From one point of view, of course, the object exists in the work as an image of what exists in the world of experience, but against this view Shklovsky stands firmly opposed. His essay is in part a polemic against the mimetic theory of art, or against any theory which takes the image to be the basic constituent of the work. To the extent, therefore, that imagery in a work of art assumes a formal rather than strictly referential intelligibility, the act of perception enters an unfamiliar and, on the face of it, hardly intelligible world. For the meaning of the work must assume, on this basis, a problematical character. The function of the poetic utterance, by contrast, is to disrupt this process of abstraction.
Poetic speech is formed speech.
The point is that our experience of language, quite as much as our experience of the world, is habitual and to that extent tends to be automatized. But poetry is a use of language which is not automatized, because it is a deviation from the norm, or from that system of expectations which supervises the use of language in everyday speech. The implication here, of course, is that in poetry the aesthetic experience is finally an experience of language itself. It is constantly solving immediate problems. Its task is fulfilled when each sentence has been completely abolished, annulled, and replaced by the meaning.