The Bells Take This Longing: A Psychosemiotic Approach to Leonard Cohen

Abstract

As anyone who has ever felt the spontaneous need to write poetry knows, a poem is an expression of some inner compulsion. As any psychoanalyst knows, the resultant poem is an expression of some unconscious desire that is normally repressed in everyday language, so the poet cannot say what he really means but is forced to assert some mimetically false but similar statement instead─if poets could say what they mean directly they would have no need for figurative or stylistically deviant language. And as any semiotician knows, a poem is a linguistic transformation of sounds into an integrated series of symbols: a pure poem would have no unconnected elements whatsoever.