"The evident power of words": Modernism and Poetic Language

Common to modernist literature and philosophy is surely an emphasis on the substantiality of Language. That is to say, the way that words do not simply report on or represent actions or experiences, but are themselves actions or experiences or are at least internal to experiences and actions. 

Words, purged of their representational function, become incantatory. They perform actions, create and call forth:

This is what any reading of poetry like that of Mallarme’s supposes. It imposes the momentary belief in the evident power of words, in their material value, and in the force they possess to attain the depths of reality. One instinctively believes that in poetry language reveals its true essence, which lies completely in the power to evoke, to call forth mysteries that it cannot express, to do what it cannot say, to create emotions or states that cannot be represented – in a word to be linked to profound existence by doing it rather than saying it.

The dream is of a return to a kind of primitive magic. But it is not now communal magic. It unfolds in the recesses of the souls of the initiates. This is the poetics of Symbolism: 

It seems that poetry is more than ever attached to a magical conception of art. This powerful current […] that Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme awakened in France, has dug its bed so deep that every spring dreams of flowing into it. The most knowledgeable art has had, for more than half a century, the ambition of charging words with a primitive power

But beyond Symbolism, we see what is surely the keynote of a certain modernist attitude to language: a language which is no longer about representation, which does not “express” a definable content; instead, it enacts, performs: conjures, summons, commands:

And one understands a poem not when one grasps its thoughts […] but when one is lead by it to the mode of existence that it signifies, provoked to a certain tension, exaltation or destruction [..] one should say that poetic meaning has to do with existence itself.

 We might trace a line between this and Deleuze’s contention that “Style, in a great writer, is always also a style of life, not at all something personal, but the invention of a possibility of life, of a mode of existence.” Each work of art is a kind of manifesto directly embodying (rather than describing) a way of being.  An artistic manifesto is also a manifestation of its own content, and an instance of what it maps out.

We have moved from a view of literary language as something that comes after or lags behind existence - depicting it however meticulously - to a celebration of language as the first note of a new rhythm of life.