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On the poetic function of language and pragmatics

By Alessandro Capone and Jacob L. Mey

A poem is to a certain degree decontextualized:

it is a system of systems which is more self-
contained than referential discourse. One could
say that the poem provides its own “universe of
discourse”. The orientation of the poem upon
itself as a message-sign has the effect of
making more of a break between the poem and
its context than in referential discourse and
results in a relative self-sufficiency for the
poetic text. (....). But a poem does not exist in a
vacuum: it is part of a general historic-cultural
context and indeed depends on that context for
its interpretation. Nor is it sealed off from a
literary context. (Waugh 1980, 72).

Jakobson insisted much on the idea that poetics should be part of the study of
language.

Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of

painting is concerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the
global science of verbal structure, poetics may be regarded as an integral
part of linguistics (Jakobson 1960).

There may be a lot of truth in what Jakobson says. However, formal linguists are
often busy denying what Jakobson takes for granted, in other words that language
serves functions different from that of articulating and expressing human thought.
Thus, programmatic statements like the one above, to be functioning, ought to be
explained in detail. (But I am not saying that Jakobson does not make his effort
elsewhere, as he is well known for his reflections on the functions of language). (see
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also Allan 20201). A step towards explaining such concepts is revealed through the
following excerpt:

Insistence on keeping poetics apart from linguistics is warranted only

when the field of linguistics appears to be illicitly restricted, for
example when the sentence is viewed by some linguists as the highest
analyzable construction (...) (Jacobson 1960).

A point that is not made by Jakobson or other linguists of a functional

persuasion is that the poetic function of language – which I think everyone ought to
take for granted – is something that cannot serve any function whatsoever outside a
theory of communication. Why should human beings think through poetry? Poetry
deals with the kind of embellishments that only make sense when we want to
communicate thoughts to others and want to show their importance, want them to be
remembered, and want them to function within a general act of persuasion. If
language only served to vocalize and articulate thoughts, the poetic function of
language would be dispensable. Although the issue of thinking aloud or thinking
silently has never been deepened sufficiently from the point of view of linguistics (for
example could there be pragmatic implicatures due to the Gricean maxims in
thought?), it is reasonable to accept that the essence of poetry when one dispenses
with the notion of communication, is missing. A poet is always a poet for someone
else, by whom he wants to be considered in high regard. We will see many cases in
which the poetic function is subordinated to some other function (argumentation, for
example). But even as an independent function, poetry and the poetic message would
not survive outside culture, as they exist through culture and serve to propagate
culture. Surely, even a solitary thought may be indebted to culture – we may have
borrowed many of the presuppositions which illuminate the meaning of the
utterance/thought. However, I do not see how it could propagate culture. In the same
way as language has sedimented after a group of people have recognized the
importance and salience of certain words, a culture has sedimented as a heritage of
values, linguistic habits and artistic creations (including poems) have been
propagated by salient individuals of the social group. There is a close relationship
between artistic creation, specifically, poetry and culture. Culture needs to be
propagated to survive – and this cannot be done in solitary thoughts, but only through
communication. The same is also true of the propagation of language, which, leaving

1
Allan 2020 says the following. Meanings given for Latin communicare are “share; share/divide with/out; receive/take
a share of; receive; join with; communicate, discuss, impart; make common cause; take common counsel, consult”
which is more or less identical with the meanings of current English communicate. Communication is the act of
conveying a message from one entity (or set of entities) to another through the use of semiotic phenomena such as
signs, symbols, and various kinds of biosemiotic data (...) (Allan 2020 in press).
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aside those structures which are presumed to be universal, is a set of words, choices,
syntactic combinations, presuppositions, figurative practices. The propagation of
language needs the unfolding of real communication among real speakers, to take
place, in such a way as to contribute to culture.

Despite Jakobson’s genial insights, only a handful of articles on the poetic function
can be found within linguistics – an indication that general linguists have, since the
inception of the subject, been busy with something else. Chomsky thought that
linguistic competence was a window on the mind – hence linguistics, in his view, is
part of the theory of mind. Since the advent of Chomskyan linguistics, with the
exception of conversational analysis, studied within sociology, and sociolinguistics,
as contrasted with theoretical linguistics, not much has been made of the theory of
performance, the rediscovery of which is at the heart of societal pragmatics, as Mey
(2001) calls that section of linguistics that has to do with the liberation of man from
the limits that prevent him from being realized in full. Critical discourse analysis
specifically takes up the most difficult tasks of Mey’s agenda (see Catalano and
Waugh 2020). What is central, in this brand of linguistics, is that language is not
only a way that allows human beings to express themselves (an idea that Jakobson
1960 attributes to Sapir, according to whom, on the whole “ideation reigns supreme
in language”), but is a means that allows human beings to construct society, including
the laws that determine and regulate social interaction and behaviour, and among
other things allows human beings to oppress others or to liberate themselves from
social oppression. To give an example, the chapter on slurs is a chapter of a societally
inspired linguistics that is busy studying the ways some social groups use language to
oppress and dominate others and the ways in which other social groups attempt to
liberate themselves from these forms of oppression and deliberate linguistic
segregation, by fighting back (linguistically or non-linguistically). Language, in other
forms, is a form of communication that allows us to have effects on society, including
the propagation of cultural values, laws, and norms from one generation to the next.

Why should poetics be part of linguistics, according to Jakobson? Presumably,

Jacobson has the intuition that poetry and language intersect in that their most
important functions are social. The poetic function should be studied in connection
with the conative function (language serves the purpose of getting others to do
things), because the best way to persuade others to do things for us is to choose words
that best express a certain concept, that can have an imaginative impact on the hearer,
that help her remember what is going on, etc. Jakobson was well aware that the poetic
function could not be studied per se, in isolation from other forms of behaviour (see
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Capone’s (2018) work on pragmemes at the market place). This is due to the fact that
most verbal messages are multifunctional: “they usually fulfil a variety of functions,
which are integrated one with another in a hierarchical fashion with one function
being predominant” (Waugh 1978, Waugh 1980, 58).

Usually, the poetic function of language is defined as that function in which a

speaker directs attention to the language he uses, to the text as used, rather than to the
message (See Todorov on the idea that the poetic function comprises the focus
within the verbal message on the verbal message itself, that is to say on the language
used (Todorov 1978). According to this view, we would have texts in which their
speakers communicate things about the world and texts that specifically address the
issue of form, where form prevails as the main message conveyed. To provide a
useful example, take a model who poses for photos and exhibits her dress. She does
not wear that dress with the purpose of covering her body, protecting herself from
cold or rain, but with the purpose to exhibit that dress, to show it. The relationship
between function and form work much in the same way for the poetic function of
language. Such a reduction of the poetic function to issues of form is not really
acceptable. In the same way as a sentence like ‘Colourless green ideas sleep
furiously’ seems to be a bad sentence of English because we do not understand what
a speaker can mean by it, a rhythmic sentence that looks like a poetic verse could
never be part of a poem UNLESS the speaker and the hearers can attribute a
meaning and a function to it. While to a certain extent a sentence like ‘Colourless
green ideas sleep furiously’ could be recuperated if one recognizes in it a certain
intention (of a poetic kind), we might obtain a sentence which has a certain rhythm
but no sense by combining words at random e.g. ‘trains 2, 4, 3, explains”, but we
would certainly not want to say that such verses constitute a poem. (Of course there
are all sorts of ways to recuperate the meaning of a verse by contextualizing it, but if
all attempts fail, then we should candidly admit that the verse was meaningless both
in the sense of having no locutionary meaning and of having no illocutionary
meaning). It would be much better to try to unify the poetic and the expressive or
emotive function (the latter term is used by Jacobson for poetry, while I would use
the former), as all devices in a verse are subordinated to the expressive/emotive
function. The poet through a (lyric) poem speaks about his mind, his internal feelings
and mental states in a way which is not easily available through daily conversation. A
certain degree of indirectness serves to define the poetic function, because otherwise
there would be no difference between the poetic and the expressive function. The
expressive/emotive function can be exercised both in poems and in daily
conversation, but the poetic function is more restricted in its contexts of use. We may
tentatively say that the poetic function is that function that is exercised through
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language when one attempts to communicate feelings, states of mind and attitudes
through a language that is attentive to form and is characterized by a certain degree of
indirection and compression. (Jakobson would probably take issue with this, as he
spots several poetic effects in the ways we normally use language for daily purpose,
such as the practice of placing an NP that is heavier (longer) last in a sequence
(coordination, for example) in order to obtain certain rhythmic effects. Jakobson also
discusses paronomasia, as in “The horrible Harry”, where the selection of ‘horrible’,
rather than a different synonym, on the paradigmatic plane is determined by certain
expected sound effects. We may agree that these “poetic effects” can be seen in
language use, but they are not so central as they are in poems. The poetic function
partially overlaps with the expressive/emotive function but has more specific
hallmarks. Why not say, then, that the poetic function is part of the
expressive/emotive function? The purpose of the expressive function is to look
inside, to bring to light the interiority of a person. But the poetic function can also be
aimed at outside objects and historical facts, in order to show the attitudes of the
speaker (epic poems, for examples, are not solely about feelings and states of mind;
they are mainly about events). The difference from prosaic language is that the
speaker colours his texts and attitudes through words that have a high emotive impact
on the hearer. The relationship between the text and the fact it refers to can be very
indirect and tenuous and in some cases ought to be recognized by the hearer.
Reference may be replaced with allusion and predication may be altered in all sorts of
ways, through metaphorical language. The general effect is that the hearer has to
guess both what is being talked about and what is being said of what is being talked
about. The degree of implicitness in poetic texts greatly exceeds the one we find in
daily texts. I am not saying that daily texts do not require implicatures and
explicatures; even legal texts that are devised to be as explicit and precise as possible
impinge on implicit propositions that are to be patiently recovered. But in poetry, the
dimension of implicitness comes together with deliberate compression, that renders
the poem cryptic and open to subjective interpretations. Whereas in daily discourse,
the intentions of the speaker are to be recovered and communication is really
successful only when this happens, in poetry the speaker’s and the reader’s intentions
are allowed to diverge even considerably. The text, following Umberto Eco, is
considered ‘open’.

So far, we have agreed with Jacobson that the focus of the poem is the message
(and not only the form of the message), that is to say the way we relate form to
content. This relationship can be improved through reflection, pondering,
inventiveness and through figurative uses of language. The attention to form makes
sure that the message is remembered, sometimes for decades (The infinite by
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Leopardi for example, which has exercised the memory of thousands of Italian
students and which is usually remembered by heart with relative small expenditure
cost). Of course, rhythmic patterns also aid in the enterprise of learning long epic
poems by heart, as such epic poems, especially at the time of Homer or of the
anonymous author of Beowulf, only had an oral tradition, but they do so only through
the interplay with figures of speech, images that had a high emotive impact on
hearers.

Going back to the idea that in poetry the focus is on the message and not on the
form (only) allows some symmetry to exist among all the functions of language. Take
for example the referential function, which is contrasted with the poetic function.
Different though it may be from the poetic function, it is a relationship between form
and content. Such a relationship would be entirely missing in the case of poetry if we
adopted, for example, the view by Todorov. And asymmetry would result. Why
should some functions be about content while others not? Presumably the functions
of language are categorized through the kind of content they are meant to convey.

Of course, the poetic function can be subordinated to other functions. I can use a
rhyme in the course of a tv advertisement, or I can use a poem for filibustering
purposes in a parliamentary debate, I can use a poem as an example in a conference, I
can use poems for the purpose of teaching language to small children (learning by
heart the days of the months of the year, for example). This does not mean, according
to Jakobson, that the poetic text does not have hallmarks of its own, such as rhythm,
rhymes, alliterations, assonances, parallels, contrasts, and figurative language.

According to Jakobson a poem is a generative structure, such that, given the

introduction of a certain word, we are given expectations about what is to follow.
This is due to the fact that the verse is based on equivalence relations: we have
parallels in metre among verses of the same poem, patterns of assonance, patterns of
alliteration, patterns of rhyme. Of course there may be a certain degree of
exaggeration in his claim that, given the introduction of a word, we know what is to
follow. The syntagmatic planes and the paradigmatic planes intersect at every
possible syntactic node and what is inserted may be determined by equivalence
relations; yet, the insertion of words on the paradigmatic plane follows free choices
(otherwise, everything would be determined from the beginning). But all this literary
critics know very well – leaving aside the linguistic terminology in which these
considerations are cast. What is less well known is Jakobson’s view that, while in
referential discourse, we are normally focused on the relationship between the word
and the referent, in the case of poems we are more focused on the relationship
between words and words. This will be clearer, when we discuss the case of
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contextualism. The proximity of words may very well serve to delimit meanings
further, to restrict what can be meant (or to broaden it). The very existence of
figurative language, furthermore, ensures that a word will stand for other words.
Take, for example, the Anglo-saxon ‘sea-swan’, which stands for ‘ship’. This is
clearly a figurative case where a level of metaphor is being used, this time, in a fairly
restrictive way (in many other cases the meanings of metaphors cannot be easily
circumscribed). This may have become a dead metaphor but it started as a metaphor.

1.

One of the hallmarks of poetic discourse is that, like all fictional discourse, it bears no
guarantee that reference should be interpreted (fixed) according to the rules of
ordinary discourse. In ordinary discourse, the name ‘John’ is used only if both the
speaker and the hearer can fix the reference of the name by adopting a rule of use
according to which in a certain context C, the name ‘X’ is used (should be used) in
order to refer to X. In other words, the speaker and the hearer or hearers have in the
past heard the name used in order to refer to x and, even if they did not witness the
event of giving the name ‘X’ to X, they assume that through a referential chain,
language users show deference to such an initial use by assuming that it took place
(McDowell 1998). Every language user who used the name ‘X’ to refer to X shows
deference to uses by other speakers that are causally linked, through a chain of other
users, to the original event in which participants having the appropriate status and
appropriate conditions established a rule of use according to which the name ‘X’ is
associated with X. These are standard conditions for uses of names within circles of
friends and relatives. But fictional names and uses of names in poems are beyond
such rules. First of all, the presuppositions for the use of proper names need not be
satisfied, since the hearer in hearing the name ‘X’ need not know the referent that is
associated with ‘X’. Speaker’s meaning, in other words, becomes sufficiently
detached from hearer’s or reader’s meaning. The hearer/reader only needs to know
that, when she hears/reads the name ‘X’, there is an X the speaker is referring to, but
does not know which X. Of course, after reading a poem, literary critics may be busy
establishing referents for such uses and the informed hearer (or audience) may
become aware that ‘X’ was used to refer to X, knowing which referent was associated
with ‘X’. However, in many cases a name may be used in a fictional way, not to refer
to anybody in particular, but to refer a particular poetic creation. This is more or less
what happens in the long poem by Leopardi entitled ‘A Silvia’. ‘Silvia’ actually
refers to Teresa, but even Teresa need not constitute the referent of the name, since
Teresa is both described and transfigured. There is a mixture of qualities that are real
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and the result of invention. Soon the event of her death is transformed into a general
reason for complaining about destiny. In poems, even innocent words like ‘I’ and
‘You’ need different rules for interpretation. ‘You’ need not refer to the addressee of
the poem, but may refer to a person with whom the poet has an imaginary, implicit
dialogue. The reader of the poem is in the position of someone who is witnessing a
conversation and learns all there is to learn about the speakers through such a
conversation. (More or less what is described by Goffman (1980) in his analysis of
radio talk, with the difference that the people addressed by the speaker in radio talk
are real, while the ratified addressee of a poem may not be alive at all or real; and
sometimes it also happens that the addressee shifts continuously between the people
present at the talk and those who listen through the radio). The speaker in the poem
(the lyrical ‘I’) need not coincide with the person of the poet. Some imaginary
qualities may be assigned to her or him as well. As a person who transmits some
wisdom to the world, the ‘I’ is a fictional character that acquires some of the features
of universality which in general make a poem great. A poem is great if some
universal audience is moved by it; if, despite all differences in culture and values, all
readers are able to appreciate it and find a resonance between their soul and the
poem, the message is really universal. Although the poet may be male, he may
represent the ‘I’ of the poem as ‘female’. In other words, the ‘I’ refers to some
fictional person (morphology in languages like Italian may be an indication of this
intended transformation whose purpose is to render the ‘I’ more fictional than it
would otherwise be). The deictic use of pronominals, for obvious reasons, cannot be
really successful in the context of a poem, because the poem is normally removed
from a situation of discourse which is presupposed by both the speaker and the
hearer. (Waugh 1980). They do not share a space or a time, and thus there is no point
in demonstrating a certain object by the use of a demonstrative like ‘That man’ (here
actually a complex demonstrative use). Of course, the poet can make an effort to
construct a shared context, in which case uses of demonstrative can be legitimized.
The referents, however, are only evoked through such demonstrative uses, they are
not really referred to.

There is one type of ordinary discourse that resembles the poetic one. When a
teacher writes a sentence on the blackboard with the purpose of illustrating a
grammatical rule, the hearers involved (the participants) know well that they should
not look for referents in seeing names used under these circumstances. ‘Mary’ in such
contexts becomes inert, in that it does not trigger a search for the referent, because the
students know well that the teacher did not have a referent in mind. (Capone, 2020)
These are cases of sentences that do not raise to the status of assertions. The
illocutionary act is to explain a grammatical rule by demonstrating the way the rule
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produces sentences/examples. This is a case in which the illocutionary point is not

associated with the use of a sentence, but with the use of a number of sentences. It is
a language game, if we want to use terminology by Wittgenstein. In such a language
game, the rules for names may be different from those of ordinary discourse.
Sometimes the names are merely invented, but such uses have to coexist with uses of
names that follow the normal use. Faced with a sentence like ‘Mary likes Aristotle’,
‘Mary’ need not trigger a search for the referent, while ‘Aristotle’ does and still refers
to the well known Greek philosopher. A mixed language game may occur in poems
as well. Some referents are imaginary, while others are real enough.

I raised the issue whether verses are a form of assertion. In the case of the
linguistic examples on the blackboard, the sentences never surge to the status of
assertion, presumably because the names do not trigger a search for the referent. They
are only linguistic examples, used to illustrate a certain point of grammar. But what
about sentences in poems, that is verses? Are they assertions or not? That may very
well depend on how much information we have. Certain names may work like
proper names, others do not. Certain verses are factual, others are not. In a poem like
‘Elegy written in a country churchyard’, by Thomas Gray, some verses refer to real
historical facts and battles, transfigured though they are, given that the point of the
poem is to draw a moral lesson from those facts.
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

Th' applause of list'ning senates to command,

The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes,

Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone

Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

A poem is not a piece of discourse where we can use fixed rules for its
interpretation, but stanza by stanza, we know where we are and how to make sense
of the verses. Contextual clues come to our aid in understanding whether a verse is
factual and can amount to an assertion. What is interesting about the verses above is
that clues tell us when we are dealing with the assertoric function, but other clues
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also tell us how to modulate the assertion in an ironic way (‘Some Cromwell
guiltless of his country's blood’).

Language should be flexible enough to allow these mixed games called

‘poems’, in other words it must make room for the poetic function but must also
allow us to distinguish it from other functions (in the discourse above the historian
seems to prevail over the poet). The poetic function requires structural elements that
exist even in non-poetic discourse. However, in such cases daily discourse is so
different from normal uses of language that its structural elements can be said to have
been borrowed from the poetic function of language.

2. Contextualized language uses

We all recognize that human languages require several levels of contextualism for the
interpretation of their uses (as we have seen in the case above of the Elegy by Gray).
Pronominals normally require to be contextualized, for their interpretation, either
through anaphora (grammatical and textual anaphora) or through some demonstrative
gestures that point to the reference. Conversational implicatures, furthermore, can be
heavily contextualized, as they require a certain degree of knowledge of the context
so that we can have access to speakers’ intentions. However, there is the theoretical
possibility that we can use language explicitly in order to project unequivocal
intentions. Admittedly these cases are rare, but they exist. Normally,
contextualization allows us to save time (eminent people like Horn have spoken of
the speaker’s economy), to be indirect in our requests and statements (thus, escaping
responsibility), allows us to rescue infelicitous or extravagant uses (explicatures),
allows us to get rid of messages that seem to be blatantly false or logically absurd
(explicatures), allow us to settle on the intentions of the law-makers in interpreting
the law (explicatures), etc. The case of poetry is quite paradoxical. On the one hand,
we need heavy doses of contextualism to make sense of verses that otherwise would
be cryptic, too compressed, expressed through sloppy syntax; on the other hand,
poetry aims at universality. The beauty of a poetic verse is that it can strike a chord in
the hearts of all people belonging to all cultures. Poetry, to some extent escapes the
boundaries of cultures. Why are Montale or Coleridge great? They are great because
they can address universal themes and express them through verses that are
memorable and that strike the hearts of the readers.

Which are the elements that require heavy contextualization is a poem?

Certainly metaphors, especially the non-standardised ones (those metaphoric uses
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that have not accrued to the langue). As an example of non-standardised metaphor, I

usually provide students with the following example:

(1) Mary is the oceanic wave that expands and expands and caresses all of us with
her velvet voice.

Of course, here we have several levels of metaphoric meanings as some of these

levels are embedded in a level further up on the plane of interpretation. When we
have complex metaphors like these, we have to start interpretation work within the
lower levels and then reach the superior level or levels (a kind of compositionality
of explicature reconstruction). The general point I would like to make is that
metaphors like these have no guarantee that they will be interpreted in standard
ways; each of the readers has to bring his personal story in the interpretation of
these multiple metaphors. The resulting interpretations are always different – but
of course, they can be compared and, at the end, we may opt for a syntheses of all
these interpretations available. Metaphors always require what Kecskes (2013)
calls the egocentric dimension of interpretation.

Consider the following stanza from Montale’s The lemon trees:

Vedi, in questi silenzi in cui le cose

s'abbandonano e sembrano vicine
a tradire il loro ultimo segreto,
talora ci si aspetta
di scoprire uno sbaglio di Natura,
il punto morto del mondo, l'anello che non tiene,
il filo da disbrogliare che finalmente ci metta
nel mezzo di una verità.
Lo sguardo fruga d'intorno,
la mente indaga accorda disunisce
nel profumo che dilaga
quando il giorno piú languisce.
Sono i silenzi in cui si vede
in ogni ombra umana che si allontana
qualche disturbata Divinità.

You realize that in silences

things yield and almost betray
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their ultimate secrets.

At times, one half expects
to discover an error in Nature,
the still point of reality,
the missing link that will not hold,
the thread we cannot untangle
in order to get at the truth.
You look around. Your mind seeks,
makes harmonies, falls apart
in the perfume, expands
when the day wearies away.
There are silences in which one watches
in every fading human shadow
something divine let go.
https://poets.org/poem/lemon-trees

The translation is clearly not literal and, thus, it does not help much. However, it
is certain that when we reach ‘uno sbaglio di Natura’, ‘il punto morto del mondo’,
‘l’anello che non tiene’, ‘il filo da disbrogliare’ we are not sure what the poet is
referring to. Which is the mistake made by Nature? Is it the fact that people,
regardless of the fact that they live in a wonderful place like that exemplified by
the lemon trees, die in the end? The expression ‘Il punto morto del mondo’ can
clarify the rest of poem a bit if it refers to a point of the world that has died.
‘L’anello che non tiene’ (the ring that does not hold) may be an allusion to life
which is imperfect because of death (it is as if we got stuck to life through a ring
(or chain) that keeps us connected with something permanent). This may be the
context that allows us to interpret the verses ‘sono i silenzi in cui si vede in ogni
ombra umana che si allontana qualche disturbata divinità’. The human souls that
depart may be those of the dead. ‘Qualche disturbata divinità’ may refer to God’s
attitude. He is merely disturbed by such departures. He does not fix this problem.
Now, I do not want to say that this is the only possible or the best interpretation of
these lines, but only that they requires heavy doses of contextualization.
Sometimes we should contextualize a poem through the poet’s life and his
manuscripts (this is what is done with Leopardi) or the historical context,
sometimes we should contextualize certain lines in the light of literary citations. I
will say more on literary citations later.

3. Literary citations

Literary citations create a level of intertextuality. More than one voice merge in
making text and in spreading a message. The use of multiple voices creates
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dimension of universality – it is not the voice of the author but that of humanity
that speaks; and the readers are asked to decipher the text intended as a
stratification of voices. Readers are more or less in the role of archaeologists, who
to dig into the text and see how the text lives in different ages, comparing the
context of now and the context of the past (or the contexts of the past). This
interplay of contexts, texts and sedimentations creates an effect of multiple
comments. Each text and context comments on the other texts and takes us one
stage further in the understanding of the poem. Quotation marks are normally
missing in poems, as they do in oral conversations. They have to be reconstructed
and the best way to do so is to start from background knowledge (pragmatics
plays a pervasive role in this as stated by Capone 2013). If we know that a text
belongs to a prior poem, then we are entitled to add inverted commas and obtain
the effect of quotation. This procedure, as can be easily seen, is thoroughly
pragmatic. Speaker intentions prevail and the readers have to reconstruct those
intentions with the best tools they have available – fragments of memories of past
poems. Of course, it remains to be said that such techniques presuppose different
effects on readers, as readers range from those who can easily have mnemonic
access to the texts cited (and compare them with the citing texts), to those who are
not experts on poetry and fail to see the citations and to make comparisons. The
comparison usually recognizes the meaning of the cited text in the context of the
poem (as well as the cultural and historical context). Consider the following
quotation from Alda Merini:

Ho conosciuto Gerico,
ho avuto anch'io la mia Palestina,
le mura del manicomio
erano le mura di Gerico
e una pozza di acqua infettata
ci ha battezzati tutti.

I have known Jericho,

I have had my Palestine,

The walls of the madhouse,

they were Jericho’s walls

 14

and a pool of infected water

baptized us all.

E con l’acqua di pozzanghere infette/ and with the water of infected pools

ci lavammo di fretta le mani,/ we washed our hands in a hurry

che assai erano sporche/ which were very dirty

tra la polvere e le insopportabili mosche,/between the dust and the unbearable

flies

ti diedi un battesimo d’acquasanta/I gave you a baptism of holy water (Capone, A.

from “Quando le stelle si staccano dal cielo”, 2020, in press, La fine del Peccato)

The latter poem clearly quotes the former. But the quotation is not literal. In fact,
it is split into two verses. Furthermore, an inanimate object is the subject of the
cited text in Merini’s poem, while an animate object is the subject of the quoting
text. The contexts are also different. Merini’s poem is about the madhouse, in
which the poetess spent much of her life. The infected water probably refers to the
fact that people considered the mental ill as infective. The latter poem is not about
the madhouse. The poet clearly has the memory of his neighbour, Signora Basile,
who washed her son’s hands and face with the water of a small pool at the port.
The water may be somehow not completely clean, but it can serve the purpose of
cleaning. Then, when the author says that with that water he gave a baptism of
holy water, he somehow refers to a process of purification. The water is purified
through the baptism. And the addressee is purified through baptism.When Alda
Merini uses the words ‘baptised us all’, she may even refer to a process of
initiation, she becomes a person who is mentally ill among people who are
mentally ill. Thus, the cited text and the citing texts may have very different
interpretations – the former text may present a figurative language which is
missing in the citing text. The citing text, somehow, comments on the cited text. It
is a liberation poem and its emancipatory effect seems to pervade the condition
described in the former text. After all, Christ came to help and rescue the poor. Of
course more can be said about these mirroring effects, but surely they ought to be
studied in connection with many texts and a full paper ought to derive from these
considerations one day.
 15

The issue of quotation takes us to the issue of polyphony. While linguists

usually work with a notion of intention (or intentions) which is linked to the
individual, since Volosinov (1986) certain linguists have been busy showing that
the text has a polyphonic structure and that speakers are not solely responsible for
it. Hearers take responsibility as well, as they can correct, modify, query, object.
Quotations and indirect reports (see Capone 2016, 2020b) may have appeared to
some to be the best way to prove that this polyphony issue exists. Of course, the
text (especially the poetic one) has to be seen as a kind of sedimentary rock, to
which different voices have contributed. Each voice lives independently from one
another. Yet, allusions to previous texts may provide a context of interpretation.
The voice of the author is one among many and encapsulates other voices
explicitly and implicitly. Some poets take pleasure in quoting without using
quotation marks, sure that readers will not come to the conclusion that they
appropriated other poets’ verses and that they will play the same game of
polyphony. Sometimes they quote within quotation marks, without however citing
the quoting poet, being sure that the readers will identify them. No poets quote
explicitly by attributing verses to others.

The poetic text, however, certainly includes the voices of the hearers/readers
who fill the lacunae or spaces voluntarily left by the authors when using cryptic
language and an exaggerated degree of compression. As Eco used to say, texts,
and in particular the poetic text, are ‘open’. The intentions attributed to the
speaker/poet may be in competition with those the speaker may have had. So
which count more?

4. Poetry and communication

It is one of the misconceptions about poetry that it has no place in ordinary

communication (although Jakobson was aware that the poetic function could be
subordinated to other functions). Poetic texts are to be studied or read silently, or
at most they are made to be recited aloud among circles of people who are devoted
to poetry or to be the objects of conferences, where they are cited and then
dissected, so to say. At school, poetic texts are studied with the guidance of
teachers, who are themselves guided by what literary critics have said about them.
“Momigliano says....’, ‘Pagliaro says’, ‘Giacalone says’, the teacher used to say,
after learning by heart what these people said. This method of studying poems,
although it shows deference to tradition and to what knowledgeable people have
said about poetic texts, leaves little space for discussion. After all, following
Umberto Eco, poetic texts should be considered open and disparate readers ought
to be able to find in them different things, as they bring their egocentric
 16

experience to bear on the texts (see Kecskes 2013 on egocentrism and

interpretation). In reading a poem, there is always a tension between the authorial
intentions and what readers are able to see in it, given their personal experience.
Personal experience surely is the first guidance to reading a poem. I said
previously, for example, that the infected pools of the poem ‘La fine del peccato’
remind me of my neighbour who washed her child’s face with the water of a pool
of water near the port. My experience was determinant in adding a level of
interpretation to the poem by Alda Merini and then to the poem ‘La fine del
peccato’. We can never be sure that the interpretations of various readers will have
something in common, however, in discussing the poem, given different personal
experiences, a deeper level of interpretation can be reached.

In any case, I want to set aside the persuasion that poems are there to be read
aloud among groups of readers, whether class mates or readers who meet on a
more voluntary basis. As we have said repeatedly, the poetic function may be
subordinated to selling goods at the market place (See Capone 2018). In Sicily,
especially in the past, vendors used to shout and invented stories to persuade their
customers to buy their products. The poetic function in these cases is not
autonomous but has to be seen in its auxiliary function: vendors who try to gather
huge crowds of customers who listen to what they have to say and can be
persuaded to buy goods. We have many of the formal markers of poetry: rhythm,
rhymes, inversion, parallelism, contrast, metaphors, etc. These rudimentary poets
have learned to make poetry through exposure to experience, certainly not through
books or school training.

Another case, where the poetic text works as a communicative event is within the
context of courting, Lovers may well write poems and give them to each other as a
sign of their love. Of course, they take the opportunity to talk about what is of
great importance to them, they express their feelings and emotions. The emotive
function is uppermost in such exchanges of poems. Unlike the poetic texts of the
marketplace, where the focus was on attracting people and advertising, here the
focus is on the self and on the other. The participants are mostly busy talking
about their own emotions and the other as well is transfigured through emotions,
rather than being merely described. Consider for example the following fragment
from a poem taken from “Quando le stelle si staccano dal cielo”.
 17

E tu che ora mi guardi/And you who are now watching me

rannicchiata sul mio divano,/lying crouched on my sofa
in questo angolo di mondo che ormai è tuo,/in this corner of
the world which is now yours
con aria interrogativa,/with an interrogative expression
per capire cosa ci riserva il futuro,/to understand what the
future has in store for us
sappi che anche io sono stato intrappolato/you should know
that I too was entrapped
nei tuoi occhi troppo chiari, troppo azzurri,/in your eyes,
which are too clear, too azure,
ove saltavano i pesci/where the fish used to jump
e giocavano i delfini/and the dolphins played
e la vita sembrava scivolare/and life seemed to slide
verso una meta sconosciuta./towards an unknown destiny

The poet here has two intentions. Talking with his lover and talking with his
readers. The readers are in the position of over-hearers (I would use the term over-
readers, if it was familiar through the literature). The other-than-self is obviously
transfigured. She is not described in realistic ways, but in ways that, though
personal and emotive, give us a hint as to her real way of behaving. We may very
well use the term hyper-realistic to allude to the fact that though the person is
described in a subjective way and through a level of figurative meaning, the
ultimate effect is that of offering readers a more faithful description of reality than
the one we would obtain through ordinary prose.
Similar effects can be seen in the graffiti on the palaces’ walls in Italy, where a
lover can express his love for a girl by writing verses. Graffiti would presumably
require an essay, but we cannot get into this issue. Songs can also be seen as
popular forms of poetry, but in one case an author reached the glory of the Nobel
prize. Songs would also deserve another essay, as they can be recycled to express
what a lover feels for a girl or boy, without explicitly saying that. This form of
 18

indirect communication should not be ignored. In this way, a lover can tell me that
she loves me without directly saying that. It is enough to dedicate a song to me.
And the text of the poem may say what the lover is not able to say, without
actually saying it. Suppose you have been dedicated a poem/song like the
following:
https://www.canzoni.it/testi/marco-masini/nel-mondo-dei-sogni.html

You would certainly start asking what purpose this dedication served and then at
one point you may find resemblances between the lyrical ‘I’ and the person who
dedicated you the song/poem. And at a later point you will find messages that are
intended for you: apologies, expressive, declarations of love, etc.

5. Compression and pragmatics

Most of our readers would agree that the poetic text is one where the poet tries to
say things with maximal economy. A poetic text, especially during the hermetic
period in Italy, reached an unprecedented level of compression. Consider the
following poem entitled ‘Soldati’ by Ungaretti:

Soldati (Soldiers)

Si sta come d’autunno

sugli alberi
le foglie.

(One stays like

leaves
On the trees
In Autumn).

The experience of the war is rendered through the metaphor of the Autumn leaves,
which are about to drop by thousands and at the same time, form a carpet on
which we tread when we walk producing disturbing noises. The poem is
extremely compressed, but we can reach its ultimate meaning through
decompression, by using pragmatic means. Metaphors are the keys to
 19

interpretation, but this metaphoric level can only be triggered once certain clues
are activated. In fact, if we were to omit the title ‘Soldiers’, we would get stuck in
choosing an interpretation based on the right metaphoric meaning. The poem
might well acquire, this way, a more generic meaning, being a metaphor for the
passing of time. Instead, in this poem, the impersonal use of the verb ‘si sta’ (one
stays) seems to point to a physical state, as well as to a psychological one: one has
the feeling of being in a very provisional state. The poem is also enriched by an
implicit contrast. Whereas the leaves fall due to a natural course of events, the
soldiers fall from the branches of the trees because of an unnatural cause. Another
implicit contrast is that, while the leaves are one with the branch on which they
sit, the soldiers can at most stay on the branch, they are not part of it, and, thus, are
likely to fall off. Expanding a poem is a question of patience and time, as readers
need to contextualize it, need to choose those words that work as intended clues
to determine and select interpretation (e.g. the title ‘Soldiers’), and they are like
archaeologists who need to dig deeper and deeper: the more context they bring to
the interpretation of the poem, the richer its interpretation becomes. They need not
only confine themselves to the boundaries of this single poem, by they must
compare it with all other poems that show a connection with it, either because we
know that the author read them or because of the presence of literary citations.

6. On the universality of poetry.

We often say that the best poems have a universal appeal. Surely, everyone agrees
that when we read Dante, Shakespeare, Leopardi, Carducci, Keats, Coleridge,
Montale, etc. we go through experiences that are very pleasurable. Such poems
and verses exercise a lot of influence on us readers, they get stuck in our
memories, and those words have greater chances to survive than their competitors.
Poets are perhaps the only people who can have a powerful influence on language
and its propagation. We agree that the best poems have a universal appeal, but can
we really say what it consists of, how that appeal is constructed? It seems that at
the heart of the best poems is the attempt by their authors to use the best possible
means of expression for what they want to say. Thus, given that a certain notion is
expressible through expressions a, b, c, d, the author will select the expression that
will have a greater impact on the reader, that has greater chances to be
remembered by heart, the one which has more expressive potential (if a is chosen,
than a should express more than b, c or d). Figurative language plays an important
role, because notions that are expressed through suitable felicitous images are
more likely to attract attention and to be remembered. In the same way as poems
 20

can use a figurative plane, advertisements can make leverage on it to convey

notions in a felicitous way, that is by attracting attention, making sure they are
remembered, and establishing connections between one notion and another.
Consider the advertisements on Daikin air conditioners, where there is a focus on
leisure time and butterflies. The air produced by these conditioners is so pure that
butterflies can thrive in it; thus, tv viewers are invited to try Daikin conditioners.
The success of the commercial is proportional to the success of the images used.
Such images attract attention, can no longer be wiped out of one’s memory and
establish connections with other notions (e.g. pure air).

Consider the end of the poem “Vicolo” by Quasimodo:

Vicolo: una croce di case

Che si chiamano piano,
e non sanno ch’ è paura
di restare sole nel buio.
This alley: a cross of houses
That call one another softly
And they do not know that it is fear
To stay alone in the darkness.

When the author utters ‘ a cross of houses’, we may, on the one hand evoke the urban
landscapes of certain parts of old cities, with intersecting and small alleys; on the
other hand, we may have access to the concept ‘cross’ and its associated connections
with sorrow, weeping, despair, but also salvation; the fear of remaining alone in the
darkness is compensated by the solace which this Christian concept brings with it.
Figurative language adds deeper interpretation levels.

Going back to the presumed universality of poetry’s appeal, this has to do with
form, but also with content. To say that form is everything in a poem is like wanting
to propose that we can construct beautiful lines made out of rhythmic structures
dispensing with meaning structures altogether. The problem for the poet is not how to
invent beautiful rhythms and rhymes, but to give content an expressive shape. Poems
remain impressed because the contents are universal and the words used to express
them are the best that anyone at all could use to express those contents, making their
impact deep and making sure that they are remembered for generations. The right
 21

image of the poet is that of a person who struggles with form and content and must
find the most suitable form to express a certain content. He is someone who searches
for the best possible words, given the content s/he wants to express. Of course, the
context could not exist without the form, but surely the poet has the freedom to
construct a poem in which combinations of words create a unique effect, in which
words have influence on what follows and meanings can be enriched further in a
contextual way. The poet has conventional and unconventional resources. Very often
his structures are elliptical, cryptic, and they have to be completed through
integration with other words that co-occur in the poem. While the resources a poet
inherits from convention are limited, the resources s/he can use by adopting
pragmatic principles are infinite. Modulations a la Recanati (2004) find in poetry the
best domain for their applications. When Quasimodo in his poem ‘Vento a Tindari’
says ‘Amaro pane a rompere’ (bitter bread to break), he is certainly not saying that
bread is hard to break, that the task of eating is difficult and hard, but he is
presumably referring to the existential condition of human beings, who have to suffer
to bring home some food. Now the metonymic broadening of ‘bread’ does not have
the effect of providing a certain and fixed referent for bread; for bread, for the poet
and his readers, can mean anything that is essential to human life, from food to
spiritual needs. There may be a latitude in the broadening of the meaning of this
word, which may be induced by the word ‘bitter’ and by the word ‘rompere’. Now,
the fact that a word may have some latitude, in interpretation, and one that is intended
by the author, is important in making a poem universal, because it will appeal to a
greater number of people. Universality also consists in the resonance between the
verse and the readers. A universal verse is one that is touching, but why is it
touching? Presumably because the condition it addresses is one that is experienced by
most, perhaps all people. The poem ‘Vento a Tindari’ after a central part dealing with
the poet’s exile and existential anguish, ends with the poet’s friends waking him up
from his meditations, scared that he might fall down the slope into the sea. The final
verses are:

E io fingo timore a chi non sa (And I dissimulate fear to those who do not know)

Che vento profondo mi ha cercato (What a deep wind has searched me).

Here the poet establishes a contrast between the fear he was supposed to have (being
so close to the slope) and the state of anxiety brought about by the previous
meditations. Such meditations are summed up by the thought/presupposition that a
deep wind has searched him. While Shelley used the image of the wind for the
 22

prophetic message of the poet and its transmission and propagation, here for
Quasimodo, the deep wind (as clarified with the collocation with ‘deep’) is the wind
of introspection. The wind has also the ability to push Quasimodo down the slope,
either physically or through the intervention of some psychic state. I prefer the latter
interpretation – as he wakes up from his mediations, the poet understands that he was
about to fall down the slope due to utmost depression. This verse in which the poet
says ‘E io fingo timore a chi non sa/che vento profondo mi ha cercato’ has a claim to
universality, because it deals with an existential condition that many people
experience (isolation, for example) but also because of the formal means used which
have a deep resonance on our minds. As Jakobson says, a poem is always embedded
in certain conventions, in certain historical contexts, and although it cannot often
make use of the situational context to establish reference, its own structure becomes
the context of interpretation (rhymes, for example, have the function of focusing on
parallels or contrasts of meaning). However, all those who have really appreciated
poetry, notice that there must be a reason why certain authors have a universal
appeal. What is their greatness made out of? We certainly ought to distinguish
between rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric also has the ambition of providing rules for
choosing words that can be best have an argumentative impact on hearers. However,
its purpose is related to contingent matters. Truth is not important for rhetoric. Truth
in poetry does not amount to being faithful to well-known facts that are external.
What is external matters relatively. The facts a poem must be true of are internal
states of mind that respond to universal situations. The readers may recognize in the
poets’ solutions to their puzzles, their own responses and this phenomenon we may
call ‘reverberation’. What matters most for linguists is that in presumed cases of
poems that claim to universality, forms are carefully selected so as to best represent
the human condition they speak of. It is this perfect match between form and contents
that characterizes all excellent poetry. How do we know that the match is perfect? It
is the reactions of readers that tell us.

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 23

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