Giorgio Banti and Francesco Giannattasio

Duranti / Companion to Linguistic Anthropology Final 12.11.2003 2:31pm page 290 Poetry CHAPTER 13 Giorgio Banti and Francesco Giannattasio 1INTRODUCTION Ethnographic research has shown that ‘‘poetic’’ forms and behaviors are almost universally widespread, and it is a common opinion in Western culture that the term ‘‘poetry’’ refers to something that ‘‘anyone who goes deeply into oneself may recognize and understand,’’ as Boethius wrote fifteen centuries ago about music.1 But looking at the facts more carefully one comes to realize that one of the most defining characteristics of poetry – and significantly of music as well – is the impossi- bility of defining it in any simple way. First, poetry is a term that underwent constant semantic change and redefinition in the Western literary tradition, and increasingly widened its scope. Indeed, if ‘‘Aristoteles already was uncertain in his Poetics (47a8– 47b28) between several definitions of poetry founded respectively upon rhythm, expression, and representation’’ (Molino 2002: 17–18), the semantic range of the term ‘‘poetry’’ presently goes well ‘‘beyond language,’’ as observed by Hymes (2001: 187), and ‘‘can express aesthetic pleasure in almost any sphere.’’ Second, it has been observed that in several cultures there are no specific words for indicating something similar to our notion of poetry. Last but not least, in many traditional (and not only oral) cultures, verse generally is sung verse. This makes it often difficult to distinguish ‘‘poetic’’ from ‘‘musical’’ production within a continuum of activities that include, especially in ritual, ceremonial and representational contexts, different levels of bound discourse and of phonic and rhythmic formalization of speech. This difficulty also has an impact upon what we mean by other terms such as ‘‘line,’’ ‘‘versification,’’ ‘‘lyric,’’ ‘‘chant,’’ and by the more general dichotomies ‘‘prose’’ versus ‘‘poetry,’’ ‘‘ordinary speech’’ versus ‘‘poetic speech.’’ In fact, it is necessary to assess how such concepts are to be used when speaking about a specific culture and to take into account how ‘‘poetic’’ texts are created, how and when they are used, and which social and aesthetic values they draw on. It was not by chance that the first stimulus to a real discussion of poetic formalization in a linguistic anthropological perspective was due to the so-called ‘‘oralist’’ Duranti / Companion to Linguistic Anthropology Final 12.11.2003 2:31pm page 291 POETRY 291 scholars such as Milman Parry, Albert B. Lord, and later Eric A. Havelock, Walter Ong, Jack Goody, Ruth Finnegan, Paul Zumthor, and others, who brought into the foreground since the 1930s the techniques, the systematic organization, and the ends of composing poetry in contexts of oral tradition and ‘‘mentality.’’ Equally important has been the evidence of ethnomusicologists who, starting with the work done by George Herzog during the 1930s on Native American societies, investigated the relationship between music and language and the several levels of rhythmic and phonic formalization of speech in different cultures. Suffice it to mention here the systematic studies by Constantin Bra˘iloiu on the syllabic giusto (1948), Rumanian popular sung verse (1954), and ‘‘child rhythm’’ (1956). However, it has been mainly due to Roman Jakobson’s (1960) notion of a ‘‘poetic function’’ of language that poetics has become a full-fledged object of inquiry for linguists. In fact it is well known that Jakobson (1960: 356) regarded the poetic function of language as the ‘‘focus on the message for its own sake’’ differently from, for example, the so-called emotive or ‘‘expressive’’ function, that is focused on the ‘‘addresser.’’ In his view, the poetic function projects into the speech chain ‘‘the principle of equivalence’’ as ‘‘the constitutive device of the sequence’’ (p. 358): in poetry, ‘‘syllables are converted into units of measure, and so are morae or stresses’’ (ibid.); ‘‘equivalence in sound [ ...] inevitably involves semantic equivalence’’ (p. 368); ‘‘in the same way any sequence of semantic units strives to build an equation. Similarity superimposed on contiguity imparts to poetry its thoroughgoing symbolic, multiplex, polysemantic essence [ . ]’’ (p. 370). Jakobson’s hypothesis of a poetic function intrinsic to language – and his resulting claim that ‘‘the analysis of verse is entirely within the competence of poetics, and the latter may be defined as that part of linguistics which treats the poetic function in its relationship to the other functions of language’’ (1960: 359) – caused a number of linguists to venture into the field of metric and poetic phenomena. Their results have been conspicuous: careful analyses of individual poetic systems (e.g., Wimsatt 1972; Dixon and Koch 1996; Banti and Giannattasio 1996; Schuh 1989, 1999, in press a, in press b), transcultural typologies of versification systems and of their metric organization (e.g., Lotz 1960, 1972; Halle and Keyser 1980), models of phono- logical analysis such as metrical phonology (e.g., Kiparsky and Youmans 1989; Goldsmith 1990), and more generally a new attention to the rhythmic, intonational, and melodic features of language and their cognitive aspects, even within the frame- work of a semantics of emotions (Molino 2002: 22). But does a poetic function, intrinsic to the linguistic system, really exist? Jakobson acknowledges not only that ‘‘verse is primarily a recurrent ‘figure of sound’ ’’ (1960: 367), but even that ‘‘measure in sequences is a device which, outside of poetic function, finds no application in language. Only in poetry [ ...]isthetime of the speech flow experienced, as it is [ . ] with musical time’’ (p. 358). In other words, he sees a fundamental difference, a sort of dialectics, between the phonic and metric organization of verse and the general properties of how language works. Even though the syllable can be regarded as a rhythmic unit both in ordinary language and in versification systems, it is only in the latter that there is a measured organization of equivalent units (syllables, prosodic length, stresses, word boundaries, syntactic pauses, etc.), often on the basis of a regular (isochronous) periodicity, just like music. Even if it is possible to identify intonational contours in ordinary speech, it Duranti / Companion to Linguistic Anthropology Final 12.11.2003 2:31pm page 292 292 GIORGIO BANTI AND FRANCESCO GIANNATTASIO is only in specific systems of versification – or in singing – that such contours pattern into ‘‘figures of sound,’’ i.e., sequences of fixed and recurring pitches. Although poetic meter undeniably has ‘‘many intrinsically linguistic particularities’’ (Jakobson 1960: 365), it is difficult not to agree with Jean Molino’s recent claim (2002: 31) that ‘‘poetry cannot be confused with language or one of its functions: it is the outcome of imposing upon language a structure that has very strong links with music and dance.’’ It is thus in the frame of a virtual continuum from language to music or, better, from speaking to singing, that one has to try and identify the constitutive elements that underlie the oral and written scatter of the different ‘‘poetic’’ forms and behaviors. The point here is not to assign poetry a definite position within this continuum in a Procrustean and – unavoidably – arbitrary way. Rather, it is to look into the problem of poetic formalization and the typology of poetry across cultures and time in a wider perspective, by studying them not only within the traditional limits of literature and linguistics, but also in the wider horizons of ethnomusicology and anthropology. 2SPEAKING OF ‘‘POETRY’’: A FEW DEFINITIONS The fuzzy relationship between word and music, meaning and sound (cf. Brogan 1993a: 939–40), content and form (‘‘essentialists’’ versus ‘‘formalists’’; cf. Brogan 1993b: 1347–8) has been one of the leitmotifs of theoretical debate in Western literary tradition, through steadily changing poetic practices and definitions of poetry that followed upon each other since the times of classical Greece. This complex history will not be pursued here;2 suffice it to point out that this peculiar relationship is called up by two of the most well-known definitions of poetry in European literature. Indeed, Dante’s ‘‘it is nothing else than rhetorical and musically set creation’’3 unravels the relationship between word and music by means of a simple and neat -que ‘and’, while Paul Vale´ry’s (1943) more recent he´sitation prolonge´e entre le son et le sens ‘protracted hesitation between sound and meaning’ gives this relationship the shape of a continu- ous and irresolvable ‘‘either . or.’’ Much has happened since the time when the Greeks used the same word, mousike´, to describe dance, music and poetry, and basic education in the fields of art and letters (Winn 1993: 804). Little by little literacy and the ensuing theoretical reflections split music from poetry; they developed into separate art forms, even though they merged during the centuries in several forms of poetry for music, music for poetry, and theatrical plays like melodrama. Poetry retained all this time its character of sound patterning of language especially through its specific features of meter and prosody, even though these increasingly became a set of graphic more than aural rules. Indeed, as pointed out by Brogan (1993a: 938), in the Western tradition ‘‘what most readers understand as ‘poetry’ was, up until 1850, set in lines which were metrical,’’ and the definitions of this word that continue

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