The Rhetoric of Romanticism Paul de ManL Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image I THE history of Western literature, the importance of a 2 of poetic language does not remain constant. One could conceive of an organi- zation of this history in terms of the relative prominence and the changing structure of metaphor. French poetry of the six- teenth century is obviously richer and more varied in images than that of the seventeenth, and medieval poetry of the fi teenth century has a different kind of imagery than that of the thirteenth. The most recent change remote enough to be part of history takes place toward the end of the eighteenth cen- tury and coincides with the advent of roman Z ment of which equivalences can be found in all European lit- eratures, Wordsworth reproaches Pope for having abandoned. imaginativ. L dicts “ = orative allegorization. Meanvihile the term jnggination stead- ily grows in importance and complexity is al mT as in the poetic t This evolution in poetic terminology—of which parallel instances could easily be found in France and in Germany—corresponds to a profound change Im. In a state gnarl2 Intentional Structure of Image in the texture of poetic diction. The change often takes the form of a return to.a greater concreteness, a proliferation of natural with a dialectic that is more paradoxical than may appear at first sight, the structure of the language becomes increasingly metaphorical and the image—be it under the name of symbol ‘or even of myth—comes to be considered as the most promi nent dimension of the style. This tendency is still prevalent to- day, among poets as well 2s among critics. We find it quite natural that theoretical studies such as, for example, those of Gaston Bachelard in France, of Northrop Frye in America, or of William Empson in England should take the metaphor as their starting point for an investigation of literature in gen- eral—an approach that would have been inconceivable for Boileau, for Pope, and even still for Diderot. aby is iw it ually abun- cls the tl id sntal aml Suity_that characterizes the poetics of romanticism. The ten- sion between the two polarities never ceases to be problem- atic. We shall try to illustrate the structure of this latent tension as it appears in some selected poetic passages. ; In a famous poem, Hélderlin speaks of a time at which “the gods” will again be an actual presence to man: nun aber nenni er sein Licbstes, IA Nun, nun mussen dafur Worte, wie Blumen, enistehn oe (“Brot und Wein,” stanza 5) Taken by itself, this passage is not necessarily a statement about the image: Hélderlin merely speaks of words (“Worte”), not of images (“Bilder”). But the lines themselves contain the image of the flower in the simplest and most explicit of all metaphorical structures, as a straightforward simile intro- duced by the conjunction wie. That the words referred to are not those of ordinary speech is clear from the verb: to origi- Intentional Structure of Image 3 nate (“entstelin”). In everyday use words are exchanged and Put to a variety of tasks, but they are not supposed to ori nate anew; on the contrary, one wants them to be as well- known, as “common” as possible, to make certain that they obtain for us what we want to obtain. They are used as established signs to confirm that something is recognized as being the same as before; and re-cognition excludes pure orig- ination. But in poetic language words are not used as signs, not even as names, but in order to name: “Donner un sens plus ur aux mots de la tribu’” (Mallarmé) or “erfand er fair die Dinge eigene Namen” (Stefan George): poets know of the act of naming—"nun aber nent er sein Liebstes”—as implying a re- tum to the source, to the fure motion of experience at its be- ginning The word “entstehn” establishes another fundamental distinction. The two terms of the simile are not said to be identical with one another ithe word = the flower), nor analo- gous in their general mode of being (the word is like the flower), but specifically in the way they originate (the word originates like the flower).' The similarity between the tw. teside in their essence (identity), or in their appeara (a in the manner in which both originate. And Holderlin is not speaking of any poetic word taken at random, but of an authentic word that fulfills its highest function in naming being as a presence. We could infer, then, that the fundamental intent of the poetic word is to originate in the sane manner as what Hlderlin here calls “flowers.” The image is essentially a kinetic process: it does not dwell in a static state where the two terms could be separated and reunited by anal- ysis; the first term of the simile (here, “words”) has no inde- pendent existence, poetically speaking, prior to the metaphor- ical statement. It originates with the statement, in the manner suggested by the flower image, and its way of being is deter- mined by the manner in which it originates. The metaphor re- quires that we begin by forgetting all we have previously known about “words”—“donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu”—and then informing the term with a dynamic existence