Poetic language exists to be contained as an exception

Evidence

It is this hierarchy of original meaning and secondary representation that is at work, and at stake, in the distinction we make between normal language, whose purpose is to communicate, and the literary or poetic. Words that ‘stand out as words (even as sounds)’ are words that do not know their proper place in the hierarchy. In so-called literary writing, words are not the dutiful representatives of their authors. They do not mechanically make present a simple, original meaning from their absent author’s mind. As we saw from the line in Marsafi’s text, such words usurp larger powers, gathering their force from their associations with other words and setting loose an almost endless play of semantic/verbal echoes. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 455

Categorization

• XREF: This reading of poetic language as a hierarchy-protecting exception echoes Mary Douglas on anomaly and taboo, and Mitchell is tying it to his analysis of Marsafi’s Quranic/poetic text earlier.