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).