Abstract
If we perceive the poetic text as a relatively stable semiotic formation resulting from an imaginative process, we can also discuss „worlds“ and ways of „world-making“ in poetry. The fictional aspect remains an important aspect in poems, even though the ways of world-making in poetry are different from those in fictional narratives or drama.
Not only the lyrical persona, but also the notion of fictionality leads us to the realm of a constructed, doxastic worlds: „„[T]he lyrical “I” can be imagined as fully contained within a fictional world constituted by the poetic work and, simultaneously, the lyrical “I” embodies this fictional world” (Červenka 2003). Since the persona utters its version of a world and since it is a created semiotic representation of human consciousness – as a “fictional being” (Pavel 1986), its version of the world is simultaneously a presentation of a fictional world.
The fictionality and thus the world-performing power of the poetic discourse is a topic rarely discussed. Although we don’t read poems because of their fictional qualities, fictionality is nevertheless one of the elements contributing to its aesthetics.