Abstrakt
The mediality of poetry has undergone a significant change throughout history. While in oral cultures poetry is itself a medium (especially a medium of memory, as Eric Havelock demonstrated on Homer's epic), in modern times, on the contrary, a significant part of poems shows a certain initial inaccessibility and the poem often needs to be mediated: by interpretation, by commentary explicating the context, or by paying attention to it and thus overcoming the inaccessibility.
How to understand this mediation? Is it possible to speak here of a secondary mediality or a form of McLuhan's statement "the medium is the message"? In my talk I will try to answer these questions by using the concept of the poem as a scene of the imaginary. Roman Jakobson defines the poetic function as a focus on the message for its own sake; however, the poem exhibits a contradictory character from this perspective.
On the one hand, it is a speech that flows (as a transparent communication of meaning), and on the other hand, it is an object that focuses attention. This paradox, which manifests itself on multiple levels, most notably between sound and meaning, is constitutive of the perception of the poem: if we pay special, intense attention to it, it creates a temporary imaginary scene on which seemingly contradictory elements coexist and communicate.
Attention here is partly analogous to immersion as described by narratology. However, it differs significantly from it in that it requires effort and is not an immersion in a fictional world, but rather a focus on the experienced present.
This lyrical presence, unlike practical presence, also includes the imaginary or ideal dimension of reality. In this sense, the lyric poem is a medium of the absent (that which is not actually present) or the invisible (that which cannot be present or is normally uncommunicable) and showing it as present and intertwined with actual reality.
A large number of poems can illustrate the conception, beginning with nonsense poetry that can "rhyme" together incongruous or non-existent objects. In my talk I will focus primarily on the Western elegiac tradition in a broader sense, for which the scenic nature of the poem is important.
The elegy, as a poem of mourning for the dead, is also a poem that makes the dead and the living temporarily present on the same imaginary scene and thus overcoming the fundamental contradiction between life and death.