What do poets show and tell linguists?

Abstract

My paper briefly reviews where Jakobson contributed to the productive conjunction of linguistics and poetics and comments on where he seemed to fail, and why. It then emphasizes the singularity of literature and reiterates (as it were) the importance of repetition in verbal art. I believe that all Jakobson's ideas in the Closing Statement, when brutally transformationally reduced, amount to saying that repetition lies at the core of verbal art (even if it is not the only phenomenon crucial to verbal art). It is by dint of the diversity of kinds of partial repetition that are licensed in verbal art, that we accord it such an important place in our culture, deeming it a fit means for achieving depth and complexity of representation, or for seeing ‘into the life of things’—including that deepest and most mysterious of things, human consciousness. Finally I turn briefly and with the help of a relatively simple poem by Seamus Heaney to the idea that poets continually show linguists things about language, things of which linguists themselves can easily lose sight: especially our power through language to re-think everything and anything.

Keywords:

• repetition
• literariness
• Jakobsen
• Heaney
• stylistics