Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics

Roman Jakobson, Style in Language. I have a lot of anxiety about this post because I only marginally understood this essay but I'll try to write about it. It seems that most of this essay is devoted to defending these statements:

(377) ...In poetry any verbal element is converted into a figure of poetic speech... 'poetry is a kind of language'... [therefore] 'there seems to be no reason for trying to separate the literary from the overall linguistic.'

Jakobson seems to be concerned with what Bernstein talked about-- but rather than dubbing it 'extralexical,' he identifies these qualities as inherent to language. He begins by describing language's purposes and functions, with a little diagram

CONTEXT

ADDRESSER MESSAGE ADDRESSEE

CONTACT

CODE

Which is then revised (or complemented by):

REFERENTIAL

EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVE

PHATIC

METALINGUAL

He spends a significant amount of time tracing linguistic patterns/sounds through lines of poems, idioms, stories-- not only in English. It seems to be an in-depth study of 'why poetry works'.

(372) In poetry, any conspicuous similarity in sound [think Poe] is evaluated in respect to similarity and/or dissimilarity in meaning. ...Sound symbolism is an undeniably objective relation founded on phenomenal connection between different sensory modes, in particular between the visual and auditory experience.

(373) Poetry is not the only area where sound symbolism makes itself felt, but it is a province where the internal nexus between sound and meaning changes from latent into patent and manifests itself most palpably and intensely.

So we can never escape meanings created or associated with sound but they can be tinkered with. Jakobson looks at Poe, but I can't help thinking of Plath or Stein here too (or Bunting, obviously). I love this quote from Charles Sanders Peirce about some literary forms in which verbal devices are 'unostentatious' and language seems a 'nearly transparent garment':

(374) 'This clothing can never be completely stripped off, it is only changed for something more diaphanous.'

Again, language-- and sound-- and its appearance-- can never be totally transparent, just more and more sheer.

And I think Jakobson would agree with Bernstein that these 'extralexical' components of a poem are legible and deserve to be read, as well:

(375) Textbooks believe in the occurrence of poems devoid of imagery, but actually scarcity in lexical tropes is counterbalanced by gorgeous grammatical tropes and figures.

I'm still not quite sure here-- it seems that sound & sense are very much connected for Jakobson. It still sort of feels hierarchical-- or maybe it's that sound has its own sense that foregrounds 'semantic sense'.