Syntactic Aspects of Poetry: A Pragmatic Perspective

Abstract

This paper is meant to review some studies and analyses that deal with the language of poetry as it is different from the language of other literary genres. Poetry consists of language that produces effects ordinary language does not produce. So poetry is a language differently ordered or arranged. Levin (1969) pointed out that linguistic analysis, when applied to poetry, would result in a grammar that is different from the grammar that a linguistic analysis of ordinary language would produce (11). The language of poetry differs drastically from ordinary discourse. Many of these differences derive from certain literary conventions. In other words, many features distinguishing poetry from ordinary discourse result from the mere fact that a writer addresses himself to writing a poem. This fact entails a considerable number and variety of linguistic particularities. The conventions of the poetic form entail features like rhyme, alliteration, meter and so on (Levin 59). TYPES OF DEVIATIONS IN THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY Leech (1969) argues that any deviation from expected patterns of linguistic behavior will bring about a reaction of disorientation and surprise. Rules in poetry, Leech elaborates, are made to be broken (10-12). Leech observed that looking back over the span of English literature since Chaucer; we note that certain freedoms of language have been traditionally sanctioned in verse, but not in prose (17-23). Leech remarked: The obvious function of these freedoms is to compensate the poet for his loss of freedom in submitting himself to the discipline of verse composition; to furnish him with a wider set of choices than are normally available in English and thus to give him a better chance of squeezing his language into a predetermined mould of versification (18)