Abstract

In this paper, I develop a pragmatic view of the poetic function of language by resorting to the ideas of contextualism, inferential pragmatics, and pragmemes (Mey, 2001, Capone, 2005), developing considerations on the poetic function of language on the basis of considerations by Jakobson (1960) and Waugh (1980). I argue that pragmatics plays an important role in elucidating the poetic function of language and that even in everyday language (not only in anthologies) we find cases of texts where the poetic function coexists with (or aids) other functions. Contextualism allows us to interpret a poem: referents must be fixed or need not be fixed due to the requirements of the discourse; citations are brought in through pragmatic ways; polyphony is achieved via sedimentation of citations in a current text; the vicinity of a certain word, or concept, or line is likely to affect the interpretation of a certain expression. Polyphony is what allows the text to live on in a dimension that transcends the limits of the subjective experience of the poet but allows the text to be inserted in a tradition in which each verse reverberates with memories of other verses. The poetic text can take different forms, from graffiti to discourse at the market-place, to discourse between lovers. All these forms of poetic text would not exist if the notion of poetry did not include the idea of semantic/pragmatic compression which is matched, in interpretation, by expansions. In this paper, I also try to tackle the issue of the universal appeal of some poems, even if I am aware that this topic is as mysterious as fascinating. Paradoxically, a contextual approach to poetry seems to be at odds with the claim that the most acclaimed examples of poems have a universal appeal and touch a universal chord in the readers’ hearts. What is genuinely puzzling is the contrast between the need to fully contextualize a text and the fact that such a text can have a universal appeal across cultures.