ABSTRACT
It would be a misunderstanding to think that poets and novelists deal in pure fictions and ignore the real. In fact, the opposite is true. They begin by focusing on their vision of reality and in transfiguring what they see they reach a higher level of understanding. The key to this achievement is precisely in the metaphoric language and vision of the world. Frost and Cuadra, for example, perform what one can call a tour de force by forcing a landscape to yield a meaning that is extraordinary in its depth. Hughes, Rilke, Cuadra, Blake, and Leconte de Lisle look intently at a jaguar, a panther, or a tiger and attempt to decant from the animal’s movements and attitude its very essence. Dante, Cuadra, and Vigny show how a poetic vision can be strengthened by elements from memory and how a bugle can transform a real event into a dreamlike experience. Coleridge and Eminescu create dream worlds that nevertheless are built from elements of the real. Finally Heyerdahl, Hesse, and Proust illustrate the relation of the self to its mental universe.
