Three models for the description of poetry

Abstract

With the increasing concern for explicit, precise and complete grammatical descriptions of languages (primarily under the impetus of Chomsky), the relation between poetry and grammar has come to command particular attention since sentences occurring in poetry often fail to be accounted for by the grammar of the language. That is, poetic sentences may simultaneously manifest more constraints and less constraints on combinatorial possibilities than exist in non-poetic language. Some linguists, not content merely to list such sentences as exceptions to the grammatical rules, have suggested ways of ‘expanding’ the grammar to account for such sentences. One well-known effort is Levin's (1964) attempt to ‘fix’ a generative grammar of English so it will generate such deviant sentences as, for example, Cummings's He danced his did. Another approach, though not specifically applied to poetic texts, is represented by Harris's (1952) discourse analysis. Here many vexing problems are avoided in that the aim is to construct a ‘grammar’ of a single text by setting up categories, empirically defined in terms of morphological environments, that apply only to the given text.