The Language of Poetry

FAIN: FA-11798-77

Harris A. Friedberg
Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT 06459-3208)

A theoretical study of poetics investigating the relationship between the linguistic preconditions of poetic form (meter, rhyme, etc.) and the special nature of poetic language. Study will argue that the constraints imposed upon the grammar and phonology of the poets' natural language by his poetic form radically alters the basic priority of deep structure to surface structure in ordinary language. Book will consist of four essays on this theory.