In Defense of Poetic Fantasy

20 Jul, 2025

I wonder if there’s any way to determine where the balance lies between venturing a proposition (“I was thinking that maybe…”), justifiably and confidently asserting something (“Bob definitely meant that literally”), and legitimately taking that assertion a step further, into the realm of a categorical statement that brooks no argument or objection, i.e., a particular thing or situation absolutely is, and is in the way that you say it is, end of discussion?

This question often comes up when I’m faced with philosophy or religious thought or literary criticism—how in the world, I end up asking, can you really feel comfortable throwing out absolutist declarations regarding, say, the soul, or the inviolable bounds in which a form of creativity is able to flow? Reading Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic this past week has returned me to said question.¹ Todorov’s examination of the genre is grounded in structuralist thought, big among certain disciplines in the mid-twentieth century, and which the Poetry Foundation describes as having proceeded via investigation of “underlying structures, such as characterization or plot, and attempted to show how these patterns were universal and could thus be used to develop general conclusions about both individual works and the systems from which they emerged.”² Not an unreasonable method to follow, I suppose, when trying to sort out genres and what defines them, especially if (here) you’re someone who loves fantastic tales and wants to find more of them. Engaging in such classificatory activity isn’t necessarily good or bad on its own. But for fields such as literature, poetry, drama, and art, where there are ostensibly no right answers, or injunctions against pursuing your material however you feel best suits the project, moving in with taxonomic ambitions, much less the tendency of many a scholar or authority figure to hold up “science” as the guide for approaching and valuing every last endeavor, can soon grow absurd.

Admittedly, Todorov was no simplistic thinker, and he recognized the ways in which stories can cross would-be rigid boundaries between, here, the uncanny, the fantastic, and the marvelous. But even so, you get statements in this book such as “the fantastic can subsist only within fiction; poetry cannot be fantastic.”³ Todorov’s reasoning here is that poetry isn’t supposed to be taken as “representative” of anything, “that poetic images are not descriptive, that they are to be read quite literally, on the level of the verbal chain they constitute, not even on that of their reference. The poetic image is a combination of words, not of things, and it is pointless, even harmful, to translate this combination into sensory terms.” And this situation can’t give rise to the fantastic, which “requires… a reaction to events as they occur in the world evoked.” That is, as you’re reading the protagonist’s account of the weird situation he encountered, in which he wasn’t sure whether what was happening was real or imagined or dreamt, or even possible, period, you, too, feel the same uncertainty—“hesitation”—about how to take it all—as the protagonist does. That hesitation, Todorov says, is pretty much the defining characteristic of the fantastic. If it winds up that we’re able to reason out what happens so that the cause of all the disturbance can be explained in line with physical, real-world laws, we’ve got a case of the uncanny; if the whole scenario’s really taking place in a world where events can happen that can’t in our own, we’ve got the marvelous. Where the question lingers, and you don’t know which way to go, you’ve got the fantastic.

I’ve puzzled over why Todorov thinks this can’t happen in poetry. With the admission that I could be misinterpreting something fundamental about what he means by “descriptive” or “literal” or anything else, I’ve come down to the provisional conclusion that his thinking about how poetry is supposed to function or what it’s supposed to do is just too narrow. Why can’t the poetic image be translated into sensory terms? Isn’t this, for instance, what haiku is doing—placing us smack in the middle of a very particular moment in which sensory information is essential to evoking “a reaction to the events as they occur in the world evoked”? Bashō’s famous frog plopping into an old pond, for example, evokes a world with which we may not be first-hand familiar, but there’s an event happening there, and we’re going to react to it in one way or another, whether with surprise, boredom, delight, recognition, or something else.⁴

Well OK, but what about the hesitation typical of the fantastic? Take Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” for example, in which you have a father riding through the night with his small son, the latter of whom insists the supernatural being known as the Erlkönig’s throwing out all sorts of enticements preparatory to snatching him up and taking him off to fairyland.⁵ The father does what any father would probably do; insist that the kid’s hearing and seeing things, and that there’s nothing out there. An adult reader gets both points of view, remembering what it’s like to be a child conjuring up all sorts of monsters in the dark, knowing as well that said visions can easily be explained via recourse to the way nature functions. Yes, the kid does wind up dead in his father’s arms—but was it really because the Erlkönig took his life, or was it due to something else, maybe a hallucinatory fever that had the boy imagining all these things before finally succumbing to his illness?

You could also take Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners” as another example of poetry hosting the fantastic—a “lone traveller” and his horse trying and apparently failing to get the attention of an isolated home’s (ghostly?) inhabitants.⁶ What’s going on there? Are there really spirits hanging around the house or in the forest? Is the traveller deluded in some way? Here and in the Goethe piece, is it all somehow clear what the correct answer is, and if a reader hesitates to come down on one side or the other, she obviously hasn’t read very carefully or doesn’t possess the skills needed to approach the poem in the first place?

It would be useless to argue that these pieces aren’t poetry, or that they don’t make use of descriptive language. Admittedly, although a lot of poetry could and does function in terms of language itself referring only to itself—and this is what I see the language poets, for example, doing⁷—poetry often seems more invested in description than in anything else, even if that description follows a different, less than straightforward route, than that found in prose.

Whether or not Todorov’s assertions about poetry and the fantastic, or about any other genre, are wholly or partially correct, my larger concern is why he and others find it necessary to be so categorical about literature in general. What would happen if we couldn’t come to an agreement about whether a given story was fantastic or not? How could we possibly go on—possibly venture to read anything else—before we determined what the right classification was? Where are we supposed to put this thing on our shelf or in the library or bookstore if we don’t know how to label it?

This taxonomic pull is an easy fit with the ways we’re told we always have to stay on brand, be identifiably one thing and not another. In the case of literary genre, if I can’t adequately compare a book with another one that’s achieved recognition and success, how will anyone know they should be interested in it? How can we possibly push it to the public, when the assumption is that said public could never possess the resources to determine whether they’d like to know more unless they understand how it fits within a predetermined formula? This assumption is right in line with big publishing’s m.o.—and if we’re going back to the poetry/fantasy split, then something like “The Erlkönig” or “The Listeners” would have to be tossed on the slush pile; poetry can’t be fantastic, so this isn’t poetry, or this isn’t fantasy. We’ll have none of this confusion—much less hesitation about what to do with it or wrangling about how to sell it, or whether it’ll even sell at all. Asking whether it’s good or enjoyable or etc. to anyone at all is hardly of concern.

When I come across what feel to me like attempts to make absolute declarations, I often wonder where these declarations might actually be useful. In discussions of literature or art, I find it hard to understand what the point is; if we establish that X is the case, and nothing can ever bring that X into question, then there’s no reason even to discuss it anymore, and the thing about which you’ve argued so confidently should then be removed from the realm of relevant topics. Better move on and find another thing to be authoritative about.

The best I can come up with, in terms of the usefulness of such assertions, is in a parental situation in which some form of annoying nonsense (a toddler’s shouting the same two words over and over for an hour, a kid’s incessant door slamming) must come to an end if everyone’s to stay sane. In essence, a case of that’s how it is because that’s how I said it is. And indeed, many a literary critic often seems to take on the role of a parent attempting to exercise their superior authority over the unformed brains of everyone else. But even the youngest kid knows that even if you can’t come up in the moment with a good objection to the ruling dictum, that dictum’s only being tenuously held in place. You know, in other words, that the authority’s argument—perhaps its entire structure—is weak, and that if you keep poking at it, you’re going to find the rotten places that will bring it down.

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