Language, poetry and reality. ordinary language and poetic language in Roman Jakobson

In times like these, characterized by a renewed inflation of linguistic signs, the poetic word has a particular task to fulfil: that of restoring the dignity, value and consistency to the self-referentiality of language; to the embryonic ability of "tracing out" and inscribing the world which is proper to the poetic word itself. This important game is played out by the very people who are called upon to "awake language from its torpor": the poets themselves. Roman Jakobson has been amongst the first to concentrate their scientific attentions upon the self-hood of the poetic text, in so doing revealing the "secret" relationships of strength which justify its fascination. In Jakobson's works the verbal art is considered both as an explanatory phenomenon for the elaboration of scientific problems - as in the case of phonological science - and as an object of study in and of itself. Jakobson's linguistic-semiotic analysis of thirteen centuries of world poetry highlights the substantial links between signifier and signified; the differing "facets" of the signs are distinguishable at a merely analytic level, while it is the poetic language itself that illustrates their dialectical relationship. Poetry helps to consider ordinary language and the metaphysics of the obvious that it brings as a circumstance rather than a dogma: it unmasks the symbolic nature of every aspect of reality; the oblivion of human sensory production fails and this implies a new consideration of human language, beside which poetry and its irreducible sensory charge can stand as decisive factors.