Notes

1. A Theory of Poetic Syntax

1. Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960); rpt. in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p. 322.

2. M. A. K. Halliday, “Descriptive Linguistics in Literary Studies,” in English Studies Today, ed. G. I. Duthie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964); rpt. in Linguistics and Literary Style, ed. Donald C. Freeman (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1970), p. 70.

3. Seymour Chatman, “Milton’s Participial Style,” PMLA 83 (1968), 1398

4. Donald C. Freeman, “The Strategy of Fusion: Dylan Thomas’s Syntax,” in Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics, ed. Roger Fowler (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 19-39.

5. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Glyph 1 (1977), 174.

6. Ibid., p. 189.

7. E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 170.

8. Ibid., p. 17.

9. Ibid., p. 169.

10. Ibid., p. 173.

11. For another contribution to this debate, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 33.

12. Jacques Derrida, “Limited Inc.: a b c . . . ,” Glyph 2 (1978), 168.

13. This because Derrida is certainly anxious that the consequences of his reexamination of the linguistic code be extended to the analysis of spoken language. Historically, Derrida’s immediate target happened to involve written forms and thus also literature. It was for this reason that stylists rather than theoretical linguists found themselves facing the unwelcome task of rebutting the deconstructionists’ attacks.

The best-known exception to this generalization, an exchange between Derrida and speech-act theorist John R. Searle in the pages of Glyph, demonstrates all too clearly the inability of theoretical linguists themselves to take seriously and to meet on its own ground the challenge of a Derridean critique (see Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” and “Limited Inc.”; and John R. Searle, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” Glyph 1 [1977], 198-208).

14. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957), p.

15. Ibid., p. 56.

16. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 26.

17. See Paul B. Armstrong, “The Conflict of Interpretations and the Limits of Pluralism,” PMLA 98 (1983), 344-345.

18. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). Contrast here Smith, pp. 9-13 and chap. 2.

19. Stanley Fish, Is There A Text In This Class? (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 239, 242; the term “shared pretense” is borrowed from Searle.

20. Ibid., p. 72.

21. Richard Ohmann, Shaw: The Style and the Man (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1962); Seymour Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James (Oxford: Blackwells Press, 1972).

22. See for instance Donald C. Freeman, “Literature as Property: A Review Article,” Language and Style 13:2 (1980), 156-173.

23. Fish, p. 150.

24. Ibid., p. 169. As Paul Armstrong notes, Fish comes even closer “to vicious circularity” in his dispute with John Reichert (see Fish, p. 299, cited in Armstrong, p. 346).

25. Ibid., pp. 155-158.

26. Ibid., p. 318.

27. Ibid., p. 28.

28. Ibid., p. 370. Gerald Graff also attacks Fish’s interpretive communities in Literature Against Itself (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 166-168. His note to p. 168 cites several other discussions of Fish’s position.

29. See for example Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin, eds., Essays on the Language of Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Roger Fowler, ed., Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975); and Donald C. Freeman, ed., Linguistics and Literary Style (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1970) and Essays in Modern Stylistics (London and New York: Methuen, 1981).

30. I think in particular of Josephine Miles, Eras and Modes in English Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957); Morris Halle and S. Jay Keyser, English Stress: Its Form, Its Growth, and Its Role in Verse (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); George L. Dillon, Language Processing and the Reading of Literature: Toward a Model of Comprehension (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978); and Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Discourse (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977), respectively.

Students of poetic syntax, incidentally, might learn a great deal from reflecting on the success of these volumes. Almost immediately upon publication each of these texts significantly raised the level of intellectual debate in its respective subfield. The provision of a basic framework for discussion has led quite naturally to the development of more questions and to the evolution of a still more sophisticated theoretical model. There is thus every reason to hope for an equal measure of success to attend the formulation of a comprehensive theory of poetic syntax.

31. Dillon, p. xvi.

32. Ibid., p. xxvii.

33. For a definition and discussion of the terms “competence” and “performance,” see Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), pp. 3-15.

34. See, for instance, Susumu Kuno, “The Position of Relative Clauses and Conjunctions,” Linguistic Inquiry 5:1 (1974), 117-136.

35. In what follows, I shall use the term “linguistic competence” to refer to the whole of this field of shared analytical assumptions, except when, for a specific purpose, I wish to distinguish between exclusively language-oriented cognitive skills and those with broader applicability.

36. Fish, chap. 6.

37. Ibid., pp. 303-304; italics mine.

38. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London and Ithaca, N.Y.: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 114.

39. Thus Smith’s criticisms of stylistics, which we shall consider in some detail in chap. 4, figure in her book as the second barrel of an attack which takes as its first target contemporary syntactic theory as a whole: “The professional linguist’s . . . description of the utterance reflects an arbitrary demarcation and abstraction from the fullness, the density, and the spatial, temporal, and causal continuity of all human action and all events in nature” (p. 18).

40. E. R. Steinberg, “Stylistics as a Humanistic Discipline,” Style 10:1 (1976), 67-78.

41. Timothy R. Austin, “Prolegomenon to a Theory of Comparative Poetic Syntax,” Language and Style 16 (1983), 433-455.

42. Pratt, p. 26.

43. For an excellent (if terminologically complex) discussion of prose style from a standpoint broadly compatible with my own, see Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short, Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose (London and New York: Longman, 1981).

2. The Technical Analysis of a Literary Text

1. Culler, p. 5.

2. John Reichert, Making Sense of Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 24.

3. I must myself plead guilty to having mistaken one kind of argument for the other in a previous paper [see Timothy R. Austin, “Constraints on Syntactic Rules and the Style of Shelley’s ‘Adonais’: An Exercise in Stylistic Criticism,” PTL 4 (1979), 335-337]. I am grateful to Steven Lapointe for insisting that I reconsider that position.

4. Pratt, p. 16.

5. Ibid., p. 11.

6. Paul Kiparsky, “The Role of Linguistics in a Theory of Poetry,” Daedalus 102 (1973), 234; rpt. in Essays in Modern Stylistics, ed. Donald C. Freeman (London and New York: Methuen, 1981). p. 13.

7. Ibid., p. 243.

8. For a very clear philosophical discussion of this problem of hypotheses’ instability and the effects of this problem on the establishment of valid scientificstatements, seeHilaryPutnam, Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 28-30.

9. Leonard Bloomfield, Language (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935) pp. 194-197.

10. Emmon Bach, Syntactic Theory (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1974) contains an excellent bibliography, as also does Adrian Akmajian and Frank Heny, An Introduction to the Principles of Transformational Syntax (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1975). See also Joan W. Bresnan, “On Complementizers: Toward a Syntactic Theory of Complement Types,” Foundations of Language 6 (1970), 297-321; Chomsky, Aspects, “Conditions on Transformations,” in A Festschrift for Morris Halle, ed. Stephen R. Anderson and Paul Kiparsky (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1973), pp. 232-286, and Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); Joseph E. Emonds, A Transformational Approach to English Syntax (New York: Academic Press, 1976); Ray Jackendoff, Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1972), and “Morphological and Semantic Regularities in the Lexicon,” Language 51 (1975), 639-671;and John R. Ross, Constraints on Variables in Syntax, Diss. M. I. T., 1967.

11. Bresnan, “A Realistic Transformational Grammar,” in Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality, ed. Morris Halle, Joan Bresnan, and George A. Miller (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1978), p. 4.

12. Ibid., p. 59.

13. Ibid., p. 4.

14. As in Bloomfield, p. 161.

15. This structure has been simplified to omit any reference to the syntactic “trace” left by the movement rule that has applied (see Chomsky, “Conditions”). While by no means trivial to the EST in general, traces will not substantially affect the analyses presented in the course of this particular study. I shall therefore continue to omit them from tree-structures without further comment.

16. Again see Chomsky, “Conditions,” and Emmon Bach and George M. Horn, “Remarks on ‘Conditions on Transformations,’ ” Linguistic Inquiry 7:2 (1976), 265-299.

17. The term filter is often used in such cases [as in Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik, “Filters and Control,” Linguistic Inquiry 8 (1977), 425-504; see especially pp. 430-433]. However, usage of the three terms condition, constraint, and filter still tends to be somewhat imprecise.

18. “[T]he great weakness of the theory of transformational grammar is its enormous descriptive power,” [Noam Chomsky, “Some Empirical Issues in the Theory of Transformational Grammar,” in Goals of Linguistic Theory, ed. Stanley Peters (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972)]. See also Chomsky and Lasnik, pp. 427-428, and Bresnan, “A Realistic . . . Grammar,” p. 59.

19. Richard Cureton provides an effective review of the major contributions to this debate in “‘he danced his did’: An Analysis,” Journal of Linguistics 16 (1980), 245-262. A late entry is James Paul Gee’s “Anyone’s Any: A View of Language and Poetry through an Analysis of ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town,’” Language and Style 16:2 (1983), 123-137.

20. Otto Jespersen, Essentials of English Grammar (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1964), p. 181; my emphasis.

21. I use the symbol “*” throughout this study to indicate that a sentence is unacceptable to most native speakers as a sample of standard English. I do not use it with material quoted from poetic texts.

I should also note that the full details of the distribution of any are considerably more complex than I have suggested here. I do not believe, however, that my simplification in any sense misrepresents the facts relevant to this particular literary application of them.

22. I am aware that my use of words such as chosen, overlook, and transgress implies a measure of consciousness on the part of the poet about the syntactic effects he has created. I return to this issue in chap. 5; see also Culler, pp. 117-118.

23. Their work has also been discussed by Cureton and by Tanya Reinhart, “Patterns, Intuitions, and the Sense of Nonsense,” PTL 1 (1976), 85-103.

24. Samuel R. Levin, “Poetry and Grammaticalness,” Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, ed. Horace G. Lunt (The Hague: Mouton, 1964). Rpt. in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p. 226.

25. Ibid., p. 227.

26. James Peter Thorne, “Stylistics and Generative Grammars,” Journal of Linguistics 1 (1965), 49-59; rpt. in Linguistics and Literary Style, ed. Donald C. Freeman (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1970), pp. 185-186. A reprise of essentially the same argument may be found in Thorne’s later paper, “Generative Grammar and Stylistic Analysis,” in New Horizons in Linguistics, ed. John Lyons (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 185-197; rpt. in Essays in Modern Stylistics, ed. Donald C. Freeman (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), pp. 42-52. See also David A. Lee, “‘The Inheritors’ and Transformational Generative Grammar,” Language and Style IX (1976), 77-97.

27. Thorne, “Stylistics and Generative Grammars,” p. 189. See also Reichert, pp. 26-27.

28. Thorne, “Stylistics and Generative Grammars,” p. 187.

29. See for example Thorne, “Stylistics and Generative Grammars,” p. 187, and Reinhart, pp. 91-93.

30. See Reinhart, p. 98, where her division of the poem, proposed on altogether independent grounds, is identical to that advanced here.

31. Ann M. Banfield, “Stylistic Transformations: A Study Based on the Syntax of ‘Paradise Lost,’ ” Diss. University of Wisconsin 1973.

32. George L. Dillon, “Inversions and Deletions in English Poetry,” Language and Style 8 (1975), 234-235.

33. Ibid., p. 221; my emphases.

34. Thus of cases very similar to some discussed immediately below as examples of poetic syntax violating completely the standard syntactic norms, Dillon remarks only that “this particular construction is probably ungrammatical, . . . but it is so common in Spenser that one must work out some strategy for it” (Language Processing, p. 36). Elsewhere he rephrases this same argument, asserting the need for stylists to devise “adjustment[s] for coping with ungrammatical texts” (p. 138).

35. Richard Cureton, “The Aesthetic Use of Syntax: Studies on the Syntax of the Poetry of E. E. Cummings,” Diss. University of Illinois 1980, pp. 120–128, especially Strategies 5 and 6.

36. Citations from Shelley’s works will be taken from Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, eds., The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London and New York, 1927; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, 1965). Hereafter this edition will be cited as CWS; in referencing passages quoted, I shall include volume, page, and line numbers. Throughout this study, emphases, capitalizations, and punctuation will be those of the standard critical editions cited unless I note to the contrary.

37. Chomsky, “Conditions,” p. 238.

38. See Bach, p. 212.

39. See S. Jay Keyser, “A Partial History of the Relative Clause in English,” in Papers in the History and Structure of English, University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics, Vol. I, ed. Jane B. Grimshaw (Amherst: Graduate Linguistic Student Association, 1975), pp. 1-33; and Chomsky and Lasnik, p. 435.

40. George Miller and Noam Chomsky, “Finitary Models of Language Users,” in Handbook of Mathematical Psychology, II, ed. R. D. Luce, R. R. Bush, and E. Galanter (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1963), pp. 419-491. Further work on this topic is contained in Kuno.

41. Chomsky, Aspects, p. 127.

42. Banfield, pp. 134-135. This issue is also discussed by William P. Bivens III in “Parameters of Poetic Inversion in English,” Language and Style XII (1979), 15-16.

43. Dillon, “Inversions and Deletions,” p. 227; once again this point is recast in Language Processing, chap. 1.

44. Dillon discusses a number of similar cases from a reader-oriented standpoint in the early pages of Language Processing. His assertion that pragmatic and semantic criteria may often lead us never consciously to entertain certain structurally admissible interpretations seems to me plausible. He himself, however, notes several exceptions closely analogous to that cited here (pp. 15, 20). My concern is, in any case, with such sentences’ formal status with respect to syntactic competence rather than with the heuristic strategies we may or may not invoke to decode them (see chap. 5 of this study).

45. Carlos Baker, Shelley’s Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (1948; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), p. 14.

46. Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, “Keats and Shelley: A Comparative Study of their Ideas about Poetic Language and Some Patterns of Language Use in their Poetry,” Diss. University of California, Los Angeles 1972, p. 127.

47. Fish, p. 259. See also, for example, his discussion of Freeman’s paper on Keats’s “To Autumn,” pp. 263-266. Rather more surprisingly, we find Hirsch making a very similar accusation on p. 166 of Validity in Interpretation.

48. See Emmon Bach, “Comments on the Paper by Chomsky,” in Formal Syntax, ed. P. Culicover, T. Wasow, and A. Akmajian (New York: Academic Press, 1977), pp. 133-156; and Janet Dean Fodor, “Parsing Strategies and Constraints on Transformations,” Linguistic Inquiry 9 (1978), 427-473.

49. For an excellent survey of experimental evidence supporting this contention, see Herbert H. Clark and Eve V. Clark, Psychology and Language: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), esp. pp. 45-84.

50. Dillon, “Inversions and Deletions,” p. 229.

51. Thorne, “Stylistics and Generative Grammars,” p. 191. See also Paul Ziff, “On Understanding ‘Understanding Utterances,’ ” in The Structure of Language: Readings in the Philosophy of Language, ed. Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J. Katz (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 390-399.

52. John M. Lipski, “Poetic Deviance and Generative Grammar,” PTL 2 (1977), 246; quoted in Cureton, “The Aesthetic Use of Syntax,” p. 117.

53. Dillon, “Inversions and Deletions,” p. 229; my emphasis.

54. Language Processing, p. xxx.

55. I do not want to imply that this feature was unique to Pope (a point I shall have to return to later in this study) nor that it was anything less than a much admired virtue of his style in the eyes of most of his contemporaries; see Donald Davie [Articulate Energy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 60] who claims that for Augustan poets generally “ ‘strength’ . . . is close and compact syntax, neither more nor less.”

56. Citations from Pope’s works will be taken from John Butt, ed., The Poems of Alexander Pope (London: Methuen, 1963), hereafter PAP; in referencing passages, I shall include the name of the work, unless that has been specified elsewhere in the immediate context, and the relevant page and line numbers.

57. This hypothesis itself would constitute an interesting methodological principle with obvious links to common-sense reader strategies for processing poetic material. However, it lies beyond the immediate scope of this discussion.

58. See Ray Jackendoff, “Gapping and Related Rules,” Linguistic Inquiry 2 (1971), 21-35; Susumu Kuno, “Gapping: A Functional Analysis,” Linguistic Inquiry 7:2 (1976), 300-318; John R. Ross, Constraints, and “Gapping and the Order of Constituents,” in Progress in Linguistics, ed. M. Bierwisch and K. E. Heidolph (The Hague: Mouton, 1970); and Justine T. Stillings, “The Formulation of Gapping in English as Evidence for Variable Types in Syntactic Transformations,” Linguistic Analysis 1 (1975), 247-273.

59. I am aware that, given the versatility of transformational grammars and the range of human ingenuity, innumerable other hypotheses may be cobbled up on demand. I am, however, more interested here in the question of how a stylist chooses between competing theories than in the theories themselves. In any case, “[s]cience must proceed not by experimentally testing all imaginable theories . . . but by rejecting all but a very small number of theories as a priori too implausible to be worth testing” (Putnam, p. 25).

60. For a specification of these rather complex restrictions, see the sources cited in note 58.

61. See Barbara Abbott, “Right Node Raising as a Test for Constituent-hood,” Linguistic Inquiry 7 (1976), 639–642; Alexander Grosu, “A Note on Subject Raising to Object and Right Node Raising,” Linguistic Inquiry 7 (1976), 642-645; Jorge Hankamer, “Constraints on Deletion in Syntax,” Diss. Yale University 1971; and Richard A. Hudson, “Conjunction Reduction, Gapping and Right-Node Raising,” Language 52 (1976), 535-562.

62. A chance remark in Dillon’s constantly stimulating paper suggests yet a third possible approach. In categorizing deletion patterns common in English poetic texts, Dillon simply notes that “where [a] deleted element would normally be pronominal in Modern English, D.O.’s [direct objects] are deleted to the right” (“Inversions and Deletions,” p. 221). His description prompts us to consider the possibility of a Rightward Pronoun Drop rule as another means of generating the structures we have encountered in Pope’s poetry. Such a rule might have several rather attractive features. Limiting deletion to pronominal direct objects in conjoined sentences would make this rule less sweeping than either rightward Right Node Raising or Conjunct Scrambling; and the proposed rule bears an intriguing resemblance to a more general rule of anaphoric pronoun deletion often attributed to Old and Middle English syntax [see F. Th. Visser, An Historical Syntax of the English Language (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1963), p. 525]. Alas, this solution too runs afoul of a specific construction in the Pope corpus, this time a famous couplet from “The Rape of the Lock”: “Here Thou, Great Anna! whom three Realms obey,/Dost sometimes Counsel take—and sometimes Tea.” (PAP, 227: 7-8). Here we find no overt verb in the second conjunct, but by definition a Rightward Pronoun Drop rule cannot be held responsible for the deletion of the verb take. We shall thus be forced back, in this particular case, either on rightward Right Node Raising or on leftward Right Node Raising combined with Conjunct Scrambling, if we wish to explain the deletion that has clearly occurred.

63. For brevity’s sake I omitted numerous examples paralleling that cited from “The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”; some interesting cases may also be found in Dillon, “Inversions and Deletions.”

64. Noam Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), chap. 2.

65. Jerry A. Fodor, Thomas G. Bever, and Merrill F. Garrett, The Psychology of Language (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 85. For a more general discussion of what makes scientific hypotheses “simple,” desirable, or “plausible” in this sense, see Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 351-354.

66. See, for example, Ohmann’s work on Shaw cited in chap. 1.

67. Harold Whitehall, “From Linguistics to Criticism,” Kenyon Review XIII (1951), 713; cited in Freeman, Linguistics and Literary Style, p. 3.

3. The Aesthetic Dimension

1. Ahmad K. Ardat, “The Prose Style of Selected Works by Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein,” Style 14 (1980), 3. (The journal Style specializes in such studies and frequently reviews the whole field of stylistic statistics.)

2. Fish, p. 74.

3. Compare Leech and Short, pp. 14 and 42-48.

4. Citations of Dryden’s work refer to H. T. Swedenberg, ed., The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956), hereafter WJD; references list volume, page, and line numbers as well as the title of the poem quoted from, wherever this information is not already given in the text.

5. It may seem that I assume too easily here and elsewhere in this study that reading poetry involves rather mechanical “real time,” left-to-right analysis. I would not seek to deny the charge outright. Indeed, that some carefully qualified concept of “the linearity of text” is indispensable in literary stylistics is strongly argued by Leech and Short (pp. 210-212) who also cite Fish in the same vein. But we shall have cause to reexamine the whole issue of “the reader” from a rather different perspective in chap. 5.

6. Here and elsewhere in this discussion I shall use the terms “distance” and “delay” interchangeably. As will become clear when I analyze their formal status as stylistic concepts later in the chapter, these terms effectively constitute a matched pair, related respectively to our experience of poetry along spatial and temporal dimensions.

7. See Clark and Clark, pp. 66-68. Dillon also discusses at some length cases of that kind in literary contexts in Language Processing, p. 24. He attributes the garden-path metaphor to Henry Fowler.

8. Thus, for example, linguistic theory has seldom found that it needed to define or to measure the “distance” between syntactic constituents. The obvious exception proving this generalization—Peter Rosenbaum’s reliance on distance calculations as part of his “erasure principle” governing complement sentence interpretation [The Grammar of English Predicate Complement Constructions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), p. 6]—has been obviated by subsequent developments in syntactic theory itself.

9. Citations of Byron’s works refer to Frederick Page, ed., Byron: Poetical Works, Oxford Standard Authors edn., corr. John Jump (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), hereafter BPW; references list the relevant work’s title, where necessary, and page and line numbers.

10. Stylistic delay caused by syntactic manipulation (often mistermed “syntactic tension,” as I shall explain below) has of course already received extensive discussion in the literature. Donald Davie finds an excellent example in T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion” (Davie, pp. 88–89). A parallel case discovered in Dylan Thomas’ poetry by Donald Freeman was already outlined in the opening pages of chapter 1. Both Richard Cureton (“The Aesthetic Use of Syntax,” pp. 175 ff.) and Irene Fairley [“Syntactic Deviation and Cohesion,” Language and Style VI:3 (1973), 220] offer parallel examples drawn from the works of E. E. Cummings. In the field of prose style analysis, meanwhile, George Dillon cites an excellent discussion by Jane Tompkins of a passage from Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle” (Language Processing, p. 135); and Leech and Short devote major sections of chap. 7 of their book to this same topic.

I shall take issue with some of the specific assumptions and indeed conclusions of these analyses in the pages that follow. Nonetheless, I am fully aware of the groundwork that has been so expertly laid in this particular area.

11. Cureton, “The Aesthetic Use of Syntax,” p. 27 (my emphasis); see also his chap. 1 (passim).

12. Gwendolyn Brooks, The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (New York: Harper & Row, 1959).

13. Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), pp. 260–261; cited in Davie, p. 18.

14. As used by Leech and Short, pp. 226 ff.

15. See for example Cureton, “The Aesthetic Use of Syntax”; Davie, pp. 85–91; Donald C. Freeman, “Keats’s ‘To Autumn’: Poetry as Process and Pattern,” Language and Style XI (1978), 3-17; Jakobson; Kiparsky; Samuel R. Levin, Linguistic Structures in Poetry (The Hague: Mouton, 1962); and R. G. Peterson, “Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature,” PMLA 91 (1976), 367-375.

16. Peter Quennell, Byron: A Self-Portrait (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), II, p. 516.

17. That this equation is in fact proposed without proper qualification may be seen if one considers the unstated implications of the following sentence from no less an authority than The Norton Anthology of English Literature: “Within [the] two lines [of the heroic couplet] it was possible to attain certain rhetorical or witty effects by the use of parallelism, balance, or antithesis within the couplet as a whole or the individual line” (I, p. 1730). One cannot blame the student who infers from this remark that, outside the heroic couplet mode, such effects as “parallelism, balance, and antithesis” have been, and indeed still may be, altogether impossible.

18. Baker, p. 23. The critical views expressed in this paragraph accord with, and have been considerably influenced by, the work of Desmond King-Hele [Shelley: His Thought and Work (Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971), esp. pp. 42 ff.]; Melvin T. Solve [Shelley: His Theory of Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927), esp. pp. 36 ff.]; and Floyd H. Stovall [Desire and Restraint in Shelley (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1931), esp. pp. 140-141].

19. Baker, p. 37 (my emphasis).

20. Earl Miner, Dryden’s Poetry (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 146.

21. The term is T. S. Eliot’s [The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), p. 83]; see also Solve, pp. 149 ff.

22. I do not have space here to address the possibility that triadic structures may represent “a conventional means to elevation” of style regardless of the context in which they appear, a claim advanced by K. G. Hamilton [John Dryden and the Poetry of Statement (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1969), p. 142] and by Winston Weathers [“The Rhetoric of the Series,” in Teaching Freshman Composition, ed. Gary Tate and Edward P. J. Corbett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 313-319].

23. I refer throughout to E. H. Coleridge’s standard edition, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1912), hereafter CPW. As usual, I list each work’s title, and the relevant volume, page, and line references, wherever necessary, immediately following each quotation.

24. The name is due to John R. Ross (unpublished mimeo notes); but see also S. Jay Keyser, rev. of Adverbial Positions in English, by Sven Jacobson, Language 44 (1968), 357-373; and Justine T. Stillings, “Sentence Raising” (Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1975).

25. The dangers inherent in accepting such self-assessments in the case of this particular poet have been well documented in Norman Fruman’s Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (New York: George Braziller, 1971). The present discussion will represent yet another reason for crediting Fruman’s allegation that Coleridge’s remarkable critical powers were exceeded only by his acute feelings of personal insecurity.

26. “O!” wrote Coleridge in his notebooks, “it is the relation of facts—not the facts, friend!” [Anima Poetae: From the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London, 1895; rpt. Pennsylvania: The Folcroft Press, 1969), p. 148] The same emphasis on “relation” (and indeed even that word itself) reappears in Coleridge’s definition of poetic genius elsewhere in the notebooks (p. 233).

For other references to the dell as a symbol, see “Pantisocracy” (CPW I, 68-69) and “To a Young Ass” (CPW I, 74-76, esp. line 27). I discuss the general function of this symbol in Coleridge’s poetry and in his life in chap. 2 of my dissertation, “A Linguistic Approach to the Style of the English Early Romantic Poets,” Diss. University of Massachusetts 1977.

27. Jonathan Culler discusses at some length in chap. 3 of his Structuralist Poetics this problem with Jakobsonian analysis, the nagging feeling one has that “with a little inventiveness, symmetries of all kinds can be discovered” in any work (p. 58). He subsequently defends stylists’ methods from their more violent detractors, however, along lines similar to those developed in the rest of this paragraph.

28. For another paper that exploits broad structural congruencies of this kind, see S. Jay Keyser, “Wallace Stevens: Form and Meaning in Four Poems,” College English 37 (1976), 63-101.

29. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 381.

30. Is it too fanciful to see again here the same pun on round and around that we noted before in our discussion of “Reflections . . .”?

31. “A Linguistic Approach,” pp. 18-19 and 55-71.

32. One of many fascinating footnotes in CPW offers admittedly circumstantial evidence that an earlier version of this line may in fact have read not “honey-dew” but “fields of dew” (CPW I, 298: fn. 2). Coleridge’s subsequent revision, if this was indeed the case, permitted him, as we shall shortly see, to create a syntactic pattern which would have been impossible with dew as modifier rather than as head of its construction.

33. The term “prominent” as it appears here and in the discussions that follow represents a useful shorthand means for taking into account a number of complex and inherently relativistic judgments that readers make about different aspects of a literary text. Chap. 2 of Leech and Short’s study of prose style includes an excellent discussion of this word and of allied terms such as “foregrounding,” “frequency,” and “deviance.”

34. My reference to Verb Final here is occasioned by the fact that, for some reason that I do not fully understand, I cannot read the fourth clause of this passage as a topicalized sentence with the first preverbal NP as its object. Verb Final must therefore be invoked to give the surface Subject-Object-Verb order that I instinctively assign it.

35. Cureton, “The Aesthetic Use of Syntax,” pp. 147 ff.

36. Quotations from The Ruined Cottage use the text printed in Jonathan Wordsworth’s The Music of Humanity (New York and Evanston, Ill.: Harper & Row, 1969), hereafter TMH; line numbers alone will be used to identify the passages quoted, all of which come from Part I of the poem.

37. As defined in Ross, Constraints, example 5.46.

38. Unable to keep from meddling with his own best work, Wordsworth destroyed many of the beauties of the opening lines of this poem when revising them for inclusion in Book I of The Excursion [see Jonathan Wordsworth’s comments in TMH; and Timothy R. Austin, “Stylistic Evolution in Wordsworth’s Poetry: Evidence from Emendations,” Language and Style 12 (1979), 176–187]. This was certainly true of the “dappled syntax” of the passage discussed here. In the 1814 text, Wordsworth wrote mundanely of “[a] surface dappled o’er with shadows flung/From brooding clouds” (lines 5-6). The availability of this clearly inferior textual variant for comparison renders particularly vivid, I think, the role that syntax can play in establishing coherence for a passage as a whole.

4. The Task of Interpretation

1. Smith, p. 160.

2. Fish, p. 78.

3. Irene Fairley, “Experimental Approaches to Language in Literature: Reader Responses to Poems,” Style 13:4 (1979), 335.

4. Culler, p. 118.

5. See Freeman, “Literature as Property”; Leech and Short, p. 13; and Muffy E. A. Siegel, “The Original Crime’: John Berryman’s Iconic Grammar,” Poetics Today 2:1a (1980), p. 170.

6. Smith, p. 170.

7. Fish, p. 82.

8. Roger Fowler, “Language and the Reader: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73,” in Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics, ed. Roger Fowler (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 120, 122 (my emphasis). Compare with this the almost precisely parallel statement of intent in Leech and Short, pp. 2-5.

9. E. L. Epstein, “The Self-Reflexive Artefact: The Function of Mimesis in an Approach to a Theory of Value for Literature,” in Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics, ed. Roger Fowler (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 41.

10. Ibid., p. 40; my emphasis.

11. Ibid., p. 75. I dispute the specifically evaluative application of Epstein’s discoveries in chap. 5 of this study.

12. Fish, p. 76.

13. Since Fish also, of course, attributes to transformational grammarians beliefs in the absolute truth of their grammatical model that I cannot myself find in my reading of those authors, this part of his attack on stylistics was perhaps predictable.

14. Hirsch, p. 170; see also Armstrong, p. 342.

15. Fowler, Style and Structure, p. 8.

16. Freeman, “The Strategy of Fusion,” p. 39.

17. Ibid., p. 20.

18. It is interesting in this light that Smith stages a brief but intense attack on historical criticism in terms that very much resemble those already cited from her critique of stylistics: “this sort of interpretation is absurd . . . because the invocation of particulars of this kind . . . have no greater claim to constituting the ‘meaning’ of the poem than an interpretation that infers from it” a meaning “quite independent” of its historical origins (p. 35; emphases my own). I could not agree more that critical insight represents the only “greater claim” to legitimacy for any statement about a text.

19. Smith, pp. 170-171.

20. “Experimental Approaches,” p. 335.

21. Smith, p. 170; my emphasis.

22. “There is a cyclic motion whereby linguistic observation stimulates or modifies literary insight, and whereby literary insight in its turn stimulates further linguistic observation. This motion is something like the cycle of theory formulation and theory testing which underlies scientific method” (Leech and Short, p. 13, who also cite Leo Spitzer in the same vein). Compare Armstrong, pp. 341-343; and Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), chap. VII.

23. “Constraints,” pp. 324-330.

24. See Ross, Constraints, example 4.20; and George M. Horn, “The Noun Phrase Constraint,” Diss. University of Massachusetts 1974.

25. A. Clutton-Brock, Shelley: The Man and the Poet (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), p. 144.

26. Leech and Short, p. 42.

27. As I have already stressed (perhaps almost too insistently), this correspondence is entirely local and temporary. I find it wholly refreshing, therefore, that George Dillon, discussing confusing cases of apposition in the works of Wallace Stevens and William Faulkner, should see in those constructions—“sentences that are ill-formed any way you parse them”—not a reflection of human imperfections but an attempt by those particular authors “to achieve the romantic . . . apprehension of a wholeness beyond all distinctions” (Language Processing, p. 113).

28. Smith, pp. 163-164.

29. Great care must be exercised, however, in reading such material. The word “iconic” has frequently been used in ways very different from that intended here. In the title of Freeman’s “Iconic Syntax in Poetry: A Note on Blake’s ‘Ah! Sun-Flower’ ” [in U/Mass Occasional Papers in Linguistics II, ed. Justine T. Stillings (Amherst: Graduate Linguistic Student Association, University of Massachusetts, 1976), pp. 51-57], “iconic” is employed to characterize a group of stylistic effects that I would want instead to term mimetic. By the same token, not all of Cureton’s “iconic” effects as listed in “The Aesthetic Use of Syntax” would in fact be so classified under my own guidelines. It will assuredly take time for usage of these technical terms to achieve any real stability—time whose passing this chapter is designed to hasten.

30. My text for the early draft of this poem is taken from Griggs’ Collected Letters, Vol. I, pp. 334-336. A letter draft to Lloyd, cited in CPW I, 178 (fn.), does not appear in Griggs’ collection. Though that version represents still a third variant over the Southey letter and the published text, the alternate readings it introduces do not in any way affect the point I make here about syntactic iconicity.

31. Not, of course, that I wish to denigrate critical claims that make appeal to readers’ intuitions. I myself described Shelley’s syntactic choices in “Adonais” as “intuitively apt” earlier in this chapter. That does not prevent me from enjoying those rare cases where more tangible evidence is available to support my contentions.

32. Leech and Short note a similar prose example from Lyly’s Euphues: “the repetition in parallel of examples from different spheres of experience . . . enforces the generality of a didactic principle which is otherwise seen to be particular” (p. 17).

33. Here and in the pages that follow, I elaborate on ideas first advanced in studies such as Jakobson; Kiparsky; and Levin, Linguistic Structures in Poetry. My discussion constitutes, in fact, a series of steps towards a yet more sophisticated sense of how precisely “the repetition of ‘linguistic sames’ ” pinpointed by those theorists as central to poetic syntax “can come to have meaning” in complex and elaborate poetic contexts (Siegel, p. 166).

34. Dillon, “Inversions and Deletions,” passim.

35. See Culler, p. 119.

36. That readers consider such a possibility is also argued by Leech and Short, pp. 142-143.

37. Mark van Doren, John Dryden: A Study of his Poetry (New York: Henry Holt, 1946), p. 69.

38. George Williamson, “The Rhetorical Pattern of Neo-Classical Wit,” Modern Philology 33 (1935), 55.

39. John Dryden and the Poetry of Statement, p. 46.

40. Williamson, p. 81.

41. Hamilton, p. 89.

42. Paul Ramsey, The Art of John Dryden (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969), p. 72.

43. Hamilton, chap. 2; Ramsey, chap. 6.

5. Conclusions Theoretical and Pedagogical

1. As I have noted elsewhere, Dillon’s Language Processing represents the state of the art in the field of language processing theory that parallels stylistics as I define it.

2. W. Daniel Wilson, “Readers in Texts,” PMLA 96 (1981), 848, 856. I refer the reader to this article for a most informative discussion of much of the material alluded to here. Additional commentary may be found in Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

3. Wilson, p. 856.

4. Ibid.

5. It might seem folly to introduce here yet another construct for fellow theorists to attack, rename, dissect, or befriend. My discussion throughout the preceding pages has, however, created that construct already by presupposing it. To evade the tasks of defining it clearly and explaining the role it plays within my stylistic theory would merely invite misunderstanding and misrepresentation.

6. It also parallels Jonathan Culler’s reliance on the notion of an “ideal reader” in his development of a theory of literary competence (Culler, p. 124).

7. Armstrong, p. 343.

8. Ibid., p. 347.

9. This idea was first suggested to me, in fact, by a member of the audience at a session of the 1979 Summer Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Salzburg, Austria.

10. My phrasing as I spelt out my conclusions in this paragraph—“A would be compatible with B,” “C does not absolutely conflict with D”—will be familiar enough to linguists. In my theory of syntactic stylistics, as in linguistic theory itself, the primacy of the internal consistency of the theory remains absolute. I am delighted, that is, to find that certain classroom data seem consistent with my theoretical hypothesis in one particular case. Even were closer examination to prove those data worthless, however, I would not renounce the technical analysis with which they apparently correlate. As Jonathan Culler notes: “[C]laims about literary [and stylistic] competence are not to be verified by surveys of readers’ reactions to poems but by readers’ assent to the . . . efficacy of [the resulting] explanatory hypotheses” (Culler, pp. 125-126).

11. “Stylistic Evolution,” pp. 180-187.