Anthony L. Johnson, The Poetry of Suggestion

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
The Poetry of Suggestion: W.B. Yeats and Edward Thomas

Author(s): Anthony L. Johnson
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1987), pp. 85-104
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773003
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THE POETRY OF SUGGESTION
W.B. Yeats and Edward Thomas
ANTHONY L. JOHNSON
English, Pisa
THE POETRY OF STATEMENT AND THE POETRY

OF SUGGESTION
In investigating the suggestiveness of the signifier in the context of

twentieth-century poetry, I have chosen two poets, Yeats and Ed-
ward Thomas, whose work may be rewardingly compared and con-
trasted. The poetry of both bears some of the distinctive hallmarks
of late Romanticism; in particular, it displays a rich spectrum of
resolutions of a dialectic in which a poetic Self defines itself through
contact with a resistant Other. But the precise forms taken by that
dialectic in the poetry of Yeats and Edward Thomas are strikingly
different.
In talking of the suggestiveness of the signifier I mean the degree
to which the signifier contributes to total poetic effect. It is of the
nature of the signifier to be perceptible to the senses but intellectual-
ly elusive, whereas it is of the nature of the signified to be intellec-
tually perceptible but elusive to the senses. [It follows that a large
measure of intrinsic affinity relates the signifier to its suggestiveness,
while a large measure of intrinsic affinity relates the signified to its
capacity to assert, recount or narrate. So, in the work of any poet,
and especially in the work of any Romantic poet, we can try to assess
the relative importance - diachronically and synchronically - of a
poetic of statement and a poetic of suggestion, as qualitatively dif-
ferentiated components contributing to an overall poetic.]
A poetic of statement derives from the signified, whose messages
will tend to be readily accessible to consciousness, whereas a poetic
of suggestion derives from the signifier, whose messages will tend to
operate on a pre-conscious plane but to penetrate the psyche all the
more deeply because of the signifier's resistance to analytic formula-
tion.
[It could, in fact, be argued that the nature of human cognition

through verbal channels has embedded within it a polarization be-
Poetics Today, Vol. 8:1 (1987) 85-104
86 ANTHONY L. JOHNSON
tween two types of awareness of just the kind Yeats saw as regulating
the human predicament. Less than three months before his death,
Yeats wrote: "To me all things are made of the conflict of two states
of consciousness, beings or persons which die each other's life, live
each other's death. [. . .] Two cones (or whirls), the apex of each in
the other's base" (1954:914). What is, Lacanianly, most immediate
- the signifier and its suggestions - is most resistant and elusive to
logical understanding, whereas what has to be inferred from sensori-
ally perceptible forms of sound or print - the signified, with its
statements and its diegesis - is most accessible to logical understand-
ing. Thus what is nearest to the senses is cognitively remotest and
what is cognitively accessible is farthest from the senses.]
THE POETICS OF W.B. YEATS AND OF EDWARD THOMAS

On my reading, both Yeats and Edward Thomas developed poetics
that are, Romantically, oriented away from society, crowd mentali-
ties and factuality, toward a discovery of the self but the forms their
poetics took followed divergent - in some respects almost opposite
- paths. As Yeats's poetry developed, signifier and signified tended
to enrich each other in a dialectic of plenty and presence, whereas in
Thomas the thrusts of signifier and signified tend to keep up a para-
doxically conflicting relationship. In Thomas the central concern of
the signified is to prefigure - in a wide variety of forms -- a sense-
bearing sign (a pseudo-referent) which, by his poems' own "defini-
tion," excludes any real or repeatable context or any comparison
with other signs. It appears as a sign anagogically elevated above nor-
mal communication. Deprived of fully communicable features (as
presented by the signifieds), it stands as an unknowable "metasign":
only such a sign can, in Thomas's "transcendental" poetics, redeem
the primordial "loss of sense" on which its world-view hinges. Thus,
Thomas's signifieds tend to deny, while his signifiers implicitly assert,
the validity of empirical communication, whereas in Yeats's poetic of
communicativeness, signifier and signified collaborate to provide a
stylish "excess of sense" with respect to each other.
YEATS'S EARLY POETIC AND HIS MATURE POETIC

I must now add a diachronic specification. My comparison between
Yeats and Thomas has simplified the issue by comparing Edward
Thomas's poetic with that of the mature Yeats rather than with that
of the younger Yeats, whose poetry is less sharply differentiated
from that of Thomas.
In The Wanderings of Oisin, Yeats wrote as follows (1957:11):
132 Oisin. We galloped over the glossy sea:
133 I know not if days passed or hours,
134 And Niamh sang continually
135 Danaan songs, and their dewy showers
THE POETRY OF SUGGESTION: YEATS AND THOMAS 87
136 Of pensive laughter, unhuman sound,

137 Lulled weariness, and softly round
138 My human sorrow her white arms wound.
This could be called tone poetry or mood poetry. In the "possible

world" of the poem, which shuns true contexture, the principle of
desire and the reality principle do not come into a productively dia-
lectical relationship. They are blurred together in an area of con-
sciousness intermediate between the two. The qualitative conflict be-
tween them is dissolved and consciousness is relegated to a uterine
state of unknowing where time itself dissolves: "I know not if days
passed or hours," Yeats wrote, while in lines 137-138 human emo-
tions are placed on the same plane as anatomical details: "[she] soft-
ly round / My human sorrow her white arms wound." Here the sug-
gestiveness of the signifier works rhythmically and lexically to create
a mood of yearning for consolation to compensate for a vaguely de-
fined, self-indulgent nucleus of loss (seen here in "weariness" and
"human sorrow").
After writing In the Seven Woods, published in 1904, and The
Shadowy Waters, first published in 1900 and printed in a different
version in 1906, Yeats increasingly came to pursue a strategy point-
ing in the opposite direction - toward a polarization or accentuation
of the conflict between the desire principle and the reality principle.
The two principles came to work like Yeats's intersecting cones,
needing the struggle with each other to achieve poetic definition in
the text. Besides this, a sense of time is no longer obliterated from
consciousness but is made its ground or foundation. To compress a
global assessment into the smallest compass, we might say that the
mature Yeats makes conceptual clarity and/or a clear narrative line
(conveyed through a sequence of situations) function as his "poetic
conscious" or intellectual consciousness and the suggestiveness of the
signifier as his poetic preconscious or sensual consciousness (i.e., a
consciousness of perceptible forms that eludes intellectual analysis).
Or we could say that consciousness of the type pertaining to the left
hemisphere of the brain is placed in a dialectically cooperative rela-
tionship with that pertaining to the right hemisphere of the brain, so
that each of the two forms of consciousness - that of statement or
diegesis and that of suggestion - is heightened by the simultaneous
presence of the other.
In this connection we may appreciate a remark made by Yeats in
a letter to Olivia Shakespear (Dublin, April 22, 1926) praising A.N.
Whitehead. Yeats wrote: "His [Whitehead's] packed logic, his way of
saying just enough and no more, his difficult scornful lucidity seem
to me the intellectual equivalent of my own imaginative richness of
suggestion - certainly I am nothing if I have not this [...]. He is the
opposite of Bertrand Russell who fills me with fury, by his plebeian
loquacity" (1954:714). Here, in defining the quality in Whitehead

which delights him, Yeats actually, I think, defines the two poles or
ideals which we find cultivated and in operation in the best of his
mature poetry - "packed logic" and "scornful lucidity" on one hand
and "imaginative richness of suggestion" on the other. In my view,
Yeats was able to get these two poles, which are so radically different
in nature (making up an opposition rooted in the interrelatedly binary
nature of the human brain) to converge toward poetic intensity by
heightening the nature of each. This meant diametrically reversing
the policy followed in The Wanderings of Oisin, where the nature of
each type of consciousness is diluted to produce a twilight world
which actually precludes both intuitive suggestion and intellectual
lucidity.
Simplifying, then, I see Yeats's early poetic (that preceding The
Green Helmet and Other Poems and Responsibilities) as being pre-
valently time-excluding, loss-oriented and death-seeking and as con-
veying an elegiac-consolatory tone, whereas I see his later poetic as
being prevalently dialectical, time-absorbing, joy-oriented and life-
seeking and as conveying a tone of what could be called "bitter joy."
The relationship between the two strands of consciousness activated
by such a poetic is a complex one. It requires his readers to achieve
in their awareness a synthesis of coniunctio oppositorum of logic
and intuitive response - of lucidity and suggestion.
When Maurice Wollman asked Yeats for an interpretation of "The
Death of the Hare" (1957:453), Yeats protested against any one-
sided restriction of poetic sense to the logical sphere. He wrote: "If a
poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility" (1954:
840). Similarly, in talking about the poem "Colonel Martin" (1957:
594-597), Yeats says: "It has a curious pathos which I cannot de-
fine. I have known from the start what I wanted to do, and yet the
idea seemed to lie below the threshold of consciousness - and still
lies" [i.e., after the poem has been written and read] (1954:897).
The implication to be drawn from these two remarks is, I think, that
"the idea" of a poem constructed according to such a poetic does
not ultimately lie either in its conceptual logic of the signified (or in
the co-pragmatic logic of narrative development [cf. Johnson 1984:
209-210]) or, even, in the intuitive suggestion of the signifier but in
the peculiar day-night simultaneity of opposites linking them in their
"quarrel" with each other. By this I mean, of course, an opposition
between types of consciousness, not between the directions in which
they work, which may be convergent or divergent. In any case,
Yeats's reply to Wollman shows his reluctance even to attempt a
"translation" of a poem's suggestibility into conceptual terms - the
innuendo being that to do so would be to "lobotomize" or make
valueless, a complex whole, resulting from the interpenetration of
two modes of thought.
THE POETIC OF THE MATURE YEATS
At one pole of Yeats's mature poetic there is poetry of statement

and argument, born of the desire to give historical and social ideas
full expression. (Yeats's "world-project" achieved theoretical status
in A Vision.) At the other pole there are all the devices of sound,
rhythm, intonation and syntax, which add up to a "rhetoric of sug-
gestion." In the middle there is Yeats's expert use of symbols. They
are found in particularly concentrated form in the three sequences A
Man Young and Old (1957:451-459), Words for Music Perhaps
(507-531) and A Woman Young and Old (531-540). Such symbols
have a conceptual core (open to referentiality), which allows what
the poems say to be read as elemental "stories" but also an unde-
limited aura of suggested sense which can draw deeply on a reader's
intuitive response. This allows Yeats to encircle his signifieds with a
supplementary source of suggestiveness - that of symbolic resonance
bridging the conscious and preconscious levels.
First, I will consider a simple example of a phonic enactment of
a narrative situation in the poem "In Memory of Major Robert
Gregory" (1957:322-328), in the seventh stanza:
49 For all things the delighted eye now sees

50 Were loved by him: [...]
51 [...]
52 Their tower set on the stream's edge;
53 The ford where drinking cattle make a stir
54 Nightly, and startled by that sound
55 The water-hen must change her ground;
56 [...]
Here the sound-texture of lines 52-53 prepares for the "perfor-

mance" of a startling sound in line 54. The semantically full lexical
items in lines 52-53 are dominated by [s,t,r,l,d]; we find [t,r] in
"tower" (adopting Yeats's Anglo-Irish pronunciation), [s,t] in "set,"
[str] in "streams," [rd] in "ford," [dr] in "drinking," [tl] in "cat-
tle" and [st,r]in "stir." After which, the reader's ear or "inner ear"
may be "startled" by the trochaic reversal of an expected iamb in
"Nightly," which is thrown into relief by the long pause preceding it
and the shorter pause following it, as also, in terms of timbre, by the
plosive + liquid shock of [tl] in that word. Then, in mid-line, the
reader discovers a kind of conflation of the previous dominant con-
sonants in "startled ['sta:rtld] ." Phonically, the [tl] of "startled" re-
peats or echoes the same combination of consonants just heard in
"nightly ['naitli] " - a combination which phonosymbolizes the
sound of cattle drinking, while the word's consonant texture spells
out sounds found a total of 16 times in "tower, set, streams, ford,
drinking, cattle, stir."
A quick succession of phonosymbolic effects can be found in
"The Fascination of What's Difficult" (1957:260), whose second

sentence is:
4 [.. .] There's something ails our colt

5 That must, as if it had not holy blood
6 Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
7 Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
8 As though it dragged road-metal. [...]
Here the "colt" is the poetic I's Pegasus of instinctively joyful imagi-
native energy. Lines 5 and 6 show perfect metric regularity and a lilt-
ing, unimpeded rhythm which reaches its peak in the second half of
line 6: "leaped from cloud to cloud." After this there is the brusque
shock of trochaic "Shiver ['fivar] ," followed by a phonetic "run-up"
of metrically and semantically weak syllables in "under the" (itself
incorporating the irregular trochee of "under"), after which we
encounter four semantically and metrically stressed syllables featur-
ing phonosymbolic traits in the five monosyllables of "lash, strain,
sweat and jolt." The sense of the line's overriding paradigm of
"expenditure of effort under shock" is heightened phonically and
rhythmically by the quick "whiplash" to be heard in "lash [lae] ,"
the long, diphthong-centered syllable comprising five sounds of
"strain [stren] ," the clipped, voiceless urgency of "sweat [swet] ,"
and the semantic confirmation of the signifier's violation of metric
regularity in the first four feet to be found in "jolt [d3ault] ," which
reminds the reader that the line's own rhythm has been jolted from
expectation; this correspondence between sound and sense is under-
scored by the complex tongue movement with lip-rounding to be
performed in pronouncing "jolt." The end-of-line group "sweat and
jolt" manages to right the line's metre at the last moment, so sym-
bolizing the colt's resistance to the series of shocks imposed on it.
Perhaps the most striking phonosymbolic effect in the poem, how-
ever, is achieved by "As though it dragged road-metal," which marks
the end of the sentence and is followed by a prominent mid-line
pause, with a swerve in the semantic movement. Here the tense, stac-
cato rhythm resulting from the succession of phonetic shocks ranging
from the immediacy of "Shiver" and the onomatopoeic rendering of
the sound of a whip in "lash" to the buccal skidding of "jolt" comes
to be suddenly braked to a standstill by the sequence "dragged
road-metal." The presence of three heavily voiced consonants in
"dragged," which themselves lengthen the pronunciation of [ae] is
followed by the [au] diphthong in "road"; this is a stressed syllable
where an unstressed one was expected and it almost chiasmically un-
winds the initial [dr] of "dragged" in its consonant sequence [r,d].
After this there is the third successive stress, even if a lighter one, in
the first syllable of "metal." On the rhythmic plane this powerfully
suggests a slowing down to a complete halt appropriate to the seman-
tic level. We might say it takes the semantic level to a performative

climax. Directly after the three stressed (but increasingly more light-
ly stressed) syllables of "dragged road met-" and the unstressed
"-al[l] " of the second syllable of "metal," the total mid-line halt in
rhythm and semantic flow supervenes.
Another interesting phonic and rhythmic "performance" of a con-
cept is seen in "Adam's Curse" (1957:206; published 1902), a poem
that inaugurates some of the techniques of Yeats's maturity:
4 I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe;
5 Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
6 Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
[...]'.
What is striking here is the phonic and rhythmic rapidity of pro-

nunciation of many monosyllabic words, first in "Yet if it does not
seem" and then the clipped polysyllabic neatness of "stitching and
unstitching," whose stressed syllables are identical and therefore con-
stitute a rhyme within the line; thus the sense of an act being done
and undone with agility and neatness is found mirrored in the phonic
texture. Part of this effect is due to the fact that the syllable [stlt ]
contains the shortest vowel in stressed position in the English vowel
system and is surrounded by voiceless consonants whose own pro-
nunciation is extremely rapid: [s,t,tf ].
A still more precise sense of phonetic correspondence, chiasmic in
this case, is found in "The Living Beauty" (1957:333-334):
8 [.. .] O heart, we are old;
9 The living beauty is for younger men:
10 We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.
Here we find a chiasmic reshuffling of the sound texture of "beauty

['bju:t] " in "tribute ['trlbju:t] ," which contains all the sounds of
"beauty," while further binding is achieved through the double occur-
rence of [t] (reading [tr] as approximating to [t + r] ). We might say
that the word "tribute" pays its own phonic "tribute" or recognition
to the earlier word by its reworking of it, the only addition being
[r], which is considered by Ivan Fonagy to symbolize a manly -
vehement but majestic - emotional tone (1976:89).
Another example of binding between two elements with chiasmic
reshuffling occurs in "To a Young Beauty" (1957:335-336), whose
last lines read:
16 There is not a fool can call me friend,

17 And I may dine at journey's end
18 With Landor and with Donne.
Here the consonants of "dine" and "end" (the verb and its indirect
object in line 17) are [d,n] and [nd], respectively, and this chiasmic
sequence [d,n,nd] is found again turned inside out like a glove in the
names of the two poets that the poetic "I" hopes to dine with at
journey's end - "Landor" and "Donne," whose sound texture yields
[n,d,d,n].
Such instances offer vivid enactments of the signifier's capacity to
thrust its presence and sensual substantiality into the reader's con-
sciousness through sound selection and combination. It may be
noted that, traditionally, most such cases escape critical attention be-
cause criticism follows logical moduli and has been almost uniquely
interested in "tuning in" to the same "wavelengths of consciousness"
it itself broadcasts on, that is, conceptual ones. The difficulty of
identifying and then accounting for sense-accretions achieved by sen-
sual forms tends to act as a strong deterrent against what I take to be
one of the key tasks of literary criticism.
With a poet such as Yeats, who wrote much, it is easy to choose
poems that bear out a critical thesis and discard others. So I would
now like to look at a poem by the mature Yeats which, of all those
he wrote, might seem to be just about the most unfavorable to my
thesis that his mature work embodies a life-seeking poetic of enact-
ment and presence - "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death" (1957:
328). Its last six lines are:
11 A lonely impulse of delight
12 Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
13 I balanced all, brought all to mind,
14 The years to come seemed waste of breath,
15 A waste of breath the years behind
16 In balance with this life, this death.
Here chiasmic balancing is more intricate. It extends over four lines

(13 to 16) horizontally and vertically (i.e. within and between lines).
"I balanced" in line 13 is set vertically against "In balance" in line 16
and "The years to come" in line 14 is set against "the years behind"
in line 15. Within line 14 "years to come" is given semantic defini-
tion by its position in the word order before the words assessing the
value of those years - "waste of breath." This arrangement stylizes
"waste of breath" as the value to be given to those years' semantic
and syntagmatic "future content" - as if giving a "grade" to the
value of those future years. Conversely, the value given to "the years
behind" - again, "waste of breath" - precedes that syntagma in the
line; so "waste of breath" is perceived (sensually and conceptually)
as the "grade" given to those years' semantic and syntagmatic "past
content. " The different voices of sound and sense are heard in unison.
The word order underwrites and demonstrates the semantic diagram,
putting the future "value" after and the past one behind its respec-
tive matrix.
At a casual or hurried reading it might seem that Yeats offers a
kind of justification or rationale of the airman's decision (to fight in

the war). But, with a deconstructive eye, we can note that the pre-
sent tense of the title, "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death" uses a
verb, "Foresees," that locates that death in the future, whereas line
14 has slipped unobtrusively into the past, even for future years
("The years to come seemed waste of breath"), as if - we might say
- the speaking voice came from a spirit beyond death. The choice of
"seemed" as the poem's last verb insinuates the signifier's innuendo
("seemed" but only seemed) - that the now wise spirit recognizes its
error. Instead of an airman who "foresees" his death, what we hear is
the airman's spirit who is "dreaming back" that death (1937:226-
229) to its causes in past thought, in regret. Absolutely nothing in
the poem sanctions that "seeming," so the global suggestion is that
"the years behind" were not "a waste of breath" and that "The years
to come" would not have been "a waste of breath." What could be
viewed critically as a measure of confirmation of this conclusion is
found when we turn to the more private variant-poem on the same
theme written soon afterward and entitled "Reprisals" (1957:791);
it appears in the Variorum Edition among "Poems not in the Defini-
tive Edition." "Reprisals" shows a closer referential link with Major
Robert Gregory's death and with what followed that death historical-
ly and displays a passionate refutation of the indifference to death
the earlier poem attributes to the airman:
1 Some nineteen German planes, they say,
2 You had brought down before you died.
3 We called it a good death. Today
4 Can ghost or man be satisfied?
[- ..]
10 [.. .] rise from your Italian tomb,
11 Flit to Kiltartan cross and stay
12 Till certain second thoughts have come
13 Upon the cause you served, that we
14 Imagined such a fine affair:
15 Half-drunk or whole-mad soldiery
16 Are murdering your tenants there.
Here the tone approaches that of an outraged harangue addressed

to the ghost of the unnamed airman, who corresponds referentially
to Robert Gregory and leaves no doubt of the poetic rejection of the
airman's thanatos-oriented choice.
A different kind of signifier suggestion is found in Yeats's series of
highly suggestive poems "A Man Young and Old" in The Tower
(1957:451-459). Here Maud Gonne, the object of Yeats's unrequit-
ed love throughout his youth, appears transfigured in the signifier as
"Madge," which can be read as the compression of the name "MAuD
GonnE," with the first two letters of "Maud" followed by its last
letter and then by the first and last letters of "Gonne." Interestingly,
the letters of "Maud" appear in the right order in the three lexical
items in the title of the series: "Man . . . Young . . .Old," that is, in
the first two letters of "MAn," the middle letter of "yoUng" and the
last letter of "olD."
The predominance of the (literally transfigured) Maud among the
figures recalled from the poet's youth is shown structurally when we
find that it acts as the englobing element in the whole series of the
poems. The first two poems are based on Maud, the third on Olivia
Shakespear, the fourth on Iseult Gonne (Maud's daughter), the fifth
on Olivia and the sixth again on Maud. This yields the chiasmic figure
AABCBA. Then the last four poems (excluding the rendering of the
chorus from Oedipus at Colonus) all present a poetic reworking of
Maud plus other figures. In VII the allusions are to Maud and, appar-
ently, George Russell; in VIII to Maud, Russell and Yeats; in IX to
Maud, Olivia and Yeats; and in X to Maud plus two other figures
(called "Peg and Meg").]
The most intriguing graphic and phonic embedding of Maud's
name, however - a name that only appears explicitly once in the
texts given in The Variorum Edition - is that found in the first poem
in the series, "First Love" (1957:451), whose last verse is:
13 She smiled and that transfigured me
14 And left me but a lout,
15 Maundering here, and maundering there,
16 Emptier of thought
17 Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
18 When the moon sails out.
Here we find "Maunder-," a verb that occurs nowhere else in the

Variorum texts, showing the poetic "I" transfigured and bearing
(prominently wedged into its signifier-substance) the name of the
woman the empirical poet had loved so long and so unhappily. A
complex transformation of lexical values occurs. On the one hand,
the unflattering lexical value of "Maunder" casts a critical light on
the textual and referential source of the transformation of the poetic
"I." The poetic "I" is made to "maunder," that is, "to move or act
in a dreamy, vague, aimless way." On the other hand, the full inclu-
sion of the sounds and letters of Maud's name (interrupted only by
"n[n] ") offers indirect recognition of the completeness of the trans-
formation of the poetic "I," as if the poem, rather than attempting
any dissociation from the empirical origin of that change, aimed to
powerfully spotlight it.
[The inscription of Maud's name in the texture of the signifiers
attached to the poetic "I" is found again in a different form in the
fifth poem in the series, "The Empty Cup" (1957:454), where the
younger self of the poetic "I" appears as "A crazy man" who is
"Moon-AccUrseD," a term whose first, fifth, eighth and last letters
spell out "Maud."]
The last textual sample by Yeats I wish to examine is precisely

that symbolic poem "The Death of the Hare" (1957:453) which
Yeats was so adverse to interpreting. The text is:
1 I have pointed out the yelling pack,
2 The hare leap to the wood,
3 And when I pass a compliment
4 Rejoice as lover should
5 At the drooping of an eye,
6 At the mantling of the blood.
7 Then suddenly my heart is wrung
8 By her distracted air
9 And I remember wildness lost
10 And after, swept from there,
11 Am set down standing in the wood
12 At the death of the hare.
and Yeats's elucidation was: "You can say that the poem means that
the lover may, while loving, feel sympathy with his beloved's dread
of captivity. I don't know how else to put it" (1954:840-841).
What springs to mind in comparing the poem itself with Yeats's
comment on it is the symbolic "involvement" of the language of the
first, in contrast with the logical, expository detachment of the lan-
guage of the second. In the text, with the lightest of touches, Yeats
uses words to set up actorial situations (between the "I" and the hare,
the hare and the "yelling pack," the "I" and the "she" who is a
"lover") which the reader must relate to each other. The paradoxical
capacity of such poetry to span logically incompatible scenarios by
superimposing one on another or switching in an unexplained way
between them without breaking syntactic continuities can be ex-
plained by reference to an evocation of emotions that Yeats himself
allows to be both indefinable and precise: "All sounds, all colours, all
forms, either because of their preordained energies or because of long
association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions" (1961:
156-157). The precision of the emotion evoked by the simple, sud-
den mounting of a scene just long enough to permit minimum diege-
sis corresponds to the more conscious, declaratory portion of Yeats's
symbolic technique (pertaining to the poetic of statement), while the
indefinable nature of those emotions and their suggestive plasticity
(applicable to the "hare/pack/spectator-helper" situation and to the
"lover/lover" situation, without discontinuity) corresponds to the
unconscious, suggestive portion of that technique (pertaining to the
poetic of suggestion). Yeats is, here, boldly requiring the reader to
supersede the logical, left-hemisphere contradictoriness of "reading"
the hare in terms of the woman and the woman in terms of the hare;
but the intuitive, right-hemisphere response is made possible by some-
thing fully acceptable to left-hemisphere consciousness - the simple
delineation of minimal narrative situations.
If we now direct interpretation into a prevalently left-hemisphere

stance and accept Yeats's own "interpretation" of his poem, we
could say that in lines 1-2 the poetic "I" acts as liberator of the hare
from the "yelling pack," which is out to track down and kill it (= her);
in lines 3-6 his verbal contact with her appears as a "compliment"
and her physical reactions ("dropping of an eye" and "mantling of
the blood") indicate both a freely instinctive response but also a
physical acknowledgement of a "blood-link" between "I" and "she."
In lines 7-8 there is a kind of "coup de theatre": a strong emotional
link with such a "wild" (free) woman, based on love of - and delight
in - that freedom may suddenly turn the poetic "I" into a subtler
kind of capturer or tracker-down of a woman who must be left free.
This, in lines 9-10, recalls the tragic thought of how "wildness" may
be "lost," with the poetics "I"'s own role implicitly reversed. "Swept
from there" suggests the transition from illumination-in-thought to
physical consciousness of events. In lines 11-12, "Am set down
standing in the wood / At the death of the hare," there is an ana-
phoric circularity in a return to the original scenario. Now the "hare"
has been caught and the poetic "I" is conscious of its/her death. Con-
sciousness is split two ways - the horror of seeing a hare killed by a
yelling pack despite its desperate "leap" to escape but also a discov-
ery of the danger that, in wishing (with loving delight) to lay hold
himself on that "wildness," the poetic "I" may himself bring the
"hare" to its death - an emotional death through attachment.
Compared with many other poems by Yeats ("To a Wealthy
Man. . ." or "Easter 1916," for example), this poem and Yeats's com-
ment show that in this symbolic mode - seen here in its boldest
form - the sequenced unfolding of situations and the unfolding of
suggestions are arranged and interlocked in a challenging way, requir-
ing the reader to make an active, productive response. Even when it
is successfully made, the reader's "emotional response" may remain
almost entirely at a pre-verbal, pre-logical level and Yeats's comments
in his letter to Wollman imply that the richest part of the response
should, in fact, remain intuitive. In the last analysis, the "poetic of
statement" and the "poetic of suggestion" are held in productive ten-
sion against each other but Yeats's final preference (in line with his
siding with "subjectiveness" against "objectiveness" in A Vision) is
for suggestion against statement. We might, in fact, see suggestion as
the subjective facet within Yeats's global poetic and the statement-
of-ideas and/or the stating-of-situations as its objective facet.
If the criteria of Lotman's cultural typology can be applied to the
poetic of the early Yeats, I would say that its implied code of values
identifies the most positive situation in what is paradigmatically pre-
sent but syntagmatically absent - in other words, in decontextualized
essences. In the mature Yeatsian poetic, the combination preferred
is paradigmatic presence together with syntagmatic presence; in other
words, the poetic situations explored, however universalized, are con-

nected with and contextualized in, imaginable historical or existential
situations. As early as 1892, Yeats had written "Thus [.. .] I [...]
read history, and turn all into a kind of theatre" (1954:219) but the
truth is that, as a poet, Yeats achieves an effective interpenetration
between history and poetry at a later date, starting with The Green
Helmet and Other (1910) and, especially, with Responsibilities (1914).
As early as 1888, Yeats himself perceived the life-rejecting (asyn-
tagmatic) nature of his early verse: "I have noticed [...] that it [my
poetry] is almost all a flight into fairyland from the real world, and a
summons to that flight. [.. .] I hope some day to alter that and write
poetry of insight and knowledge" (1954:63).
Forty-six years later, in one of his BBC poetry broadcasts ("My
Own Poetry Again," 29 October 1934), Yeats neatly summed up the
difference between that early kind of poetry and the poetry of his
maturity. He defined "Coole Park and Ballylee" as "typical of most
of my recent poems," "not at all a dream, like my earlier poems, but
a criticism of life" (my italics).
THE POETICS OF EDWARD THOMAS
In the poetry of Edward Thomas, on the other hand, a strikingly

positive value is attached to both paradigmatic and syntagmatic ab-
sence on the plane of the signified. At the same time, a strong under-
current of suggestion is set up by the fact that the denial of language
and of its power to communicate (so forcefully pursued by the sig-
nified) is reversed or undone by the verbal art displayed in the signi-
fier. We even find two interestingly divergent emotional tonalities on
the two planes - a plangent sense of irretrievable loss surrounding a
unique event of transcendental type on the plane of the signified and
a satisfied sense of joyful discovery through the communication of
word and sound on the plane of the signifier. The nucleus or primary
hypothesis to which the signified constantly points is that, for com-
munication to occur at all, it must be direct (that is, averbal and un-
translatable into words), unrepeatable and unpreservable and incap-
able of being transferred to or understood by others, whereas the
central suggestion of the signifier is a reflexive, self-guaranteeing one
- that of its own unlimited or undelimitable power to suggest sense
and, specifically, just that kind of experience of unique communica-
tion which the signified denies to what is verbal.
We may now examine Edward Thomas's poem "The Unknown
Bird" (1981:133):
The Unknown Bird
1 Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard

2 If others sang; but others never sang
3 In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
4 No one saw him: I alone could hear him
5 Though many listened. Was it but four years
6 Ago? or five? He never came again.
7 Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
8 Nor could I ever make another hear.
9 La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off-
10 As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
11 As if the bird or I were in a dream.
12 Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
13 Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
14 He sounded. All the proof is - I told men
15 What I had heard.
16 I never knew a voice,
17 Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
18 The naturalists; but neither had they heard
19 Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
20 I had them clear by heart and have them still.
21 Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
22 As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
23 Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
24 That it was one or other, but if sad
25 'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
26 For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
27 If truly never anything but fair
28 The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
29 This surely I know, that I who listened then,
30 Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
31 A heavy body and a heavy heart,
32 Now straightaway, if I think of it, become
33 Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.
What we find here is the paradoxical presence of a bird that is all

absence - whose characteristics consist entirely or almost entirely of
what does not or cannot belong to the experience of others or to
their range of values. The "Unknown Bird" is painstakingly deprived
both of real contextuality and of any real susceptibility to compari-
son. It corresponds to what should not have existed (according to the
"naturalists") or may not have existed at all (considering that the
poetic "I" could never "make another hear"). Yet it is precisely this
total resistance to comparison and to any possible context which con-
fers uniqueness and a positive emotional charge on the "Unknown
Bird." This positiveness belongs to the experience conferred by the
bird on the poetic "I" and, implicitly, on the poem itself, whose
signifiers could be said to act, through suggestion, as the bird's
"deferred voice."
A unique one-one relationship is set up between the "unknown
bird" and the poetic "I," whose identity is delimited and exhausted
by its virtual or transcendental reception of the bird's song. A strik-
ing "performance" or display of the aparadigmatic, asyntagmatic
nature of the bird is given, first, by its existing only as voice (cf. the
fate of Orpheus in Greek myth) and, second, by the graphic dis-
closure of the bird's song as an anonymous, semantically empty "La-
la-la!" in lines 9 and 22. It is as if this featureless "La-la-la!" had
been chosen on purpose to quash once and for all any thought that
the bird's song could be "spoken" or communicated in any other
way than by suggestion.
Thus the textual presentation of the bird comes to coincide with
an elaborate - but always equivocal - denial of possible contextual
or paradigmatic features, together with the denial that there could
be other message-senders or message-receivers besides the bird and
the poetic "I." Equivocation is found in the uncanny or logic-defying
attribution of contrasting features, as in lines 23-26, where Thomas
writes that it was "Sad more than joyful [.. .], if I must say / That it
was one or other, but if sad / 'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
/ For me to taste it." In an extreme thrust toward teleological or
epistemological exclusion of the definable nature of the bird's com-
munication, even for the poetic "I," Thomas continues, "But I can-
not tell / If truly never anything but fair / The days were when he
sang, as now they seem." Not only, then, is the unique experience an
exclusive one precluded for all others within the poem (on the poem's
"internal axis") but it is dislodged from the domain of being to that
of seeming or suggestion - though, characteristically, this is not what
Thomas actually states or spells out but suggests through rhetorical
techniques of negation, litotes and sheer equivocation whose signi-
fiers circumvent Cartesian distinctness and clarity. (It is as if Thomas's
poetic were so biased towards suggestion and the absence of every-
thing but itself, that the SEEMING contained within the poem's own
domain of signs ends up becoming the only true BEING.)
The enunciated offers a cumulative attribution of value to what is
supremely aparadigmatic and asyntagmatic but, on the plane of
enunciation, this is performed with paradigmatic and syntagmatic co-
herence, sense of illocutionary purpose and satisfaction, so that the
implicit polemic of the signified against the meaninglessness of words
is startlingly reversed in the act of its implementation by the signifier.
The idea that what exists in fact cannot exist as a value and that
what possesses a positive value must be left poised equivocally be-
tween existence and non-existence is provocatively presented in the
poem "The Unknown" (1981:118). This repeats the signifier "Un-
known" found in the previous title, a recurrent signal of the sublime
status of what remains shielded by absence or present only as a
"private (poetic) language":
The Unknown
1 She is most fair,

2 And when they see her pass
3 The poets' ladies
4 Look no more in the glass
5 But after her.
6 On a bleak moor
7 Running under the moon
8 She lures a poet,
9 Once proud or happy, soon
10 Far from his door.
11 Beside a train,
12 Because they saw her go,
13 Or failed to see her,
14 Travellers and watchers know
15 Another pain.
16 The simple lack
17 Of her is more to me
18 Than others' presence,
19 Whether life splendid be
20 Or utter black.
21 I have not seen,

22 I have no news of her;
23 I can tell only
24 She is not here, but there
25 She might have been.
26 She is to be kissed
27 Only perhaps by me;
28 She may be seeking
29 Me and no other; she
30 May not exist
As in the provocative phonic ostentation of "La-la-la!" in "The

Unknown Bird," here too there is an implicit but radical denial of
contextuality and comparability. The poem is most revealing at the
very end, in its truculently blunt "she / May not exist." Similarly,
the absence of "she" is made into a positive value, at least by com-
parison with "others." The comparison is apparent, not real, since
"she" and "others" belong to two different orders of being: "The
simple lack / Of her is more to me / Than others' presence." It be-
comes clear here that a true source of communication in Thomas's
poetic must be poised between presence (as enunciation) and ab-
sence (as enunciated).
Another feature pertinent to a comparison with Yeats is that while
the poetic "I" in the mature Yeats (but not in that of the younger
Yeats) is usually assigned a dominant role on the planes of signifier
and signified, as also on that of sentence structure and grammar (a
typical example is the grammatically and semantically masterful "I"

in the poems "The Tower" and "All Souls' Night"), here it is "She"
- the hypostasis of the Other - who is dominant. "She" appears as
subject six times against three times for "I" and, when "I" does
appear as a subject, in lines 21-23, the verbal form is twice negative
and the third time it is limitative: "I have not seen, / I have no news
of her; / I can only tell / She is not here, but there / She might have
been." Here the climactic last line of the verse finally asserts a possi-
bility attached to her. She is poised between being (for the poetic
"I") and not being (as anything other than a "poetic hypothesis").
The poem's last verse (to parallel the modelling of the unknown
bird as first cause of communication and poetic identity in the other
poem) decisively plots the primacy of the poetic role of "she," even
if only as an existential hypothesis: "She is to be kissed / Only per-
haps by me; / She may be seeking / Me and no other; she /May not
exist." The sense of paradoxical climax arises from the discovery of
the separation of the question of poetic identity and communicative
status from existential identity. The possibility that the communicat-
ing "Other" may not exist syntagmatically and paradigmatically as a
signified may actually be favourable rather than unfavourable to its
power as a transmitter of sense. What is certain is that "She" exists
as a signifier and that, through the suggestiveness of Thomas's text,
that she communicates and is discoverable, on that level.
In "The Unknown" the tendency (in lines 26-29) to deny the
poetic "She" other partners beyond the poetic "I" symmetrically
mirrors the denial, in lines 16-18, that "others" could take her
place. What is found here is a radicalization of the Romantic expres-
sion of individuality through social decontextualization. In Nietzs-
chean terms, Thomas's poetic attempts a transvaluation of all values
through existential decontextualization and through an exclusion of
comparison. Compared with the strategies of the infinite found in
other late Romantics, Thomas goes a step further in instituting a
metaphysic of the Other and the Self based on a "metacommunica-
tion." This leaves room only for a minimal, yet incommensurably
valuable contact - sublimated out of language - between Other and
Self, while the empirical poet sets in motion a recuperation of lan-
guage through the suggestiveness of his signifiers. In other words, the
signifieds make the poet-in-the-poem deny all except hypothetical,
semantically uncodable signifiers, while the empirical poet has left us
textual signifiers which presuppose the possibility of communication
and achieve it against the grain of the poem's teleology. The reader is
left to sort out a conjunction of opposites where enunciated and
enunciation, signified and signifier are institutionally split down the
middle.
The last poem I wish to discuss is "Rain" (1981:84):
Rain
1 Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

2 On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
3 Remembering again that I shall die
4 And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
5 For washing me cleaner than I have been
6 Since I was bor into this solitude.
7 Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
8 But here I pray that none whom once I loved
9 Is dying to-night or lying still awake
10 Solitary, listening to the rain,
11 Either in pain or thus in sympathy
12 Helpless among the living and the dead,
13 Like a cold water among broken reeds,
14 Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
15 Like me who have no love which this wild rain
16 Has not dissolved except the love of death,
17 If love it be for what is perfect and
18 Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
In this poem, there is a single sender or source of messages, "Rain,"

and a single recipient, "me," linked only by "solitude," that is, by a
total absence and exclusion of others. Here the strategy of verbal
negation is almost as conspicuous as in the other two poems exam-
ined and the tendency of Thomas's poetic "I" toward deprivation
and self-deprivation becomes evident in the tone of acceptance in "I
shall die" and in the lyrical tone in "love of death" - a death which
is "perfect and / Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint." The last
three lines, in fact, reveal the thanatos intrinsic to the signifieds in
Thomas's poetic. According to this, it is life which is perfected by
death and life that is included in death - just the opposite of what
we find in the mature Yeats.
On the plane of the signifieds, we may note that the title, "Rain,"
names the active partner in the dyadic, wordless process of communi-
cation presented on the poem's internal axis. After its triadic appear-
ance in line 1, it can be recognized inscribed in the graphic and
phonic signifieds of line 3, "RemembeRing agAIN [ro'membari7
a'gein]," in the phonic texture of line 8, "pRAY that NoNe ['prei
6at n n] " and in the graphic and phonic texture of line 11, "eitheR
in pAIN ['aiarln peln]," after which the series is closed by a final
explicit iteration in "wild rain" at the end of line 15.
Edward Thomas's grounding of his poetic on a desideratum of non-
verbal, signified-less form of communication is neatly formulated in
the poem "I Never Saw that Land Before" (CP 100), where he refers
in lines 14-15 to "the breeze" / That hinted all and nothing spoke"
and adds, in lines 21-22, "I should use, as the trees and birds did, /
A language not to be betrayed." The implication appears to be that
all language, through the conventionality of social usage, destroys the
value of communication. The positive condition for "unbetrayable"

communication turns out to be that it should occur through a lan-
guage of "whispers" (line 25) - of signifier-suggestion - without
words, without audience, without code and without contact, except
the ineffable one-to-one transcendental contact of the type hypothe-
sized in Thomas's most characteristic poems.
CONCLUSIONS
If we can use the terms "poetic of statement or diegesis" on the one

hand and "poetry of suggestion" on the other to refer to the logical-
assertive, left-hemisphere component of thought and to the intuitive-
suggestive, right-hemisphere component of thought, we find that
Yeats and Edward Thomas use the two types of poetry in sharply
divergent ways. In the mature Yeats, there is a polarized heightening
of their differences, so that the reader's task of relating them through
a synthesis of thought pertaining to the two hemispheres of the brain
is exacting but rewarding. The components turn out to be inter-
dependent and interactive within the text, so embodying Yeats's
theoretical model of two interpenetrating cones allowing movement
within them in opposite directions. Here suggestion operates the pre-
conscious of statement or diegesis in a joyful poetic of mastery "ero-
tic" in its relationship to life and words.
In Edward Thomas, the poetic of statement conveys an all-out at-
tack on the enabling conditions of signification, through an extreme
exaltation of hypothetical signs detached from expressible meanings
and definable only by their syntagmatic and paradigmatic absence or
negativity. Conversely, the poetic of suggestion yielded by the signi-
fiers, on the external axis linking the poetry with the reader, seduc-
tively exerts its own power to signify, so reversing the "law" or "the-
sis" of the left-hemisphere poetic. Here suggestion operates as a
resuscitation going forward simultaneously with the attack on the
value of the social use of language. The text's signifieds posit signs
spiritualized out of existence in a poetic within which the poetic
"I" is submissive toward the Other and "thanatic" toward life. We
could say that the left-hemisphere poetic is dedicated to a kind of
hunt to the death of verbal signification, hypostasized as the celebra-
tion of a "bodiless language," while the right-hemisphere poetic as-
sumes the spirit of the body of language and acts to suggest by its
own signifier-presence that language does possess sense, even if its
signifieds work to suggest it does not.
Professor Max Nanny of the University of Zurich has made a very
convincing case for a reading of the early poetry of Ezra Pound as
showing a hyper-development of contexture (i.e., syntagmatic devel-
opment), together with a lack of the equivalence function (of para-
digmatic linkage) akin to the type of aphasia in which patients can-
not perform equivalence-linkage in speech (Ninny 1980; Jakobson
and Halle 1956;Jakobson 1971). Adopting this conclusion, we could

then draw up the following table:
Mature Yeats: Paradigmatic Presence + Syntagmatic Presence
Early Yeats: Paradigmatic Presence + Syntagmatic Absence
Early Pound: Paradigmatic Absence + Syntagmatic Presence
Edward Thomas: Paradigmatic Absence + Syntagmatic Absence
REFERENCES
Fonagy, Ivan, 1976. "Le basi pulsionali della fonazione," Parte I: "I1 carattere pulsionale dei
suoni del linguaggio," 11 piccolo Hans 12, settembre-dicembre, 60-104.
Jakobson, Roman, 1971. Selected Writings II: Words and Language (The Hague: Mouton).
Jakobson, Roman and Morris Halle, 1956. Fundamentals of Language, Part II, pp. 55-82:
"Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances" (The Hague:
Mouton).
Johnson, Anthony L., 1977. "Actantial Modelling of the Love Relationship in W.B. Yeats:
from 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' to 'Leda and the Swan,' " Linguistica e
Letteratura I, 155-179.
1978a "Sign, Structure and Self-Reference in W.B. Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium"' An-
nali della Scuola Normale Superiore, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, Serie III, vol. VIII,
I, 213-247.
1978b "Sound and Sense in W.B. Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan' and 'The Second Com-
ing,' " Annali dell'Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli, Sezione Germanica, XXI,
1-2, 139-158.
1984 "'Broken Images': Discursive Fragmentation and Paradigmatic Integrity in the
Poetry of T.S. Eliot," in: T. Kemeny, L. Guerra and A. Baldry, eds., Letteratura e
Seduzione & Discourse Analysis (Schena, Fasano) 200-214.
1985a William Butler Yeats: 'La Torre,' trans. Ariodante Marianni (Milano: Rizzoli).
ed. 1985b "W.B. Yeats's 'The Magi,"' Analysis: Quaderi di Anglistica 3, 5-22.
Lotman, Jurij M., 1973. "I1 problema del segno e del sistema segnico nella tipologia della
cultura russa prima del XX secolo," in: J.M. Lotman and B.A. Uspenskij, eds., Ricer-
che Semiotiche: Nuove tendenze delle scienze umane nell'URSS (Torino: Einaudi)
40-63.
Nanny, Max, 1980. "Context, Contiguity and Contact in Ezra Pound's Personae," ELH 47,
386-398.
1982 "Ezra Pound and the Menippean Tradition," Paideuma 11, 3, 395-405.
1984 "More Menippus and Calliope: A Reply," Paideuma 13, 2, 263-268.
Thomas, Edward, 1981. The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, ed. R. George Thomas
(Oxford: Oxford UP).
Yeats, William Butler, 1937. A Vision (London: Macmillan).
1954 The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis).
1957 The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan).
1961 Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan).

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Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

The Poetry of Suggestion: W.B. Yeats and Edward Thomas

THE POETRY OF STATEMENT AND THE POETRY

In investigating the suggestiveness of the signifier in the context of

[It could, in fact, be argued that the nature of human cognition

THE POETICS OF W.B. YEATS AND OF EDWARD THOMAS

YEATS'S EARLY POETIC AND HIS MATURE POETIC

136 Of pensive laughter, unhuman sound,

This could be called tone poetry or mood poetry. In the "possible

loquacity" (1954:714). Here, in defining the quality in Whitehead

THE POETIC OF THE MATURE YEATS

At one pole of Yeats's mature poetic there is poetry of statement

49 For all things the delighted eye now sees

Here the sound-texture of lines 52-53 prepares for the "perfor-

"The Fascination of What's Difficult" (1957:260), whose second

4 [.. .] There's something ails our colt

tic level. We might say it takes the semantic level to a performative

What is striking here is the phonic and rhythmic rapidity of pro-

Here we find a chiasmic reshuffling of the sound texture of "beauty

16 There is not a fool can call me friend,

Here chiasmic balancing is more intricate. It extends over four lines

kind of justification or rationale of the airman's decision (to fight in

Here the tone approaches that of an outraged harangue addressed

Here we find "Maunder-," a verb that occurs nowhere else in the

The last textual sample by Yeats I wish to examine is precisely

If we now direct interpretation into a prevalently left-hemisphere

words, the poetic situations explored, however universalized, are con-

THE POETICS OF EDWARD THOMAS

In the poetry of Edward Thomas, on the other hand, a strikingly

The Unknown Bird

1 Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard

What we find here is the paradoxical presence of a bird that is all

1 She is most fair,

21 I have not seen,

As in the provocative phonic ostentation of "La-la-la!" in "The

typical example is the grammatically and semantically masterful "I"

The last poem I wish to discuss is "Rain" (1981:84):

1 Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

In this poem, there is a single sender or source of messages, "Rain,"

value of communication. The positive condition for "unbetrayable"

If we can use the terms "poetic of statement or diegesis" on the one

and Halle 1956;Jakobson 1971). Adopting this conclusion, we could

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