Syntax and phonology in poetic stye

The syntactic and phonological means by which a poet manipulates language make up a performance grammar extrapolated from ordinary competence grammar; the function of all such extrapolations is the lowering of syntactic or phonological probability, and the consequent augmentation of the informational capacity of a poetic utterance. The (computer-assisted) contrast of the distinctive-feature analysis of ordinary speech to that of poetry mirrors the departures of poetic syntax from normal syntax in ways which this argument explicates. Milton, T. S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas use quite different sorts of syntactic manipulations, while e. e. cummings and J. R. R. Tolkien use very different sorts of phonological manipulations. However, the differing tactics of both classes of manipulation carry out the same strategy: the adjustment of predictability to enhance the peculiar power of poetry to mean. HA