Intending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry - Oxford Academic

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ANNA CHRISTINA RIBEIRO

Intending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry

i. the task of defining poetry

In light of the enormous variety of poetic tradi-

tionswefindaroundtheworldandacrosstheages, any attempt at finding a defining feature of poetry that would encompass all and only poems would seemtobeinvain.WhatcanStabatMater,Beatpo- etry, Shakespeare's sonnets, Goethe'sFaust, and

Japanese haiku possibly have in common? At-

tempts to provide positive accounts, with neces- sary or sufficient reasons for what counts as a poem, often meet with the counterexamples that human creativity is wont to produce. Consider theseexcerptsfromtwotwentieth-centurypoems.

Are there any commonalities between the Geor-

gian poet Galaktion Tabidze's "Without Love" and the Mexican Octavio Paz's "The Poet"?[transliterated:] usiKvarulod mze ar sufevs ts-is kamaraze, sio ar dahqris, T-Ke ar krteba sasixarulod... El hombre es el alimento del hombre. El saber no es dis- tinto del so ˜nar, el so˜nar del hacer. La poes´ıa ha puesto fuego a todos los poemas. Se acabaron las palabras, se acabaronlasim

´agenes.Abolidaladistanciaentreelnom-

bre y la cosa, nombrar es crear, e imaginar, hacer.1 Aside from being literary texts, at first glance the similarities are hard to find. Even line breaks, a feature we typically associate with poetry, are ab- sent in Paz's prose poem. Neither is there a rhymescheme in it as we find in the Georgian example (abca), which also combines the rhymes with spe- cific line lengths. The passage from Paz's poem is filled with metaphors ("Man is the food of man," "to name is to create"), whereas Tabidze's has no metaphors (though there is imagery in it: "the sun does not shine in the heavenly spheres"). In view of such dissimilarities, even those who are most familiar with the art form have shied away from drawing strict boundaries between poetry and other types of verbal art. Thus Robert Pinsky, a former laureate poet, says he "will be content ...to accept a social, cultural definition of poetry: poetry is what a bookstore puts in the section of that name."2

It barely needs remarking that such

a definition is inappropriate on many levels; I will note only that it leads to a regress that, while not infinite, would likely land us back precisely at the doors of people like Pinsky himself, that is, poets, inasmuch as bookstores follow rather than create the categories under which they sort their books.

In a recent article, Robert Pierce examined

six contenders for a defining criterion of poetry: rhythm, imagery, beauty, unity, strangeness or playfulness, and ineffability of meaning.3

None of

these, he argues, does the job of separating po- etry from other literary arts: there is no "essen- tial core of meaning" of the word 'poetry,' nor a "clearly delimited entity that is poetry" according to Pierce. 4

While rhythm, imagery, and so forth

may be typical features found in poems, none of them is necessary or sufficient for a text to count as one. Rather, he says: "What the term 'poetry' refers to is a group of publicly visible things in the social world that we call 'poems.'"5

Hence all we

candoisseewhatthesethingsareandlearntouse the term on the basis of how newly encountered texts resemble them.

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190 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

IwillnotreviewPierce'sargumentsforafamily-

resemblanceapproachtopoetryhere.Iagreewith him that none of the features he considers passes muster as a characteristic all and only poems must have. Nevertheless, even if we fail to find a fea- tureintrinsicto poems that will set them apart fromotherformsofliterature,wemaystillbeable to accomplish our definitional goal on the basis of arelationalfeature. I will rather argue for a historically-grounded poetic intention, one that I believe will provide us with the necessary and suf- ficient conditions for a satisfactory definition of poetry. If my definition is right, it will in addition provide a partial explanation for what is the ubiq- uitous characteristic of all poetries of the world - the use of repetition devices. ii. an intentional-historical formalism

My proposal takes its cue from Jerrold Levin-

son's intentional-historical definition of art. 6 Very briefly,Levinson'sproposalisthatwedefinearton the basis of the intentions of an agent as these re- late to the history of art itself, that is, to preceding artworks.Fortheobjectofacreativeorproffering act to constitute art, its agent must intend the ob- ject of that act to be regarded in the ways that pre- vious artworks were correctly regarded. He may dothiseitherbyintendingtheworktoberegarded in the way or ways that some specifiableworkor set of works have been regarded (whatever those ways of regarding them have been), or by intend- ing the work to be regarded in specifiableways artworks are or were regarded (whatever those artworkswere);forexample,"withcloseattention to form, with openness to emotional suggestion, with awareness of symbolism,"and so forth. 7 In the first case, which Levinson labels'opaque'or 'relational,'the artist's intention relates his work to other, particularartworks; in the second, called 'transparent'or'intrinsic,'the intention involves particular kinds of regard or treatment,"without having in mind or invoking intentionally any par- ticularpastartworks,genres,movements,ortradi- tions." 8

Levinson's intentional-historical definition car-

riesoverfruitfullyfromatheoryofartingeneralto atheoryofpoetryinparticular.Giventhesubstan- tial changes the poetic art has undergone in the past century and a half (particularly in the West- ern tradition), it is primarily by their being inten-tionally connected to preceding poems that some textscountaspoemstoday.WhatIproposetodoin transferringtheintentional-historicaldefinitionof art over to the realm of poetry is to revise the kind of intention involved in poetry-making and to en- rich this intention with concrete features. 9

What I

propose, then, is the following definition:"To be a poemistobeaverbalobjectintendedbyitswriter or discoverer for membership in the poetic tradi- tion or, in other words, in the category'poetry.'" 10

Thefirstdifferencetonoticeisthattheintentionin

the case of poetry moves away from theregardsof art appreciators back to the artworks themselves.

The agent'spoeticintention with respect to her

verbal object is directed at the object, not at the ways that object is to be regarded or treated (even if her overallartisticintention is to be so charac- terized). Nevertheless, the poetic intention must be grounded in the history of poetry (and in that respect it retains the historical spirit of Levinson's definition of art). To count as a poetic intention, then, an agent's intention must somehow relate to that rich and vast tradition. A poet's work must be intentionally connected to preceding poems in order for it to be a poem as well. How is that con- nection to be characterized, especially so as to de- flect the apparent circularity of the definition as offered?

Extending the analogy with the Levinsonian

art intention, we may characterize the poetic in- tention as either opaque/relational or transpar- ent/intrinsic. However, continuing my move away from the regards of art appreciators back to the worksthemselvesandtheirfeatures,Isuggestthat an author may intend her work to be a member of the poetic tradition either by intending that it be "like those other texts,"without necessarily be- ing able to pinpoint exactly in what ways her own work is meant to resemble those texts (relational poeticintention),orbyintendingittohavecertain intrinsic features, features that, as happens to be the case, have been central to the poetic tradition wherein she wishes her work to belong (intrinsic poetic intention). It is important to note that, re- gardless of the opacity or transparency of the in- tention, the poetically determinative features of an author's work need not (indeed, ideally should not) vary accordingly. This will be the case if there is a feature evinced in the history of poetry such thatintendingone'sworktobe"likethoseliterary workscalled'poems'"andintendingone'sworkto havethatfeaturewillamounttothesamething.

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RibeiroIntending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry191 iii. repetition schemes

A closer look at the poems from literary tradi-

tions around the world will reveal that the his- tory of poetry is one of texts whose universal and enduring characteristic is their exhibiting cer- tain types of repetition schemes. Rhyme schemes, stanza forms, meter, alliteration, anaphora, paral- lelism, and the numerous other poetic devices are all patterns of recurrence that began with litera- ture but have remained central to poetry alone. 12

These patterns serve various aesthetic and seman-

tic functions: they create rhythm (meter, rhyme), emphases and connections (rhyme, anaphora, as- sonance), and invite comparisons and contrasts (parallelism, stanzas, alliteration). Since there are manykindsofrepetitiondevices,itwillbeusefulto sort these into categories or levels. I will sort them into two different groups, the first"abstract"and the second"concrete." 13

Abstract types of repe-

tition consist in patterns that can be filled in by any syllable, word, or lexical structure, so long as they satisfy the criteria for that type. Concrete types of repetition involve concrete sounds, from phonemes to entire words and sentences. Repe- tition at the abstract level may be of five kinds. There is repetition organized by foot patterns, so that, for example, a marked syllable recurs af- ter an unmarked syllable (as in the iambic foot, whose marker in English is syllable stress, or ac- cent). Foot structures are combined with repeti- tion at the level of the line, which specifies how many times a foot recurs and thereby specifies line length - in the iambic pentameter, the iamb recurs five times, creating a line of ten syllables (though elision and other poetic techniques allow linelengthtovary). 14

Lines,inturn,recuracertain

number of times and thereby contribute to pro- ducing a stanza type (a ballad quatrain) and/or a poetic form (the haiku). Line structure repetition need not involve meter, however; it may consist, for instance, in the repetition of a phrasal struc- ture, as when each line must consist of a complete clause.

Repetition at the concrete level, involving spe-

cific linguistic sounds rather than higher-level structures, may be of three kinds. It may beword- terminal, as in the repetition of sufficiently similar linguistic sounds at the end of a word and/or of a line at specified intervals that creates rhyme. The Spenserian sonnet, for example, has the rhymeschemeabab bcbc cdcd ee, where three interlock- ing quatrains are followed by a final couplet. 15

There is alsoword-initialrepetition, occurring at

thebeginningsofwords,asintherepetitionofcon- sonant sounds (alliteration) and the repetition of vowel sounds (assonance). Finally, concrete-level repetition may involve the recurrence ofspecific words or phrases. The scheme below summarizes thevariouskindsofrepetitionIhavenotedhere. 16

Abstract Level

1. Foot (iamb, trochee, dactyl, bacchic, and so

forth).

2. Meter (foot×# of recurrences=line length,

as in dactylic hexameter).

3. Line structure repetition (metrical and/or of a

syntactic element, as in parallelism).

4. Stanza (quatrain, tercet, couplet, and so forth).

5. Form (haiku, sonnet, villanelle).

Concrete Level

6. Phonetic:

a. Word-initial (alliteration, assonance). b. Word-terminal (consonance, rhyme).

7. Lexical or phrasal (anaphora, epistrophe, sym-

ploce, epizeuxis, and so forth 17 ). Given these varieties of repetition, I will distin- guishpoemsasformallydenseandformallysparse.

I will call poems formally dense when they make

use of repetition at most or all of the levels speci- fied above. I will call poems formally sparse when they make use of repetition at only some of the levels specified. Consider the following two pas- sages.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

The great thing

is not having a mind. Feelings: 18

ThefirstthreelinesofShakespeare'sthirtiethson-

net are as formally dense as a poem gets. At the abstract level, there is an accentual-syllabic met- rical structure that specifies both how many syl- lables each line has (ten), how often the marked

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192 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

and how end-line repetition is patterned (aba rhyme). At the concrete level, there is the sibilant alliteration on's'three times in the first line, and recurring in the second line once and in the third line twice; alliteration also occurs on'th'in every line (thought, things, thing); there is consonance and assonance in'thought'and'sought'; and the first syllable of'silent'in the first line is echoed by'sigh'in the third. The predominantly sibilant sound of these first three lines is itself reminiscent of the sound a sigh makes, and so the poet makes us sigh with him upon reading the poem out loud. In the first three lines of Louise Gl¨uck's"The

Red Poppy"we immediately notice the conso-

nance on'ing'at the end of each line, though the repetition does not echo as much as a rhyme tra- ditionallydoesbecauseoftheshortandenjambed lines; we read past the rhymes rather than stop at them, and so see here a poet working against tra- dition.Wenoticealsothateachlinehasonlythree words, and so are invited to look for the signifi- cance of that choice - for a thing so great, the line isunusuallyshort - butonemaypresumethat,not having a mind, one will perhaps have less to say!

There are three nouns,'thing,''mind,'and'feel-

ings,'where the two'things'are opposed to one another, although they are mentioned right next tooneanotherinthesameline.Therearealsotwo stressedsyllablesperline,inthefirstinstancemak- ing up a regular bacchic meter (?/ /), but in the second and third lines a weak extra syllable at the end in'ing'and'ings'takes away that regularity.

However,noneofthesethingsrecurinthefollow-

ing lines of the poem - all the remaining lines are longer by at least one word, and the bacchic me- ter is dropped. Gl¨uck's lines are formally sparse in comparison with Shakespeare's; there is corre- spondingly less to work with in relating technique topoeticmeaningandeffect.Thisisnottosaythat

Gl¨uck'spoemislesssatisfyingthanShakespeare's

(I, personally, like it a great deal); my point was to exemplify formal density and sparseness. Gl¨uck writes in a style that is her own and does not con- form to traditional norms. A reader's experience of her poems is enriched by that awareness, which may lead the reader to seek out Gl¨uck's own way of producing meaning in her works. Nevertheless, asIhaveshown,theuseofrepetitionisstillpresent in that work.

Remarkably, we find repetition schemes of the

kinds catalogued in all poetries of the world, an-cient and contemporary. One need not speak the languages in the following excerpts to see that all these poems include abstract patterning (line breaks, syllable-counting) and concrete repeti- tions (rhymes, alliteration, anaphora). There are alsoseveraltypesofparallelism,frominterspersed matching line lengths to matching lexical cate- gories (for example, verbs or nouns grouped by position).

Ud-ri-a ud-s`u-du-ri-a

G

´ıg-ri-a g´ıg-bad-du-ri-a

Mu-ri-a mu-s

`u-du-ri-a (OpeninglinesoftheEpicofGilgamesh,inSumerian. 19 )

Llaxtay mana mama quchayux

Rit'I Antin muyurisqa

Q"apax Illimanin q"awarisqa

Manatax surk'anniyux

Manatax mama quchayux

("Mama qucha,"by Eustaquia Terceros, in Qu´echua. 20 )

Dhamiri imenifuga shingoni.

Nami kama mbuzy nimefungwa

Kwenye mti wa utu. Kamba ni fubi

Na nimekwishachora duara.

Majani niwezajo kufikia yote nimekula.

Ninaona majani mengi mbela yangu

Lakini siwezi kuyakia: kamba, kamba.

("DhamiriYangu,"byEuphraseKezilahabe,inSwahili.)

Aku ini binatang djalang

Dari kunpulannja terbuang

Biar peluru menembus kulitku

Aku tetap meradang meradang menerdjang

("Aku,"byChairilAnwar,inIndonesian.)

There are, as one might expect, variations from

culture to culture, and over time within the same poetic tradition, in terms of what types of repe- tition predominate. Alliteration, for instance, is a significant feature in most poetries of the world, but it is not a marked feature of Arabic poetry.

Thesevariationsaretheresultofmanyfactors,per-

haps the most important of which is the prosodic structure of the language in which they are writ- ten.Clearevidenceofthisconnectionisthechange from alliterative verse to accentual-syllabic verse

in English poetry, a change consequent upon theDownloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/65/2/189/5957647 by guest on 13 August 2023

RibeiroIntending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry193 transition from Old English (Anglo-Saxon) to

Modern English. It is important to note that the

listgivenhereisnotmeanttobeexhaustive.Other types of recurrence patterns have emerged, and othersmaystillemerge.Thekindslisted,however, predominate - a contingent, though not acciden- tal, circumstance (I will return to this in the fol- lowing sections).

The ubiquity of repetition in poetry across mil-

lennia and around the globe is considerable ev- idence for the claim that a concern with repeti- tion is integral to the poetic intention. So, I pro- pose, to intend that my text belong in that tradi- tion is to intend that it be made with a concern for those schemes; this may occur directly (trans- parent or intrinsic intentions), indirectly (opaque or relational intentions), or both (mixed inten- tions). (Again, note that composing with repeti- tion schemes in mind does not mean one ought to be able to expostulate, for example, on what kind of meter or rhyme one has used.) Concern with repetition can be shown byfollowingthe tra- dition(say,composingintraditionalforms),trans- formingthetradition(usingrepetitionbutaltering forms or creating new ones, and so forth), orre- jectingthat tradition (avoiding traditional forms, avoiding certain types of repetition techniques - say, metrical patterns of any sort - or, most rad- ically, avoiding repetition altogether). Alterna- tively, in cases of verbal art created outside and withoutawarenessofanypoetictradition("na¨ıve" poetry), a poem will be a verbal object made with theuseofrepetitionschemes;insuchcasesonlyin- trinsic intentions involving recurrence are needed forapoemtoobtain.Wecannowrevisitthedefini- tion of poetry given earlier, and expand the poetic intention. A poem is either (1) a verbal object relationally or in- trinsically intended to belong in the poetic tradition, by following, transforming, or rejecting the repetition tech- niques that have characterized that tradition (nonna¨ıve poetry-making), or (2) a verbal art object intrinsically intended to involve use of repetition schemes (na¨ıve poetry-making). Naturally, a poetic text, like any text, is intended to be and do other things as well: to be about the plight of urban laborers or move readers to joy; to be composed in colloquial language or show

erudition of vocabulary. But whatever its charac-teristics in these and other regards, whether a text

is formally structured or in free verse, whether its repetition patterns occur at the abstract level of meter or the concrete level of lexical recurrence, a text is poetic insofar as it is intentionally linked to previous poems directly (relational intentions), indirectly (intrinsic intentions) or, more typically, both. Moreover, intentions that are transparent or intrinsic - which will be formal intentions fo- cused on repetition - may also be"na¨ıve,"that is, lack awareness of the poetic tradition (or of the existence of poems as such). This will account for instancessuchasthoseofthepioneerpoetinacul- ture where the art does not yet exist and of which there is no knowledge, and those of the Ur-poets of antiquity (I will return to this in my concluding remarks). Note that even the child's first verses, unless the child has never been exposed to po- etry, should count as at least minimally opaque.

Again, in most cases, poetic intentions will be a

mixture of opaque and transparent ones, since in most cases they will occur within the context of a culture that has a poetic tradition. On the other hand,instancesofpurelyopaqueintentionswhere the author fails to zero in on the properties of the worksthatguidehiscreation(forexample,theau- thorfailstoseethatwhattheyallhaveincommon istheuseofrecurrenceschemes)willnevertheless resultinthecreationofapoem,sincehisintentions are guided by poems and the work is thus inten- tionally linked to them. In other words, relational intentions trump intrinsic ones, and relational in- tentions always involve awareness of a (histori- cally constituted) set as a set, even if that aware- ness does not involve (accurate, comprehensive) knowledge of the properties that make its mem- bers members of that set; nor, naturally, need it involve acquaintance with all of its members.

This also explains the right of iconoclastic po-

ets to claim, for instance, that the next twenty words they utter will be a poem. We should note, first, that their intentions are internal to the po- etic tradition - they could not be revolutionary otherwise - and, second, that they are mixed with intrinsic intentions to reject that tradition in spe- cific ways. Even if the acceptance of such"po- ems"rubs against our pretheoretical intuitions and makes little claim on our appreciation, their rejection would come only at the cost of theoret- ical consistency. Revolutionary poetic intentions

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194 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

and relational varieties of poetic intention, and as such they stake a claim to acceptance, however marginal their position in the poetic set may be.

In the interests of exploring these and other

difficult cases, in the following section I will con- sider (1) whether repetition of the sorts outlined is the prerogative of poetry; relatedly, (2) whether its boundaries are blurred when, in other literary practices, writers make use of repetition devices; (3)whetheraconcernwithrepetitionmustbepart of poetry; and (4) whether some other typical fea- ture of poetry could not (or even should not) have done the job. iv. challenges I have been arguing that the poetic intention cen- trally involves the concern with repetition tech- niques, and I have shown that such techniques mark the development and history of poetry in every culture that has a poetic tradition. We must be careful to note that this does not prevent the use of such techniques by writers of stories, nov- els,andessays,byjournalists,advertisingcopywrit- ers, and, indeed, by all the speakers of a language. Language is the prerogative of all its speakers and they may use it as they will. There are countless examples of typically poetic devices being used in

TVcommercialsandprosefiction,innewsarticles

and philosophical essays. Alliteration, for one, is a constant feature in commercial advertisements and, in English at any rate, more or less regular iambs emerge everywhere, as in the mundane but perfectly regular"I'll go and fetch the keys,"but that does not make us walking Shakespeares. A small sample should suffice to make this salient.

Dunkin'Donuts (brand name; alliteration, troche)

Verizon Broadband: Richer. Deeper. Broader. (internet advertisement; rhyme, parallelism, iamb to trochee)

U.N. Report on Zimbabwe Slams Slum Destruction

(news article; alliteration) 21
A word, a smile, a tender touch, / little things that say so much. / The thousand little thoughtful things / you do each day to please, / the way you rub my shoulders / or give my hand a squeeze...(greeting card; iambic tetrameter followed by trimeter, initial couplet followed by alternate rhyme) 22
But oh, those Polaroid babies / taking chances with ra- bies,/happytotearmetobits - /well,I'mcallingitquits (song; heptameter couplets) 23
AopassarpelaGl´oria,Camiloolhouparaomar,estendeu osolhosparafora,at

´eondea´aguaeoc´eud˜aoumabrac¸o

infinito,eteveassimumasensac¸˜aodofuturo,longo,longo, intermin ´avel.(short story; syntactical parallelism, lexical repetition) 24
Pour moi, je n'ai jamais pr´esum´e que mon esprit fˆut en rien plus parfait que ceux du commun; m

ˆeme j'ai souvent

souhait ´ed'avoirlapens´eeaussiprompte,oul'imagination aussi nette et distincte ou la m

´emoire aussi ample ou aussi

pr ´esente, que quelques autres.(alliteration, parallelism, lexical repetition) 25

The appearance of repetition patterns in non-

poetic language does not efface the important intentional-historical difference between poetry andeverydaylanguage,advertisements,andother forms of writing, literary and otherwise. Consider the various examples above. Although the inten- tion to create a catchy brand name or advertise- ment, a saccharine birthday card, or a literary or philosophical prose piecemayinvolve the in- tention to use repetition devices typical of po- etry, it need not do so. The greeting card"tra- dition,"for instance, is parasitic on several other preexistingpractices,suchasaphorismsandjokes; moreover, some greeting cards are blank. There is nothing unusual in blank, aphoristic, or humor- ous cards where no repetition device is present.

The fact that there is nothing unusual in these

alternatives tells us something important about these and the other practices exemplified in these passages, and about the intentions involved in the creation of these works. In other words, it is not a necessary condition of greetings cards (or advertisements, or novels, or philosophical es- says) that they be made with repetition schemes.

Nevertheless, when they do so, are they a for-

tiori poems? According to the present view, no: the primary intention in such cases - a relational intention - is to create a greeting card (an adver- tisement, a novel, a philosophical essay), not a poem.

Consider a writer who intended to be writing

a novel, but wrote the entire text in iambs. This author,inmyview,indeedwroteanovel.Hisnon- poetic categorial intention overrides the evident

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RibeiroIntending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry195 identify the work as a poem. 26

This, again, relates

to the historical traditions to which different liter- ary forms belong. A concern with repetition is not a feature central to the tradition of the novel (or of the short story, or of the literary essay), and so an intention to write a novel need not be one in which the use of that feature figures prominently.

Moreover, as was the case with the greeting card,

appreciators would not be surprisednotto find iambs in a novel.

Recalling the three ways in which poetic con-

cern with repetition may manifest itself (fol- lowing, transforming, or rejecting a tradition) may be illuminating in this regard. Consider an early twentieth-century English-speaking poet who avoids the type of repetition involved in, say, meter and rhyme. Now compare a contem- porary novelist who does the same. Clearly, these two writers are engaged in very dissimilar artistic projects. We would rightly see the poet as sub- verting an established tradition of metrical lines and rhyming schemes. In the case of the novelist, thereisabsolutelynothingsubversiveinhisavoid- ance of repetition schemes, and readers would not notice the absence of such patterning. That is because repetition devices are not central fea- tures of that category, and so are irrelevant in the construal of intentions to follow, transform, or reject it, being also typically of no concern in appreciation. We may find prose writers"ap- propriating"what are typical poetic devices and perhaps even metrically perverse"iambic novel- ists"(or filmmakers: the entire dialogue in Sally

Potter'sYes(2005) is in iambic pentameter

27
).

As a rule, however, we do not find in prose (or

film) the attention to those devices evinced in ev- ery line of their work: they are occasional. In a poem, by contrast, concern with repetition tech- niques typically is present in every line, and is of- ten down to the phonemes. The poetic intention makes that concern central and constant, not sec- ondaryandoccasional,andappreciatorswouldbe righttoattendtotheirpresenceasmuchastotheir absence.

These differences being granted, how are we to

handle song lyrics such as Aimee Mann's above?

Here, and in most lyrics, a concern with repeti-

tion appears to be central. It will not help to say that in lyrics the types of repetition are generally hackneyedanduninspired,invariablyinvolveend- rhymes, and ones that a listener can often guess in advance (though occasionally a songwriter suchas Mann will come around and conjoin babies and rabies). Not all poetry is innovative and inspired. What we must note is rather that lyrics are written for music - the intention behind them is to write song lyrics, not poems. There is a musical dimen- sionthatnotonlyisalwayspresent,itofteniswhat guidesthesongwritingaswell.Itistruethatsome- timesatextoriginallywrittenasapoemwillbeset tomusic.Still,insuchcaseswhatwehaveisapoem set to music, not a song lyric.

Mustrepetitionbepartofpoetry,nevertheless?

Some poets have taken their rejection of the po-

etic tradition to such extremes that fitting their works into the category of poetry becomes a chal- lenge. This is especially true of the literature of the various avant-garde modernist movements of the early twentieth century, such as futurism, sur- realism, Dada, and concrete poetry. Surrealism and Dada championed automatic writing, thereby challenging the idea of a conscious poetic inten- tion. A yet more irreverent Dada recipe for com- posing a poem was to"cut up a newspaper piece, shake the words in a bag, and reassemble them in the order they are removed." 28

More typically,

"writers"of theobjet trouv´e,or"found poem," left aside the shaking and simply broke the found prose passages into verses, as in the following excerpt from Daniel Langton's"What We Did," whose words are from the January 1967 report of the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of

Cruelty to Animals.

22 cases involving

22 large animals

reported to the office or located by officers

Horses: sick or injured, 5;

stray, 2; overridden, 15. 29
As is generally the case with free verse, found po- etry exploits the natural rhythms of a language; what this often amounts to are lines whose length corresponds to complete phrases or clauses, as seen in Langton's reconstruction. Notice however how Langdon breaks the lines so as to"create" patternsofrecurrence,asin'22'inthebeginningof the first two lines,'office'and'officers'at the end of the third and fourth, and adjectives followed by numbers in the remaining three. The first two lines are each composed of three words, totaling

eight and seven syllables, respectively, while linesDownloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/65/2/189/5957647 by guest on 13 August 2023

196 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

three and four are composed of four words each, with seven and eight syllables, respectively; this is a variation on the ballad stanza. There is, in addi- tion,parallelismin'reported'and'located,'andin 'injured,''stray,'and'overridden.'As is the case with found art objects, in the case of found poems it is the intentions of the finder that establish the text's status as a poem.

Concrete poetry and futurism emphasized the

visual aspect of typography and championed pat- tern poems and poem-pictures, respectively, the latter perhaps a genuine hybrid art form (in"Il pleut,"oneofhiscalligrammes,Apollinaireplaced the lines almost vertically on the page, each letter placedasthetypographicsymbolicequivalentofa raindrop).Futurismalsopromotedonomatopoeia andsound-poems,whichcouldconsistofmade-up words,declaredinadvancetohavenomeaning(so that all that mattered was how they sounded), or sometimes entirely of vowels, as in a couple of po- ems by the Russian futurist Aleksej Kruˇcenyx. 30

Yet no one is likely to outdo Vasilisk Gnedov,

another Russian futurist, whose"Poema Konca" ("Poem of the End") consists"of a blank page performed with a silent gesture of resignation." 31

For all their revolutionary zest, the modernists

have all intended to write or performpoetry, and repetitionremainsafrequentfeatureofmodernist poems. In Dada and Surrealism, for example, the call for automatic writing does not entail that the stream of words will be one where no word is repeated, as is evident in Andr´e Breton's 1922 "Lˆachez tout."

Lˆachez tout.

L

ˆachez Dada.

L

ˆachez votre femme.

L

ˆachez votre maˆıtresse.

L

ˆachez vos esp´erances et vos craintes.

Semez vos enfants au coin d'un bois.

L

ˆachez la proie pour l'ombre.

L

ˆachez au besoin une vie ais´ee,

ce qu'on vous donne pour une situation d'avenir.

Partez sur les routes.

Drop everything.

Drop Dada.

Drop your wife.

Drop your mistress.

Drop your hopes and fears.

Scatter your children in a corner of the woods.Drop the prey for the shadow.

Drop if necessary the easy life,

What is presumed to be a life with a promising future.

Hit the road.

One may, and with good reason, balk at poems

such as those of Gnedov and Kruˇcenyx. In the case of Kruˇcenyx, how can a text with nonsense words count as a poem at all, or even as litera- ture? It seems clearly to flout the"verbal"object criterion stipulated in my definition. Works such as these, admittedly, are at the fringe, but I think theintentional-historicalformalismofferedhereis still capable of accommodating them. Kruˇcenyx's meaningless-word and all-vowel poems may not be in any intelligible language, but I would not say that they are notverbal. The symbols he uses are, after all, linguistic and not, say, geometric or log- ical. They arelettersthat could beuttered, even if they mean nothing in any existing language.

That they can be uttered is a fact of importance

in the construal of Kruˇcenyx's poetic intentions.

His poems are, undoubtedly, subverting a tradi-

tion. But inasmuch as he eschews everything, in- cluding meaning, in his poetry, and holds on only to repeated sounds, we may read his works as an attempt to distill poetry to what he takes to be its essence - patterned linguistic sounds (perhaps this is the closest poetry can get to absolute mu- sic!). In the process, one might argue, Kruˇcenyx also shows us that the types of repetition he re- jects, those involving meaningful sounds, are the ones worth preserving.

Gnedov's"Poema Konca"poses a yet greater

problem for a definition such as mine. Imagine a writer who intended to write a poem by following

Gnedov's piece (an opaque intention, guided by

the work to which it is linked). What properties would she have to follow? A blank page - How is that a poem, and one that can inform the writerly intentions of those guided by it? If a writer is to intendherworktobelongtoatraditionbyintend- ingittobe"likethoseworkscalled'poems'"when the poems guiding the writer's intention have al- ready rejected everything that characterized that tradition, then would not the properties that once centrallycharacterizedthattraditionnolongerin- formherintentions,andlikewisethoseofthewrit- ers who follow her? If that is the case, then repe- tition will play no more than a contingent role in a definition of poetry. 32

Indeed, even the use of

words would seem to be nonessential: an aspirantDownloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/65/2/189/5957647 by guest on 13 August 2023

RibeiroIntending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry197 poet could change the oil in her car, call that ac- tivity"Symphony #4,"and claim it is a poem, one guidedbyGnedov's"PoemoftheEnd." 33

Atleast

two avenues of response are open.

The first is to place"Poema Konca"in another

category, claiming that it is a performanceabout poetry, but not itself a poem, in the way that John

Cage's"4'33""thoughaboutmusic,isnotmusic.

34

This would remove Gnedov's work from the set

of poems and enable the historical link to remain undisturbed. It would, in addition, make the hy- pothetical works above not poems, insofar as they would bear no intentional connection to any po- ems.Thisdoesseemtoresolvetheproblem,butin my view it does so at the cost of arbitrariness and inconsistence with the theory as it stands. If what grounds the definition of poetry is the intention to make one's work a poem, then on what basis do we discard Gnedov's intention (and those of his followers)? True, Gnedov is, we may assume, trying to tell us somethingaboutpoetry, perhaps even about what he takes it to be its essence, but that is not what makes his poem different from other, more traditional poems. Many poets have written about poetry. Gnedov is rejecting a tra- dition, but inserting his work in it in the pro- cess. He did not call it"Painting of the End,"or "Song of the End,"but"Poemof the End": that is, he was aware of the tradition to which he was responding.

The other alternative is to acknowledge that

Gnedov's work is, indeed, a poem, since it is con- nected to poems via Gnedov's relational and in- trinsic poetic intentions, and to note that writers whose poetic intentions are guided by his"Poema

Konca"would be guided by this workas it be-

longs in and is connected tothe history that made it possible: they would consequently be creating poems as well. This enables us to do justice to Gnedov's poetic intentions and to insert it in the tradition wherein it belongs. Poets guided by his work would not be guided by it as if it existed in a vacuum, but as it exists in its historical context; arguably, one could not even recognize Gnedov's work as a poem outside of it. They may therefore choosetofollowGnedovinhisradicalism - which, again, cannot be understood as such outside of its context - or choose to reclaim some or all of the features he himself rejected. The proposal to de- finepoetryonthebasisofanintentional-historical formalism, together with the various ways the po- etic intention can manifest itself, is thus capableof accommodating such extreme cases, along with the traditional ones.

Nevertheless, when we think about poetry we

also rightly think of similes, metaphors, imagery, and the several other characteristics Pierce con- sidered and rejected in the essay mentioned ear- lier in this paper. Why should the poetic inten- tion not be guided by these, also prevalent, fea- tures? Although a concern with tropes may and often does accompany poetic intentions, this con- cern is not, I would argue, properly calledpoetic, but ratherliterary. The reason for this is that al- thoughtropesandotherliterarydevicesmayoccur more frequently in poems, they are also relevant traits of other types of verbal art, and so cannot perform the role I have here accorded to repe- tition. They are relevant in the creation of other types of literature (that is, they will inform liter- ary intentions), and they are also relevant in the appreciation of other types of literature (that is, they will inform the interpretation and the evalu- ation of a literary work). It is equally noteworthy forapoettoavoidmetaphors,ortouseonlyclich´e ones,asitisforanovelisttodoso.Sowhileitistrue that,typically,anauthor'spoeticintentionswillin- volve concern for imagery, symbolism, metaphors and other tropes, and so on (even if it does so by avoiding the use of these rhetorical devices alto- gether), this will not characterize his work insofar asitispoetry;itwillcharacterizethatworkinsofar asitisverbalartingeneral.Concernwithallthose features characterizes literary intentions; concern with repetition devices characterizes poetic inten- tions. Poems can and have been made without im- agery, without metaphors, and so on. As A. E.

Housman has noted:"Simile and metaphor [are]

things inessential to poetry." 35

The same may be

said of the other tropes. So what I have said about poetic intention and repetition cannot likewise be said of those other features commonly found in poetry. v. identification and evaluation

Inasmuchaspoemsmaybewrittenwithor(rarely)

without repetition devices, and with or without similes and metaphors, the question of how we identify poems in practice naturally emerges. This question, it is important to note, is to be distin- guished from the issue of definition. 36

Readers or

listenersmayhypothesizethatatextwasintendedDownloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/65/2/189/5957647 by guest on 13 August 2023

198 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

to be a poem on the basis of textual evidence. This evidencemaycomeintheformofuseofrepetition devices or any other typical poetic features. Per- hapslinebreaksaretheonlyclueareaderneeds,or the only one he finds to justify his categorization.

Perhapstherearestrikingmetaphorsandimagery;

perhaps there are rhymes. Appreciators may hy- pothesizetocategorialpoeticintentionsontheba- sis of many features besides concern with repeti- tion devices and correctly identify poems, but this doesnotmeanthatareaderwillalwayssortthepo- ems from the nonpoems infallibly. Identification can be tricky and we can be mistaken in very rad- ical, novel, or borderline cases. There is room for misidentification, and that reflects the way things are - as in the case of the janitor who mistakenly cleanedawayaninstallationpieceinanartgallery.

This incident is amusing but clear evidence that

what definesxand how we recognize instances of xare two different issues. A poem does not cease to be a poem because we fail to identify it as such.

Perhaps others in the future will be more attuned

toitspoeticproperties - perhapsothersinthepast have been. On the other hand, a poet may fail in various ways and for various reasons; we may ac- cordingly either identify her text as"not a poem," or even not a piece of literary art, or recognize it as a poor instance of one.

Given the central role I have accorded to rep-

etition, one may naturally ask what consequences my definition might have for how we understand our experience of reading or listening to poems andtherelatedquestionofhowweevaluatethem.

For instance, given this view, would a poem with

just one repetition be necessarily aesthetically de- ficient, and a poem with many repetitions neces- sarily aesthetically superior? I think such a con- clusion would be misguided for two reasons. First, consider an analogy with painting. Color is essen- tial to painting, but it is not because it has more or fewercolorsthatwefindapaintingmoreorlessre- warding aesthetically. Examples of paintings that are nothing but monochromatic squares abound, and that so many instances of them exist may be takenasevidence(admittedlynotconclusive)that aestheticrewardsaretobegainedfromthem.The situation is the same with poetry. One repetition (say,analliteration)wellplacedisworthmorethan many repetitions poorly chosen. Bear in mind the different levels at which repetition may occur: po- emswritteninclosedformsaretypicallymoresat- urated with repetition, so they have (at least inprinciple)morelevelsatwhichtopromoteandre- wardaestheticattention.Sothedefinitionoffered, whilenotvaluebased,providesacriterionforeval- uation: a critic may evaluate the quality of a poem on the basis of (among other things) how repeti- tiondeviceswerehandledinit - skillinhandlinga stanzaicform,noveltyincreatingnewwaysofma- nipulating a metrical structure or in creating new ones, and so on. But formal density and skill alone will not make a poem more aesthetically pleasing (or a better poem) than a nonformal poem. This brings me to my second reason why we should not subscribe to that conclusion.

On pain of stating the obvious, repetition is

only oneaesthetic dimension of poetry: a formal dimension. Insofar as it is verbal art, poetry is naturally more than form. Interesting, illuminat- ing metaphors and similes are another source of aesthetic pleasure, as are the choices of words in general and what the poem conveys as a whole, whetheritcouldbecapturedinaproposition,oris insteadageneralfeelingorstateofmindthatcould notbesocaptured.Thedebateoverwhetherwhat a poem conveys or evokes can be paraphrased is immaterial to the present point. So a poem with many instances of those features that inform the poeticintention - repetitionschemes - andfewor no instances of what characterizes literature in general - interesting diction, imagery, symbolism, the use of tropes - is unlikely to have any claims to aesthetic superiority over another composed in the opposite manner. vi. conclusion

An intentional-historical view is a backward-

looking one and as such it naturally raises the question of the very first poems, just as it raised the issue of the very first artworks in general for Levinson. I have argued that na¨ıve poets and first poetswouldbepoetsonlybymeansoftransparent intentionstocreateverbalobjectswheretheuseof repetitionschemesisparamount,inasmuchasone cannot follow, transform, or reject traditions of whichoneisnotaware,orthatdonotyetexist.This moves us in the direction of a pure formalism to characterizeUr-poems.Toputitbrieflyandsome- what simplistically, I suggest we may characterize

Ur-poemsasversifiedlanguagemadetoservevar-

ious purposes: religious rituals, war songs, histo-

ries,andsoon.Gradually,artisticpurposescametoDownloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/65/2/189/5957647 by guest on 13 August 2023

RibeiroIntending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry199 predominate.Itisorthogonaltothisproposalhow suchartisticpurposesarecharacterized - whether in terms of expression, art-regards, the promotion of aesthetic experiences, or something else. While a pure formalism would be philosophically prob- lematic in explaining poetry today, it is a matter of historical fact that it characterized the begin- nings of poetry. We may recall that poetry and music emerged together, and that the early words for poetry in various languages indicate"making" or"artifice"(for example,poiesis, in Greek) or "song"(shi, or word-song, in Chinese;mele, air or melody, in Greek, besides, of course,lyra, one of the instruments that often accompanied perfor- mance and that gave us'lyric').

Such historical facts about the earliest poetic

creations naturally invite the question:"Why rep- etition?"Why should the first poets have zeroed in on repetition devices, and on the repetition de- vices that they did, and not others? Why should this have been the feature that endured, even in the face of great cultural changes such as the one brought about by the invention of the printing press? I think these questions are best answered by looking into our psychology and the way we processlanguage. 37

Pinskyhassuggestedthat"the

technology of poetry, using the human body as its medium, evolved for specific uses: to hold things in memory, both within and beyond the individ- ual life span; to achieve intensity and sensuous appeal; to express feelings and ideas rapidly and memorably." 38

Ithinkthereismuchtotheseideas,

and that the literary pioneers of antiquity did not arrive at the poetic techniques they did by mere chance. The psychology behind how we process sounds and develop our language skills, a psychol- ogy to be explained by the needs of oral cultures, made schematic repetition the inevitable feature of early poetry. So while poetry is defined by an intentional connection to a tradition, Ur-poetry may be defined by a psychological propensity to pattern language in certain ways - ways that are memorable, both in the cognitive sense that they are more easily remembered, and in the evalua- tive sense that they are pleasing. If repetition is also a way of adding levels of information with- out adding words, this would further speak for its cognitive advantages and consequently for its uni- versality and endurance.

I have argued that what makes a text or perfor-

mance a poem is an author's intention to connect hisorherworktopreexistingpoems,andthatsuchan intention will amount to intending to make use of, transform, or reject the repetition techniques that came to mark the history of poetry around the world. Let me draw a final point of analogy with the Levinsonian intentional-historical defi- nition of art. Levinson noted that the concept of art itself has changed, and what counts as art to- day would not have counted as art in, say, the eighteenth century. 39

Criteria of beauty, for in-

stance, have since been discarded. But while the eighteenth-century conception of art cannot ac- commodate some twenty-first century artworks, the twenty-first century concept of art should en- compassallthathascountedasarttothisdayand, ideally, future artworks as well. Levinson defends his concept as having distilled arthood to its bare (relational) essentials in such a way as to fulfill that demand. 40

Likewise, the concept of poetry at

work in the eighteenth century would hardly in- clude much that goes by the name today. Poetry has changed, and our concept of it must reflect thosechanges.Theintentional-historicalformalist conception I have defended here has, I think, the analogous merit of distilling the poetic art to the one feature that has remained constant through- outitshistoryandthatshouldaccommodateallfu- ture poetry as well. The eighteenth-century poet, to write poetry,hadto use meter, but today's poet must only take some stand or other toward metri- cal regularity. Poetry will, in all likelihood, change further in the future. But inasmuch as this is the tradition poets must contend with, their poetic in- tentionsareunavoidablyboundupwiththeartistic concerns of their predecessors. 41

ANNA CHRISTINA RIBEIRO

Department of Philosophy

Texas Tech University

Lubbock, Texas 79409

internet: anna-christina.ribeiro@ttu.edu

1. Tabidze's poem reads"Without love/the sun does

not shine in the heavenly spheres/neither does the forest move, nor does the wind blow/with joy..."In Carlos Freire,

BabeldePoemas:UmaAntologiaMultil

´ıngue(PortoAlegre,

L&PM Editores, 2004); transliteration by Robert Tchaidze, my translation from Freire's own into Portuguese. Paz's reads,"Man is the food of man. Knowledge is no different from dreaming, dreaming from doing. Poetry has set fire to all poems. Words are finished, images are finished. The dis- tance between the name and the thing is abolished; to name

is to create, and to imagine, to be born"; from Octavio Paz,´Aguila o Sol?/Eagle or Sun?trans. Eliot Weinberger (New

York: New Directions Pub. Co., 1976).Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/65/2/189/5957647 by guest on 13 August 2023

200 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

2. Robert Pinsky,The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide

(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998), p. 126.

3. Robert Pierce,"Defining Poetry,"Philosophy and

Literature27 (2003): 151-163.

4. Pierce,"Defining Poetry,"pp. 151, 153.

5. Pierce,"Defining Poetry,"p. 152.

6. Jerrold Levinson defended this view in his"Defin-

ing Art Historically,"The British Journal of Aesthetics19 (1979): 232-250;"Refining Art Historically,"The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism47 (1989): 21-33;"Extending Art Historically,"The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criti- cism51 (1993): 411-423; and"The Irreducible Historicality of the Concept of Art,"The British Journal of Aesthetics42 (2002): 367-379.

7. Levinson,"Refining Art Historically,"p. 21.

8. Ibid.

9. This need not be to the exclusion of an overarching

art-intention of the kind defended by Levinson. Insofar as she is producing art, a poet may intend her work to be re- garded in the way preceding art (including poetry) has been regarded.Butinsofarasthepoetisproducingaspecifickind of art, namely, poetry, her intention will be differently char- acterized.

10. Just as there is"found art,"there is"found poetry."

In the case of found poetry, it is the intention of the discov- erer(inaddition,sometimes,tosomemanipulation,asinthe insertion of line breaks) that counts as the poetic intention. Forpurposesofthedefinition,'tradition'ismeanttoreferto thehistoryof poetry or, more accurately, to the poems that make up that history, conceived globally (rather than, say, the German Romantic tradition). In other instances, which should be clear from the context,'tradition'may be read in the narrower sense of a given culture's poetic tradition but, in any case, understanding the term in the definitional sense should not interfere with the argument.

11. As will become clear later,'like'here is not to be

understood as some unspecifiable resemblance notion.

12. I will use the expressions'repetition schemes,''pat-

terns of recurrence,''recurrence,'and'repetition'more or less interchangeably. When I use these terms, I will be refer- ring to the kinds of repetition specified in this section and not just any sort of repetition. For example, the repetition of the definite article has not been a type of recurrence that markedthehistoryofpoetry,whereastherepetitionofinitial consonant sounds closely enough to affect the ear (allitera- tion) has. As will be made clear in the following section, this will not prevent a poet from writing a poem with types of repetition that have not been prevalent in that history.

13. AlthoughthereisnothingnewinwhatIsayhere - we

have long known what a foot is, for one - I mean to bring to light the distinctions in kind among the various types of rep- etitionthatoccurinpoetry.Interestingly,itismainlyabstract typesofrepetitionthathavebeentransformedorabandoned in modern times.

14. Of course, we talk about line length today, but this

is a consequence of writing. We should think of the poetic line more abstractly than that, if we are right to speculate thatsuchbreakswereoriginally(inoraltraditions)meantto signify greater pauses during performances; line breaks are therefore their written equivalents. In elision, syllables that could be counted separately are counted as a single syllable, as in'prisoner'(two rather than three syllables). Naturally,

insofar as this is so, one may argue that a line that makes useofoneelisionstillhastensyllables - tenpoeticsyllables,one

might say.

15. The varieties of sonnet allow for different ways of

conceiving of the stanzas. The original Petrarchan sonnet breakstheformdownintoanoctetandasestet,whichinturn are divided into two quartets and two tercets, respectively.

16. Itakeitforgrantedthatthereasonthesekindsofrep-

etition, and not others, have marked poetic cultures across the globe, is based on our psychology: how we process and are affected by sounds. But however cognitive psychology explains these facts, what matters for purposes of the defi- nition I am offering is that, when we look at the history of poetry, what we see emerge everywhere is not the repetition of (again) the definite article, but rather the types of repe- tition catalogued here. Since this is what history shows us, and the definition calls for an intentional link to that his- tory, then these are the relevant types of repetition, and not others.

17. The terms denote some of the ways words and

phrases may be repeated at the beginning and/or end of a sentence or clause.

18. From, respectively, Shakespeare,"Sonnet 30"; and

Louise Gl¨uck,"The Red Poppy,"inThe Wild Iris(The Ecco

Press, 1992), p. 29.

19. D. D. Jones,"The Pulse of Creation: The Poet-

ics of the Prologue toUd-ri-a,"in1998-1999 Proceedings of the Red River Conference on World Literature Vol. 1 (North Dakota Sate University, 1998-1999), available at http://www.ndsu.edu/RRCWL/V1/Creation1.html.

20. Quechua is the ancient language of the Incas, spo-

ken today by about 8 million people in Peru, Bol´ıvia, and Ecuador.ItisthemostwidelyspokenAmerindianlanguage. This and the following two excerpts are from Freire,Babel de Poemas, pp. 150, 144, and 132, respectively.

21.USA Today, July 22, 2005.

22. Copyright Hallmark.

23. From,"CallingitQuits,"inBachelor#2(OrTheLast

Remains of the Dodo), by Aimee Mann. SuperEgo Records, 1999.

24. From,"A Cartomante,"inContos, by Machado de

Assis (Porto Alegre, L&PM Editores, 1999).

25. Descartes,Discourse on Method, Part I.

26. However, if there were line breaks, even if uneven

ones (line breaks may be governed by syntactic integrity, number of syllables, and so forth), readers would be right to call it an epic poem, a narrative written in verse. This author should not be surprised if his readership failed to categorize his work correctly. But it may also be that this author is attempting to invent a new literary category.

27. Anthony Lane delivers a delightful critique of it -

entirely in verse - in the June 27, 2005 issue of theNew

Yorker.

28. Anna Balakian,"Dada,"inThe New Princeton

Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. A. Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (New York: MJF Books, 1993), p. 269.

29. Barbara Drake,Writing Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York:

Harcourt Brace and Co., 1994), p. 157.

30. GeraldJ.Janaˇcek,"Futurism,"inTheNewPrinceton

Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 447.

31. Ibid.

32. I thank Berys Gaut for bringing this difficulty to my

attention.Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/65/2/189/5957647 by guest on 13 August 2023

RibeiroIntending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry201

33. I thank an anonymous referee for this example.

34. I thank David Davies for calling my attention to

the possibility of adapting a position defended by Stephen Davies in"John Cage's'4'33"': Is It Music?"Australasian

Journal of Philosophy75 (1997): 449-462.

35. A. E. Housman,The Name and Nature of Poetry

(New York: The MacMillan Company, 1933), p. 10f.

36. This is not to say that they are not related. See, for

example, Gregory Currie,"A Note on Art and Historical Concepts,"The British Journal of Aesthetics40 (2000): 186-

190; Jeffrey T. Dean,"The Nature of Concepts and the Def-

inition of Art,"The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

61 (2003): 29-35; and Thomas Adajian,"On the Prototype

Theory of Concepts and the Definition of Art,"The Jour- nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism63 (2005): 231-236. My attempts here are not to offer an account of our psycholog- ical concept"poetry"(which would involve how we iden- tify, correctly or incorrectly, poems), but to offer a defini- tion of poetry. See also Georges Rey,"Concepts and Con- ceptions: A Reply to Smith, Medin and Ripps,"Cognition

19 (1985): 297-303, reprinted inConcepts: Core Readings,

ed. Stephen Lawrence and Eric Margolis (MIT Press, 2000) and"Philosophical Analysis as Cognitive Psychology: The Case of Empty Concepts,"inHandbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, ed. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre(Elsevier Science, 2005), ch. 3

37. I explore this further in my doctoral dissertation,

MemorableMoments:PoemsandHowWeReadThem(Uni-

versity of Maryland, 2006), where I defend the use of repe- tition devices on grounds of cognitive advantages and aes- theticrewards,relying,particularlyinthecaseoftheformer, on relevance theory in pragmatics. See Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson,Relevance: Communication and Cognition,

2nd ed. (Blackwell, 1995).

38. Pinsky,The Sounds of Poetry,p.9.

39. Levinson,"Extending Art Historically,"p. 411.

40. Levinson,"Extending Art Historically,"p. 412.

41. I am grateful to audiences at the 2005 Annual Meet-

ings of both the British Society of Aesthetics in Oxford and the American Society for Aesthetics in Providence, Rhode Island, for their helpful questions and comments on an ear- lier version of this paper. I am especially grateful to my commentator at the American Meeting, Susan Feagin, for accommodating last-minute changes and for her many inci- sivecomments,whichIendeavoredtoaddresshere;dittomy anonymous referees for this journal. I am also thankful to Berys Gaut for a pleasant discussion back in Oxford about my view. Finally, many thanks are due to Jerrold Levinson, GregoryCurrie,andGeorgesReyfortheirevercarefulread-

ing of my work.Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/65/2/189/5957647 by guest on 13 August 2023