Poetic Language: From Imagination to Revelation

Abstract

This research discusses the concept of poetic language, departing from a critique of the linguistic view that reduces it to a communicative system subject to analysis. Instead, it establishes an alternative conception that regards poetic language as an intellectual space in which existence is revealed rather than merely a tool for conveying meaning. The study follows a trajectory that begins with the positions of Muslim philosophers on poetic language, from Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina to the critic Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani, where their views reveal an early awareness that the poetic use of language is not a stylistic deviation but rather a capacity to disclose what standard language cannot express. It also traces a modern Western philosophical path, passing through Roland Barthes in his distinction between language, style, and writing, and culminating in Martin Heidegger, who conceives language as the “house of Being” and poetry as the art most capable of liberating language from its instrumental use and restoring its original revelatory function. The study concludes that what distinguishes poetic language is not what it explicitly says, but what it leaves open—the unsaid produced by tensions and shifts within the text—which makes the poem an existential event that is never fully completed at the moment of writing but remains open to every genuine reading experience.