Figures of Reality (1981) may be described as a polemic against those who feel poetry to be remote from normal life – an abstruse and empty game. The author argues from a contrary perspective, shared by many poets in the Romantic and Surrealist tradition, in which poetry is viewed as being vitally related to our awareness of reality. This penetrating discourse on the roots of poetry in the imagination suggests that the fascination of an illusory image lies precisely in our consciousness of its deflection from reality. Poets can take hold of and manipulate these moments; they are adept in the construction of unreality. The deliberate cultivation of such states of awareness has been a preoccupation of many poets and literary theorists, among them Coleridge, De Quincy and Rimbaud. Roger Cardinal’s commentaries on the writing of these men, as well as other texts drawn from nineteenth and twentieth century European poetry, argues that poems have meaning for us to the extent that we recognise the relationship of the figure of speech on the page to the ‘figure of reality’ as shaped by our perception of the world around us. In this way the book uniquely develops an original and subtle theory of the role of imagination in poetry.

Roger Cardinal was an art scholar and Professor of Literary and Visual Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He is perhaps best known for his ground-breaking Outsider Art (1972), a book that introduced the English-speaking world to the concept of art brut.