Poetic violence

Following Husserl, Roman Jakobson insisted that linguistic sounds cannot be separated from the meaning of words. In his essay on Russian Formalism in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 8: From Formalism to Poststructuralism (24-5), Peter Steiner explains:

“Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations analyzed in great detail the varietyof functions that linguistic signs serve. In communicative discourse,locutions are indices: they either intimate the speaker’s state of mindor point to objects. But while indexical signs can operate only withinan empirical context (they must signify an actual referent) words arecontext-free. This is so, Husserl argued, because linguistic signs areendowed with an a priori meaning, because they are not mere pointersbut meaning-intending expressions ( Ausdrucken ).”

Jakobson applied this insight to poetic: “An early pioneer of phonology, he conceivedof phonemes (the minimal units of sound in language) as intrinsicallysemantic because their main function is to differentiate wordsof unlike meaning. In literary studies, Jakobson applied this insightmost successfully to prosody. If verse, as he wrote in 1923, ‘is anorganized violence of poetic form over language,’ this violence musthave its limits. It cannot disrupt the meaning-differentiating role ofphonemes because then poetry would lose its verbal nature and turninto a kind of music. Rhythm, therefore, deforms the non-phonemicelements while the phonemic elements provide the organizational basefor the deformation.”