Understanding and Relating to Other People
I can see a myriad of problems when dealing with anything written or spoken that can screw up communication. For some reason, poetry seems to be one of the few things that isn't particularly inflicted by this phenomenon. It's quite simple why: poetry's not supposed to give you a straight answer and the sort of coherence and clarity we usually seek out in 'real speech' is not needed.
In order to truly appreciate how this functions, we need to look at some rather simple concepts that might not be apparent to everyone at first glance. Any sort of metrically-based poetry functions at the same time on both a paradigmatic and a syntagmatic scale. This means a line of iambic pentameter eliminates certain words from certain positions, and can exclude some words altogether, simply based on their sound.
An example from Alexander Pope might be in order to illustrate my point:
When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line, too, labours and the words move slow.
This line is a brilliant example of poetic diction, with an inversion of the normal syntactic order of words in the first line. When Ajax is attempting to throw the big rock, the poetic line is also struggling under this massive weight and goes significantly slower. The inversion is a necessity in Pope's poetry, because he mainly wrote in heroic couplets, a sub-genre that I have been dealing with in some detail for the past many months. End-rhymes are a necessity in heroic couplets and can overwrite the need for following accepted valency patterns. To further illuminate my argument, if we were to exchange the final word 'throw' in the first line with something appropriate, we would be forced to look at a wide range of constraints. Any word that could be a synonym of throw would be suitable for replacing it, if we were to follow the paradigmatic approach first. This means that words such as bunt, lob and hurl would be fine, but in our specific context this approach seems to be rather untenable, since they would have a hard time rhyming with slow in the following line. Instead, we could look at using the syntagmatic approac where any one-syllable word would be fine, no matter the meaning.
Of course, poetry only exists in the proper use of both syntagmatic and paradigmatic usages.
Wordsworth wrote in his wonderful preface to the (in)famous Lyrical Ballads that they wrote poetry in the language of real men, and real men apparently spoke an extremely eloquent and varied, flowery English in 1799. Woe betide us that we do not have this style of speech or writing anymore, or perhaps it is all for the better.
By now, language is mostly understood to carry little meaning in and of itself, but rather that it takes on meaning from context. Whether you ascribe value to Grice's maxims or some other sort of linguistic model of understanding communication matters very little to me, but the gist is that while language by itself holds little meaning, the speech acts, and particularly in a conversation, hold all the meaning in the world. All of our semiotics are constantly used to make a point to either ourselves or for others.
On that note, I will highlight a little piece of advice that I gave my students today: If you have to write poetry make sure that you break most, if not, all of the rules.
But if you don't know the rules in the first place, it is very hard to know how to break them.
