Abstract
What I try to indicate in this paper is that what Paul Valery called 'pure poetry' concerns the 'physiological' sensation of the body that cannot be conveyed by prose. Curiously Valery found the ideal type of art experience in the physiological phenomena due to the nature of retina-that is to say perception of complementary colors. Complementary colors produced by the eye as antidote against colors that stimulate itself are certainly subjective impressions and imply fear of disturbing objective recognitions. However, Valery regards this pure sensation which is set free from external objects to refer, as a perception of our own body whose functions are normally imperceptible to us. We directly find out about our body only when it doesn't function properly. By using means such as rhythm, rhyme, inversion and surprise, poetry captures and restrains the reader's body and interferes its smooth and automatic that is to say prosaic activity. This is the point where pure poetry and the physiology intersect. Both, guiding our attention to physical disorder, help us to gain the representation of our body, which, according to Valery's idea, is a system consisting of various functions.
