ABSTRACT
The 'social' space of which a shared language marks the notional absolute limit, and which is defined more restrictively by a community of readers or writers, is that in which much of what effectively constitutes 'experience' for the writer occurs. The formation of a literary consciousness is unquestionably to some extent a process of literary socialization. The experience of the poetic may be seen to be profoundly if atypically social. The poetic recourse to 'experience' in the attempt to found speech in the 'real' sets up the scenario of the real receding, like Nemo's Nautilus, at precisely the speed of the prospecting perception. The poetic, even as it is put forward as a maximal linguistic presencing of the real, is indissociable from the imaginative, speculative, differential tendencies of the mind in possession of language in the face of the world. The poet's apprehension of a space of possibility within which any experience occurs problematizes that experience and potentially dissipates it.
