guage itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being.
However, when the issue is to put into language something which has never yet been spoken, then everything depends on whether language gives or withholds the appropriate word. Such is the case of the poet . . . compelled . . . to put into language the experience he undergoes with language (Heidegger 59).
The apt turn of phrase--that is, a linguistic expression that reaches the status of meaning--reflects an interaction between language and its user and between found experience and the impulse to express reaction to it. Metaphorical expression, which makes one thing interact linguistically with another, unlike thing, identifies what Heidegger refers to as the "relation between word and thing" (60). It is a medium of exchange for conveying a sense of what a thing is "like," and even though (or exactly because) it stands between, or mediates, word and thing, in its very articulation transforming the thing by attributing to it the word, it sharpens the understanding of untransformed reality. That is in the background of Aristotle's assertion that, of all the devices of diction, "far the most important thing to master is the use of metaphor" (65). It is consistent, too, with Heidegger's observation that the poet, whose currency is language, "experiences an authority, a dignity of the word than which nothing vaster and loftier can be thought" (Heidegger 66). It is in this way that poetic expression can be said to represent the poet's attempt at having immediate experience of the language, as well as the attempt to share that experience with his readers.
According to Heidegger, the "true experience with language" is a "thinking experience." Such experience is an aspect of mental processes involved in making meaning, or, as Heidegger insists, making poetry. "Poetry and thought," he says, "each needs the other in its neighborhood" (70). Heidegger specifically...