ABSTRACT
This chapter explores to find correspondence between language and external reality is necessarily to believe in metaphor, to believe that something may be described and understood in terms alien to it. It examines that the language is capable of expressing a relatively narrow range of human cognition; logic, number, dream, and nightmare divide the rest. What determines our place along the spectrum it calls reference, and means the correspondence between our thought and the world. The poetic values of nothingness and everythingness represent the attempt to achieve perfect order and perfect disorder through language. Language may in this way be made to suggest what is beyond its capacity to represent. To understand this point more clearly, one can imagine this scale of reference superimposed on Sewell's order/disorder spectrum. If Romantic poetry can be described as plerotic poetry, it should be characterized by these effects: a tendency toward cognitive disorder produced y the use of multiple and expanded signifiers.
