address, etc.--at all, but is a semblance of discourse, whereby
the artistic object, the poem, which is a virtual image of an
event, is created. Language is not directly communicative in
poetry; it is the material out of which poetry is made. All
factors of speech--words with their sounds, their literal mean-
ings and rich associated meanings, and all word uses such as
statement, exclamation, or query, go to the making of the
poetic elements that constitute the image, as pigments deployed
on a canvas go to the making of a picture or bricks built up into
walls produce a work of architecture which Le Corbusier defined
as "masses brought together in light."

Poetic language-language as used in poetry-is, therefore,
"expressive" in the same sense as colors are expressive in a pic-
ture, which is not the sense in which they are used directly for
expression, like black drapes at funerals or bright motley colors
in carnival costumes. In painting the actual colors give up their
direct emotional values (whatever these are, and however they
are acquired) and assume an entirely different kind of expressive-
ness that rests on their creative functions, and belongs to the
created object, the visual semblance which is a picture, or per-
haps a decorative design. Similarly, language used in poetry has
not the same direct expressive functions as in genuine discourse.
Its normal expressive function enters into the poetic work as an
element in a composition, the work of art, and has the sort of
expressiveness that belongs to all good works of art: the expres-
siveness of a symbolic form.

In connection with the central problem of this symposium,
Expressive Language, a discussion of artistic expression may seem
out of place, since it involves a radically different sense of
"expression". But I am taking our subject in a somewhat widened
sense, as concerning the connections between language and
emotion; and the particular connection that poetry makes between
these two factors in human life is, I think, a complicated one,
but a connection of such major importance that its general neglect
by epistemologists and psychologists has shunted a good deal of
philosophical, psychological, and educational theory, and given
rise to some deplorable views of poetry.

In view of the short time allotted to each speaker, I must beg

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