lack VI, you may understand perfectly well in principal why a writer's home is being compared to a bird's nest, but even then I doubt that on reading through this section of prose that you will experience the effect of it as I do now, of feeling the living qualities of her imaginary creatures along with their context within the metaphorical 'image' without needing to impose (on them) an overly specific realization of them in another imagination.

--- [extended version]

You may now be wondering something. While I may have undergone what appears to be a radical transformation (or so I claim), you may question to what extent this phenomena might actually occur in other people as such. Maybe this seeming rapidness of transformation is comparably rare, or possibly even unique to me. However, the capacity to comprehend vital metaphor is something I have, at this point, good reason to believe is shared my many others.

Though I said I would not burden this with an extended discussion of linguistic philosophy, it would feel wrong at this point to not amend this article with a mention of Josef Stern's paper, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A METAPHOR, OR THE METAPHYSICS OF METAPHOR [9]. In it he aims to describe a form of metaphor which he holds deserves particular attention as a phenomena, which he also independently (though perhaps not coincidentally) terms 'vital metaphor', and which I have little doubt is the same as that which is described here. If it is the case that our ideas do describe the same thing, and Stern's ideas are held by others to accurately point out something they also feel to be the case for them, this would suggest that this particular, peculiar form of imagination is widely possessed by many. On the whole, the third volume of the Baltic International Yearbook contains exceptionally rich discussion on on what it means to comprehend metaphor in this vibrantly poetic fashion, and I also want to single out Elisabeth Camp's discussions of metaphorically 'seeing-as'. I feel it would be unsurprising then, if it turns out that this faculty is a key aspect of the mind that poets possess to a high degree, but which may be absent in others. In keeping to my promise though I've left in depth discussion of this to a separate article, which I will update this one with when it is published.

All in all, I hope that all those reading this, whether poetry is alive or dormant in them, are illuminated to the nature of other minds.

---

¹ As you may have noticed, I have stated off this article with a quotation of a zen koan [1]. You might have suspected that I intended to use it to illustrate an aspect of metaphor (perhaps its potential to realize preciseness), or conversely that I simply wanted to make a trendy, yet otherwise irrelevant reference to Zen Buddhism for the sake of beginning with something deep sounding, but there is actually a deliberate and wholly other reason for this being here. You see, there are certain aspects of Zen philosophy that, as far as I can tell from my experience, may be impossible to comprehend without Vitalistic Imagination. To begin to properly apprehend koans and the essential effect I feel they should have on your mind, the effect that I feel whenever I comprehend one, VI seems to be needed, as I never felt these effects before acquiring it. When I read through a koan now, a common, characteristic experience occurs that is similar between each of the koans that affect me. What this feels like is in a way similar in a way to the reading of a poem or poetic language, but instead of building up a vital, conceptual⁴ Idea through this faculty, the vitalistic imagination is essentially arrested, a scenario is presented that seems to clear the metaphorical imagination once the koan is properly realized in my mind, in a way dismissing its powers and need to grasp onto any particular thing. I feel as if I encounter something that triggers an impulse towards the vitally imaginative process, yet the particular experience imparted by the koan is beyond it (and all other imaginations) and cannot be grasped directly by it. Something clicks, and a feeling of emptiness and clarity washes over and 'occupies' my mind. But when I possessed only 'ordinary' imagination, any experience of this effect will not occur, there was only instead the feeling that I was reading something strange that yet had no clear effect that I could actually understand (beyond the conceptual idea that koan are supposed to "clear your mind" and ready it for progress toward enlightenment, which I could not yet experience), the effect that koans seemed to have in common did not become apparent until VI was activated. Once VI is active though, it specifically will be felt to be cleared of definite content, through other forms of imagination will still be comprehending the koan's scenario. So in a sense koans do seem to help to clear your mind of unnecessary grasping for conceptual understanding through metaphor and to me this seems to be a significant aspect of their purpose.

² This use of the term 'vitalistic' in no way implies the philosophical position of vitalism. Vitalism is a position that I am distinctly opposed to, as I hold that it is most likely that life and consciousness are things that necessarily arise in accordance with physical structure, regardless of the substrate that underlies that structure. This is naturally opposed to the idea that specific, 'special' substances are what underlie life, a position that we have less and less reason to believe as science provides more knowledge of how brains are structured.

I also feel the need to need to explain a certain issue here. Why not simply call VI "Poetic Imagination" (or even "Aesthetic Imagination" as Barfield seemingly does), given that it relates directly to understanding things is a particularly poetic way? Firstly, not all poetry actually uses it. There are even lines of Shakespere that, from my memory of when I lacked this faculty, I was more or less completely able to comprehend and of which my impressions have not changed since.

But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill

These lines of Hamlet, to my mind, contain no vital aspect of any significance. Specifically, the enjoyment of them is not diminished by lacking VI, nor is it enhanced by possessing it. This is in stark contrast to the dialog of the rest of the play.

So, poetic imagination as we might call it in full, if we are willing to try to identify all the aspects of the mind related to the apprehension of poetry, extends beyond what is made possible through vital imagination. It may not be possible at this point to meaningfully distinguish the mental processes that give rise to the experience of poetry at large from most or all of the rest of the mind in the same way that I propose that vitalistic thought processes seemingly can be, so I have chosen deliberately to not simply use the word 'poetic' (or aesthetic) where I believe something more specific is needed.

³ The specific delineation between an 'imaginative' faculty and a 'perceptual' faculty is not something that seems to have a hard answer. So I want us look at it like this. Certain specific modalities, like sight, can be activated by external perception caused by signals from the eye, which will cause a vivid impression of color forms. Conversely, for people without visual aphantasia at least, it is also possible for the human mind to create an internal impression of color and form that is similar in quality (to that received through the corresponding sense) but which is felt to be less real. So here, we have a sensory faculty and a corresponding imaginative faculty. I will take this to be the model of a 'typical' Aristotelian sense and the associated modality it takes part in. In contrast, there also exist one-sided, internal modalities that seemingly don't have a directly corresponding sense organ, instead they only have the single faculty. We can use the spatial feeling to illustrate this. In seeing, hearing or touching objects, we might build up a sense of space, space within which we may move around and which may also contain obstacles, walls and other things that take up space. We don't always feel this arising directly from another sense, the knowledge that a wall is on a certain place relative to another can persist within this imaginative faculty of space, even if we can't directly see it [9]. Solids, as far as we have reason to believe they do through our experience, posses volume¹⁰ and we will feel, even if we only see an object's surface, that this volume persists. So, in the case of this particular modality, can we really say that there are two aspects of it, both a vividly experienced perception and an imagination, or is there not much of a distinction at all? I will call such a one sided modality a pseudo-modality. In this way you could argue in a sense that vitalistic imagination could be considered its own pseudo-modality - depending on what you are willing to call a modality - though one that more strongly relates to other modalities and the synthesis of many of their aspects, as opposed to being a 'ground' of uniquely and highly distinct feeling qualia (which the spatial pseudo-modality seems to resemble more). And I believe that this is exactly what many aestheticians intended when deigning the term 'taste' to refer to a sensitivity to certain qualities seemingly caused by a kind of 'organ of internal sensation' as Hume did. [10] But if you were to do so and grant it this status, you might have to admit that other things that are traditionally not labeled modalities, things like feelings of tension and anticipation, might gain the status of a pseudo-modality due to them being essentially 'hallucinated' in association with events received through other modalities. So for the moment at the very least I will continue to call Vitalistic Imagination an imaginative faculty, in accordance with other philosophical conceptions of imagination (like those of Kant and Wittgenstein[11]). That I label Encompassing Voice a perception in contrast is meaningful, but still somewhat arbitrary.

⁴ I have chosen to capitalize the word Idea, in order to specifically refer to the specific 'objects' of vitalistic thought that consist of a single metaphor constructed out of various aspects of meanings and dynamically integrated through the vitalistic imagination into a unified thought. As I intend to show in later articles, the ultimate goal of many poems is to craft such Ideas.

⁵ I use the term conceptual as I do here not to imply that vitalistic experiences are non-conceptual or not based around the building up of concepts, but to imply that without VI, the forms in which the imagination can conceive of things are limited in a particular way, to a more merely conceptual experience, one that is typically limited to either a more analytical understanding of concepts (which is more devoid of feeling) and/or a more visceral one (which will have feeling, but these feelings will be heavily related to those of immediate sense impressions conjured through imagining ideas via particular sensual modalities). Conceptual understanding underlies vitalistic understanding, but in the absence of the vitalistic there will remain the merely conceptual. So, essentially, vitalistic experience is a non-sensual imagination, yet it is able to synthesize vivid feelings in its abstractness. Yet still, the simple fact of being non-sensual and vividly felt isn't enough to uniquely mark out VI as what it is, as emotional experiences in general have these qualities; it is in the composition of multi-layered metaphor into particular kinds of unified, vitalistic and abstract-yet-vividly-felt Ideas that VI is uniquely distinguished.

⁶ The whole issue of how these apparently poetic metaphorical aspects of language might have arisen and how a given culture might have developed in order to produce them as products of language experienced in contemporary modernity is a topic that Barfield goes into much greater detail in his book, Poetic Diction. [12] There, he attempts to make sense of how it might have been possible for the original people and cultural forces that created various words and phrases to have produced them such that future peoples could perceive them in poetic terms, even if they were not necessarily intentionally created to be poetic. This allows for the possibility that the coiners of a term may not have been consciously poetic or deliberately crafting a vitalistic metaphor, but may have just been following a thought process natural to their culture, and yet produced something with such elements perceptible to us anyway.

⁷ Visceral is used here in the specific sense it is used in (⁵) above, in relating to sensory experiences, along with (not-strictly sensual) feelings that are produced by immediate sense impression or suggestions of such (imagined) feelings that could have been produced through those sense impressions. Imagine being savagely clawed by a tiger. Now, consider, in addition to the sensory aspects of the imagined 'experience', the aspects of your impressions that are not the image of the tiger, nor the sound of its roar, nor a direct imagining of the force or pain of being clawed in a particular part of you body; these 'gut feelings' of viciousness, unpleasantness and overwhelmment of strength. All these associated feelings are still the visceral as I mean it, unless the impressions are transformed and become something vitalistic through metaphor. I do need to note though that despite the examples I happen to have used in this article, visceral feelings can be pleasurable sensations too, so it is not always negative, but these pleasures will still be different from the vitalisic.

⁸ I am not claiming that I have solved the apparent paradox of how people might find enjoyment in otherwise negative experiences in general, but rather only want to explain how specific instances of this can be in part explained by the possession of Vitalistic Imagination. I do not intend this to be a general explanation of the issue discussed in such essays as David Hume's "Of Tragedy" [12], i.e. I'm not claiming that VI is necessary for all aesthetic overcoming of visceral negative feeling.

⁹ Conversely to this, it may well be the case that a person with visual aphantasia, and hence no internal visual imagination or conscious recollection of visual memories, may be unable to gain pleasure from passages written for people who are assumed to have visual imagination. [14] But even so developing VI may allow them to experience some of these passages quite vividly where otherwise someone without either internal imagination would be left understimulated.  In each case, the possession of a given imagination seems to open up the reader to particular kinds of experiences enabled by writing relevant to that respective imagination.

¹⁰ We could very well imagine objects to be mere shells consisting of their currently visible and tangible surfaces, as they might be presented in the polygons of a video game of some sort. Or we could try to go even further, attempting to feel a general ambiguity as to the specifics of the solid volumes of things and forms, instead of the instinctive certainty that we typically feel we must know in general what the real constitution of a given object's form should be. But this will likely feel like an unnatural exercise to most, as it goes against our need to grasp things as they appear to us as particular objects embodied in a particular way in space.

[1] http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/48accurateproportion.html
[2] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=slack
[3] http://www.owenbarfield.org/owen-barfield-and-the-origin-of-language/
[4] https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro
[5] https://books.google.com.au/books?id=kF12CwAAQBAJ&pg=PT176&source=bl&ots=4IXN3y6nig&sig=5qkGJ8akOyK3Tu5HLTB1p7LH7Cs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjFnp3opvHVAhWCe7wKHTaZBccQ6AEIMDAC#v=onepage&q&f=false
[6] http://everything2.com/title/The+difference+between+poetry+and+prose
[7] http://www.coldbacon.com/poems/fq.html
[8] Josef Stern, The Life and Death of a Metaphor, The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication, August 2008
[9] http://www.nature.com/news/nobel-prize-for-decoding-brain-s-sense-of-place-1.16093
[10]  http://web.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r15.html
[11] http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdfG6mSAFS1zv.pdf
[12] http://www.owenbarfield.org/books/poetic.php
[13] http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/hume.tragedy
[14] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504