ABSTRACT
Tolerance of ambiguity is key to medical work, yet medicine retains an ambiguous attitude towards ambiguity. On the one hand, ambiguity must be countered for clarity in diagnostic reasoning and testing; on the other hand ambiguity pervades such reasoning and testing and can be treated as resource rather than hindrance. It is our belief that poetry, more than any other literary genre, can cultivate necessary tolerance of ambiguity. We contrast the practical use of language with the poetic use, emphasising the quality of ambiguity the way William Empson did in his Seven Types of Ambiguity. We carefully introduce Empson’s text as it suits our subsequent study of ambiguity in the following two chapters, but we are careful too to critique Empson’s typology, for we do not wish to erect idols of Poetry Medicine and we see the irony in rationalising ambiguity through a classification system.
