ABSTRACT
It may seem paradoxical to entitle an essay on organic metaphors with the phrase ‘out of nature’, but by doing so I want to suggest that some of the most significant theories of language (and related theories of literature) in the modern era have been motivated by a desire similar to that expressed in the closing stanza of Yeats’s poem: to project a model of language (or literature) as something at once standing outside the self, while at the same time conspicuously resembling it; and thus, perhaps, providing its idealized surrogate.1 The ‘organic metaphor’, on which I will concentrate here, has played a prominent role in such aspirations. As a selfconscious figure of speech it arguably first appears in Germany during the Romantic era, then (as far as the perspective of this essay is concerned) migrates to Russia, where it assumes a central place in the remarkable efflorescence of writings on language that appear there in the later nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries. But it took up this position in Russian thought because it fit in well with more deeply embedded notions about language and selfhood traceable to Russia’s medieval past – which, it turns out, were also more influential in western thought than one might first suspect.
