Chapter One - Introduction

Summary

This book is intended for readers who care about poetry, or who need to study it in university courses, but who know little about linguistics, and would like to know what, if anything, linguistics has to say about it. I hope the book also appeals to linguists who have paid little attention to poetry, but it is the first group that I have kept in mind. It arose out of lecture notes and class handouts for a course that drew mainly students of literature but also a few students of linguistics, as I was unable to find a textbook that covered even half the topics I wanted to deal with. Not surprisingly, it was the literature students who had the steeper learning curve, at least at first. Nonetheless, I will begin by talking about what poetry is, not what linguistics is. As it turned out, neither group of students found poetry easy to define.