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Internal and External Deviation in Poetry

Samuel R. Levin

To cite this article: Samuel R. Levin (1965) Internal and External Deviation in Poetry, Word, 21:2,
225-237, DOI: 10.1080/00437956.1965.11435425

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SAMUEL R. L E V I N - - - - - - - - - - -

Internal and External Deviation

in Poetry

The recognition that deviation is a distinguishing mark of poetry is as

least as old as Aristotle. I Much later, the Prague School estheticians called
attention to deviant expressions, referring to them as "foregrounded" or
"deautomatized."2 In more recent discussions they are said to be less pre-
dictable, or more entropic.3 And we, in everyday parlance, are usually
signalizing the same phenomenon when we say of certain expressions that
they are striking, heightened, different, or arresting. But however we choose
to characterize these expressions, we know that at certain points in a text-
and especially in a poetic text-the language is used in a way that is not
typical, a way which, in particular, constrains us to pause over the expres-
sion and reflect upon its form.
Two aspects of the phenomenon need to be distinguished: the reader-
response to certain stretches of language occurring in a poem, and the
linguistic structure which analysis reveals and which it is claimed stands in
some plausible relation to the reader-response. Reader-response is ex-
pressed by predicates like "striking," "different," or "original," all of
which may be subsumed under the single predicate "novel." Then "devia-
tion" is the term used to describe the way in which the language is de-
ployed.4 The reader-response is held to have intuitional validity, as well as
the support of literary criticism; the fact of deviation is given by linguistic
analysis. The claim is then made that deviation is a sufficient condition for
the response of novelty.
It can be shown that most, if not indeed all, of poetry's characteristic de-
vices exemplify deviation in one way or another. Thus, to begin with, the
1 Poetics, XXII.
2 See Bohuslav Havninek, "The Functional Differentiation of the Standard Language,"
pp. 9ff. and Jan Mukai'ovsky, "Standard Language and Poetic Language," pp. 21ff. in
A Prague School Reader, tr. and ed. by Paul L. Garvin (Wash., D.C., 1958).
3 See Ivan F6nagy, "Communication in Poetry," Word XVII (1961), 201 and passim.
4 This is its fundamental application. In what follows, it is applied somewhat more
broadly.
225
226 SAMUEL R. LEVIN

use of conventions in poetry obviously lends itself to rationalization in

terms of deviation, since the typography of a poem, its rhyme and rhythm,
devices like assonance and alliteration, all deviate from the use or appear·
ance of these same features in the language as used for ordinary purposes.
(This is, of course, not to say that rhyme or alliteration, for example, may
not appear in ordinary language discourses; it is simply that the systematic
organization of these features in poetry represents a deviation, inasmuch as
they occur in the ordinary language in a random, non-systematic way.)
Turning to features more strictly linguistic, the phonology,s for example,
the syntax, and the lexicon of poetry, it is evident that these features like-
wise deviate from the way in which they find their expression in the
ordinary language. Metaphor, also, regarded by some critics as the central
device of poetry, represents a deviation. The proof is that it is only when we
see what the metaphor is a substitution for, or, as I should prefer to say, a
deviation from, that we understand the metaphor. The same may be said
for such staples of poetic language as symbol, image, and myth. It appears,
as a matter of fact, that it is only in the themes of poetry that deviation need
not occur, since love, hate, passion, and war form the subject-matter of
ordinary language as readily as they do that of poetry. All of this leads to
the conclusion that deviation in poetry is an attribute ofform. And because
deviation is an attribute of form, the interest in responding to it, attaches
only secondarily to what the deviant expression is saying, but immediately
the expression itself. It is this characteristic of a deviant expression, that of
calling attention to itself as object, which gives it its importance in stylistic
analysis. And it is this same characteristic that prompts the consistent and
sustained use of such expression in poetry.
Cases of deviation may be classified into two types. First, there is that
type of deviation which takes place against the background of the poem,
where the norm is the remainder of the poem in which the deviation occurs.
Second, then, is that type where the deviation is to be explicated against
some norm which lies outside the limits of the poem in which the deviation
occurs. For convenience of reference, we may call these two types internal
and external deviation, respectively. 6
s Obviously, phonology is involved in features like rhyme and alliteration. But phono-
logy may also be employed to produce non-"conventional" structures. For an example,
see Dell H. Hymes, "Phonological Aspects of Style: Some English Sonnets," in Style in
Language, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok (New York, 1960), pp. 109-131.
6 More precisely, deviation with respect to norms that are internal and external to the
poem.
The two types of deviation, internal and external, thus differ from the two types of
contrast described by Michael Riffaterre, "Stylistic Context," Word XVI (1960), 207-
218, in that contrasts effected in both the micro- and macrocontexts of Riffaterre's
 INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DEVIATION IN POETRY 227

I shall begin the more specific discussion of deviation with some remarks
on typography, which is perhaps not too significant an aspect of poetic
language, but which is one that offers some fairly obvious illustrations of
the principle at work. Thus, the beginnings and ends of lines of poetry
occur not at the margins of the page, but wherever the poet means them to
occur, with the result that a poem may have irregular margins. In the same
way, breaks in the thematic progress of a poem are indicated not by in-
dentation, but by spacing, and one speaks of stanzas, not paragraphs.
Since the norms that are being violated in these two examples are those of
the ordinary language typographic practice, these deviations are external.
For these two typographic practices in poetry, internal deviation would not
be especially expressive, and it does not, as a rule, seem to be implemented.
Internal deviation, to be realized here, would require a span of regular
margins after a poem had proceeded for a while with irregular ones (or vice
versa), or, in the second case, the absence of a stanza-break after a number
of stanzas had been set off by spaces (or vice versa).
A more interesting typographic convention of poetry, one in which both
external and internal deviation may be produced, governs the use of line-
initial letters. The general practice is to begin each line of a poem with a
capital letter, producing in this way, of course, an external deviation. In the
work of such poets as e. e. cummings and Miss Marianne Moore, how-
ever, this particular convention is not observed. Their respective practices
in this regard differ interestingly in detail. Cummings' convention is to use
lower-case initials, irrespective of whether the beginning of the line begins
a new sentence. Miss Moore's practice is to use capitals wherever a new
sentence begins-whether at line-internal or line-initial position. Miss
Moore's practice, while thus constituting a deviation in respect to the
standard poetic convention, actually reverts, as far as capitalization itself is
concerned, to the standards of the ordinary language usage. Cummings'
practice, on the other hand, represents a deviation not only from the poetic
convention, but also from the external norm of the ordinary language
usage. Where the real interest in this question lies, however, is in the in-
ternal exploitation of these two unconventional standards. Cummings, in
breaking with the tradition, goes on to exploit his convention by beginning
an occasional (though not a random) line with a capital, thus producing an

analysis would be, equally, instances of internal deviation in the scheme presented here.
Also different are Waiter Alfred Koch's "inner" and "outer" styles, "On the Principles
of Stylistics," Lingua XII (1963), 418. Style is "inner" according to Koch if the criteria
used in describing the particular item are morphological, "outer" if the criteria are
syntactic or distributional.
228 SAMUEL R. LEVIN

internal deviation. Although there is no reason why Miss Moore's parti-

cular convention cannot also be deviated from, such deviation, aside from
a few special cases, does not seem to occur. 7 The different tactics of Miss
Moore and e. e. cummings in respect to line-initial typography are in-
teresting in the light of information theory, in that Miss Moore, having
broken from the tradition, which was meaningless in terms of entropy, has
substituted a new convention which is also essentially meaningless.
Cummings, on the other hand, in breaking with the tradition, has gone on
to exploit the information-theoretic possibilities.
In taking up the remaining features of poetic language it is convenient to
emphasize the distinction between conventional and purely linguistic
features. By "conventional" is intended those features which a poem in-
corporates as representing a particular literary form, those features, that is,
which an author obligates himself to observe-or at least to consider- by
the mere election to write in a certain form. The typography of a poem,
which has already been discussed, is thus a conventional feature. The two
chief conventions of poetry, however, are rhyme and meter. Inasmuch as
rhyme and meter occur only accidentally in ordinary language texts, their
systematic use in poetry represents an external deviation. But such patterns
may also be exploited for purposes of internal deviation. Thus, in a poem
where a certain rhyme-scheme has been, or is being, established, the use of
a non-rhyme would constitute an internal deviation. Such an occurrence,
by frustrating our expectations, would call attention to itself and thus pro-
duce a stylistic effect. In the same way a shift in meter at a point up until
which the poem had been metrically regular would produce the same result.
The fact that one speaks of false rhyme, off-rhyme, inversions, feminine
endings, etc. attests to the existence of such deviations. As another ex-
ample, the notion of metrical counterpoint is predicated on this same dis-

7 Miss Moore's departure from the typographic conventions of poetry does yield a
gain, however. As long as the type of letter in line-initial position is not determined by
any conventional conditions, it is possible to manage the line so that words which in the
ordinary language orthography are capitalized may be placed initially and thus made
prominent. A telling example occurs in her poem "The Steeple-Jack," Collected Poems
(New York: The Macmillan Co., 1951). The relevant lines, beginning with stanza 5, are:
A steeple-jack in red, has let
a rope down as a spider spins a thread;
he might be part of a novel, but on the sidewalk a
sign says C. J. Poole, Steeple-Jack,
in black and white; and one in red
and white says
Danger. The church portico has four fluted
columns, ....
 INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DEVIATION IN POETRY 229
ruption of the norm, one whose presence must continue to be entertained,
however, in order that the counterpoint be effected.
I shall not take up specifically the other conventional features of poetry
-alliteration, enjambement, caesura, and so forth-but it is quite obvious
that they also lend themselves to treatment in terms of both external and in-
ternal deviation.
Of the purely linguistic features of a poem's composition, the phonology,
the lexicon, and the syntax merit discussion. (It does not appear to me that
the morphological structure of poetic language is especially interesting
from the point of view of deviation.) On the level of phonology, external
deviation may be produced in a number of ways-thus, by the presence in
a poem of a phoneme which does not occur in the ordinary language, or by
the occurrence of a phonological sequence which does not so occur. Such
external phonologic deviations have been observed in the songs of certain
American Indian languages, s but they are almost never encountered in
English poetry. These two types of external phonologic deviation may be
called determinate-in the sense that such deviations can be univocally
established by comparison with the phonological description of the
ordinary language, which we may assume to be either given or obtainable.
Another type of external phonologic deviation would be that type which
we may call statistical. Here the fact of deviation does not turn on a deter-
minate, yes-or-no decision, i.e., does the phonologic feature occurring in
the poem occur in the ordinary language or does it not; it turns on a com-
parison of the frequencies with which a phoneme or sequence occurs in a
poem and in the ordinary language.9 This type of external deviation is
fairly marked in a good deal of poetry, in which we find atypical densities
of phonological features.
Concerning internal phonologic deviation there is not much to be said,
except to make the obvious statement that, theoretically, it may take place.
In the area of lexicon it is clear that what one refers to as "poetic" dic-
tion constitutes an external deviation. As in the case of phonology, external
deviation in the area of lexicon may be either determinate or statistical.
Purely poetic forms like e'en, o'er, or fain may be determined as deviant by
simple reference to a dictionary, which would label them "poetic." The
same procedure would serve for poetic nonce words. On the other hand,
the incidence of words of a certain type may be externally deviant in the

8 Edward Sapir, "Abnormal Types of Speech in Nootka," in Selected Writings of

Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality, ed. by David G. Mandelbaum
(Berkeley, Calif., 1949), p. 188.
9 See my article, "Deviation-Statistical and Determinate-in Poetic Language,"
Lingua XII (1963), 276-290.
230 SAMUEL R. LEVIN

statistical sense, i.e., as occurring with a higher relative frequency than

those words do in ordinary language texts. Thus, at certain periods archa-
isms will occur in poetry, both individually and as a class, with a relatively
high frequency; in other periods the same will hold true for foreign terms
or nonce words.
To some extent, then, external deviation in the area oflexicon can be de-
termined by referring to the usage labels in a dictionary. To establish statis-
tical deviation other procedures are of course required.
Internal lexical deviation may be occasioned in various ways, depending
on the various lexical norms that are established in a poem. To give one
example, in a poem where norms of "poetic" diction are being established,
the deviation may be effected by the use of a colloquial or dialectal expres-
sion, a cliche, a vulgar or obscene term, and so on. In all such cases the
deviation clashes against the set of expectations that has been conditioned
by the prior establishment in the poem of norms of diction and, in so doing,
it arrests and focuses our attention on the deviant form.
In speaking of internal deviation, it is necessary to remark on the relative
nature of norms and deviant expressions. A priori any given form occur-
ring in a poem may either constitute a deviation or be part of a pattern
making up the norm. Thus, if archaisms or foreign terms were used spar-
ingly in a poem, they would be internally deviant. If, on the other hand,
they saturated a poem, then they might very well serve to establish a norm
against which it would be the standard terms that would be deviant.
Before going on to discuss syntax in this paper which is concerned almost
exclusively with formal attributes of poetry, I should like t9 make a short
comment on content. For my purposes I have selected a poem by Robert
Lowell, "Sailing Home from Rapallo." In the first half of this poem Lowell
describes how warm and verdant the Mediterranean coastline was as the
ship bearing the dead body of his mother embarked from Italy for the trip
home and burial. In the second half of the poem, the cold darkness of the
family plot in New England is described. The transition can be seen in these
lines.at the turn of the poem:
While the passengers were tanning
on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs,
our family cemetery in Dunbarton
lay under the White Mountains
in the sub-zero weather.to
Like everything else in a poem the contrast here is expressed by formal
means, i.e., by language. But the deviation here is not a function of the
to Life Studies (New York: Vintage Books, 1956).
 INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DEVIATION IN POETRY 231
language, except trivially; it is a function of the content. The statement
made at the beginning of this paper to the effect that deviation is an ex-
clusive function of form thus requires emendation: deviation of content
can occur. But it is hard to see how deviation of content can occur except
internally. Only on the view which is not seriously maintained today,
namely, that only certain subjects are the proper concern of poets, could
there be deviation from external norms. But if we are not surprised at any
subject that a poet undertakes to write about, then no external norms can
be violated.
In syntax, as in the other linguistic levels, internal deviation is compara-
tively easy to explain. Given the response that a feature is deviant, if it is .
internally deviant, then, by definition, the norms which condition the re-
sponse will be found in the poem. Thus, the appearance of an imperative or
interrogative sentence in a poem in which a series of declarative statements
has been made would constitute an internal deviation. Similarly for a
sentence in the subjunctive mood when the poem has been running until
that point in tlie indicative. In the same way a sequence of simple sentences
would be disrupted by a complex sentence, and conversely. In fact, any of
the devices of sentence construction can be used so as to develop a pattern
of expectations which the appearance of a counter instance will disrupt.
Thus, an instance of inverted word order or of unusual phrase or clause
placement in a sentence would be internally deviant in a poem which is
otherwise regular in these respects.ll
It is when we come to consider external deviation of syntactic construc-
tions that difficulties arise. For in this area it is not immediately clear what
might serve as the external norm; that is, there does not seem to be any-
thing in syntax comparable to the dictionary or the phonologic description.
It might appear that in the ordinary grammatical description of a language
we ought to have something which could be made to serve as an external
norm for the explication of syntactic deviation, but unfortunately this is not
the case. As a matter of fact, it is only recently, with the development of
generative grammar, that this prospect seems possible of implementation.
Traditional and even structural, grammars cannot be made to serve for this
purpose, inasmuch as they are essentially incomplete. Nor will normative
grammars do since, in addition to being incomplete, their norms are un-
realistic, at times even whimsical. But before going into a discussion of
generative grammar and how it may be used as an external norm, some
mention should be made of still another frame of reference which it has
u It may frequently happen that a given feature is both internally and externally de-
viant. This would be true of a word order, for example, that is not an output of the
grammar and is at the same time internally deviant.
232 SAMUEL R. LEVIN

been frequently maintained can serve as an external norm against which to

measure deviation. I refer here to the statistical model.
According to this view of norms, all of us, as fluent native speakers of
English, have in our memories a body of statistics drawn from our ex-
perience with the ordinary language. Among other things, these statistics
constitute information concerning the relative frequencies with which in-
dividual words occur in the ordinary language, and also information con-
cerning the probabilities with which any word will occur given whatever
sequence of words has preceded the text to that point. Actually, it is only
the study of transitional probabilities that is relevant for the question of
syntactic deviation, frequency counts being relevant to the question of
diction. But frequency counts and transitional probabilities are usually
considered together in the statistical model, so it seems advisable to treat
both here. The statistics thus stored are supposed then to prepare us for the
incidence of words in a given text, and they are supposed also to prepare us,
on a scale of graduated probability, for the appearance of various words at
any given point in a text. Our statistical experience with the language pre-
sumably predisposes us, in any given text, to encounter more occurrences
of the word the than the word have, and to expect have more frequently
than, say, machination. In the same way, given that we have just read or
heard the sequence It was a beautiful-, we expect day to follow more readily
than, say, elephant, and the latter to occur more readily than must.12 Now
since these norms are presumably conditioned by our experience with the
ordinary language, we should be able, when we are confronted by a deviant
expression in poetry, to rationalize it against this background. There is a
certain plausibility in this line of argument. There is little question but what
we are conditioned in some such way to react to what we read or hear.
When we attempt to make these statistical norms explicit, however, certain
difficulties arise.13 These difficulties are not so severe with frequency counts,
where it is, as a matter of fact, quite feasible to draw up a table offrequency
rank-orders from some representative body of texts (although, naturally,
"representativeness" poses problems), and then to use this table as a norm
against which to measure deviation from expected word-frequencies. But it
is a different matter with transitional probabilities. For this problem it is
simply impossible to collect any significant statistics. Where the inventory
of units is restricted, as with alphabet letters or phonemes, one may

12 Considering these sequences from the standpoint of external norms. Naturally, a

context, setting up internal norms, could affect our relative expectations.
13 Cf. Warren Plath, "Mathematical Linguistics," in Trends in European and American
Linguistics 1930-1960 (Utrecht, 1961), ed. by Christine Mohrmann, Alf Sommerfelt and
Joshua Whatmough, pp. 27-30.
 INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DEVIATION IN POETRY 233

laboriously accumulate statistics that can be used to plot monogram, dig-

ram, trigram, and perhaps larger-context transitional probabilities, since
the calculations will have to be carried out for only a small number of units.
In syntax, however, where the relevant units are words, we have to deal
with a universe in the tens of thousands, and one in which the relevant con-
texts may be quite extended. Thus, even though the range of existing com-
binations is finite, the collection of adequate statistics in this area would be
a well-nigh impossible task. At a certain point, moreover, even these con-
siderations become academic. This is because for almost any sequence of
significant length it turns out that there are no matching sequences any-
where in the millions of books printed to this time.l4 Thus, if the word taste,
occurring as the fourteenth word of Paradise Lost, should strike us as
novel, we could collect no statistics to explain that reaction, since the
sequence "Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree,
whose mortal-" in all probability does not recur anywhere in the literature
(barring citations, of course).15
The use of a generative grammar for purposes of explicating syntactic de-
viation is certainly not without problems of its own. But such a gra:qunar at
least offers the prospect of providing a means for such explication. If a
generative grammar is to be adequate to a language, it must generate all
and only the grammatical sentences of that language. If we then make the
fair assumption that syntactic deviation and ungrammaticalness are the
same thing, then the above requirement points directly to the possibility of
using a generative grammar to mark externally deviant expressions. For we
can test any putatively deviant expression against such a grammar, in the
sense that we can ask whether or not the grammar will generate it. Any ex-
pression which the grammar will not generate is then ipso facto deviant.
The procedure just outlined is somewhat oversimplified. This is because
notions like syntactic deviation and ungrammaticalness are too gross as they
stand to cope adequately with various kinds of pertinent data. To take two
sequences like abysmally winked tornado distraught the and the distraught
tornado winked abysmally, and refer to them indifferently as syntactically
deviant is unsatisfactory. And as Chomsky and the literature have made
plain, to refer to them both simply as ungrammatical is likewise unsatis-
factory. The question of syntactic deviation is thus bound up with the
question of degrees of grammaticalness. And as now seems to be becoming

14 Cf. Colin Cherry, On Human Communication (New York, 1961), p. 39.

1s To be more precise, statistical investigation would result in assigning a probability
of zero to the sequence, but the assignment would have no significance, since other
sequences, including many which might and many which might not strike us as novel,
would be the same (zero) probability assignment.
234 SAMUEL R. LEVIN

clear, some degrees of "grammaticalness" may turn out to be functions not

of syntax, but of semantics. To arrive at a more discriminating view of this
general type of deviation, it might thus be advisable to consider incor-
porating within the general framework of a generative grammar a semantic
component like the one proposed by Katz and Fodor.16 Doing so would
make possible an immediate and fundamental division into those sequences
which are deviant because they are not generated by the grammar, and
which are thus syntactically deviant, and those which are generated, but
which are marked as deviant (anomalous) by the semantic component.
Further, it is possible to make some judgments on the degree of deviation
which those sentences manifest that are not generated by the grammar,
since this is just the obverse of the degree of grammaticalness. Whether it
will also prove to be feasible to define degrees of anomaly is problematical
at this point.
In general, a sequence may be deviant for one of three reasons: it may
instance a wrong word order, it may instance a wrong word selection, or it
may instance a combination of the preceding. Put another way, it may
violate a phrase-structure or transformation rule, it may violate a word-
category rule, or it may violate both. Now as Chomsky has pointed out,
given a deviant sequence, we attempt to impose some interpretation on it. 17
This attempt takes the form of analogizing the deviant sequence to some
well-formed expression. The analogizing process naturally takes different
forms depending on what type of deviation we are interpreting. In the re-
mainder of this paper I will take up several distinct types of deviant expres-
sion and comment on the different results which the analogizing process
yields.
Consider the following three sequences, which come from the work of
Pound, Thomas, and Emily Dickinson, respectively:
Shines in the mind of heaven God
My hand unravel/When you sew the deep door
The largest fire ever known ... /Discovered is without surprise

These represent word order violations; we may speak of such sequences as

syntactically deviant. In analogizing these sequences to well-formed ex-
pressions we entertain simultaneously the given form and the form it de-
viates from. Thus, in interpreting "Shines in the mind of heaven God," we
16 Jerrold J. Katz and Jerry A. Fodor, "The Structure of a Semantic Theory,"
Language XXXIX (1963), 170-210; see also Jerrold J. Katz and Paul M. Postal, An
Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions (M. I. T. Press, 1964).
17 Noam Chomsky, "Some Methodological Remarks on Generative Grammar,"
Word XVII (1961), 263ff.
 INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DEVIATION IN POETRY 235

entertain the well-formed "God shines in the mind of heaven." 1s For "my
hand unravel" we entertain "unravel my hand," and for "discovered is" we
entertain "is discovered." As can be seen, the analogue in all these cases is a
simple paraphrase of the deviant form. Poetically, the result is compara-
tively uninteresting.
Consider now the following three sequences, by cummings, Thomas, and
Auden, which represent a different type of deviation:
Anyone lived in a pretty how town
Rage me back to the making house
Stare the hot sun out of heaven
These sequences instance word-category violations; we may say of such
sequences that they are paradigmatically deviant.19 In cummings' line-
disregarding anyone lived-the deviation is produced by the adverb how
occurring where the rules require an adjective. On a priori grounds it is
possible to take any deviant sequence and attempt to rationalize it as a
case of either word order or word category violation. In actual cases, how-
ever, the structure of the deviant sequence will generally dictate the choice.
In the present instance, given the amount and type of structure incor-
porated in the phrase "lived in a pretty how town," we conclude that the
structure of pretty how town is Adj., Adj., Noun, i.e. we interpret the se-
quence as a case of word category violation. The alternative, to construe
the sequence as Adj., Adv., Noun, thus making it violate a word order
rule, would lead us to conclude that the sequence was nonsense, and our
natural inclination to redeem whatever we read rules out this analysis. The
result of the interpretation, then, is to conflate how with the category
Adjective. This is a paradigmatic conflation and is, in principle, more
viable poetically than syntactic conflation, or that type in which two variant
word orders are entertained simultaneously. In the particular example it is
hard to specify the poetic effect, since the word how is con:flated with the
high-order grammatical category Adjective, and these two elements are
too disparate for easy fusion.
In Thomas' line the sense of novelty arises from the fact that rage occurs
where the rules require a transitive verb. In construing the sentence we
entertain the notion of transitivity, where this is joined with the word rage,
which we must entertain in any case. Thomas' sentence does not seem as
18 We may omit consideration of the metaphor in this line.
19 Syntactic and pamdigmatic violation are types of what Paul Ziff calls variants and
inventions, respectively; "On Understanding 'Understanding Utterances'," in The Struc-
ture of Language, ed. by Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J. Katz (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1964), pp. 396ff.
236 SAMUEL R. LEVIN

novel as cummings'; it is easier to impose an interpretation on it. This re-

action can be explained by pointing out that the category of Transitive
Verb is lower-order than is the category Adjective, which had to be invoked
to interpret cummings' line. Put somewhat differently, rage is a member of
a subclass of a class (Verb) of which the category Transitive is also a sub-
class. There is another factor to be considered. The verb in Thomas' line is
actually rage back, not simply rage. The presence of back in the construc-
tion limits the class of transitive verbs which can be introduced in the ana-
logizing process to a small subclass of transitives including take, lead, give,
and others. In general, as classes of words are analyzed into smaller and
smaller subclasses the factor common to them graduates from being
syntactic to being semantic. The ability to cooccur with the particle back is
common, although not limited, to verbs of motion. The analogizing process
in this case thus serves to conflate rage with the factor of motion. The
poetic effect induced here approaches metaphor.
Auden's line is somewhat similar structurally to Thomas', with the
difference that the transitivized verb stare functions with a complement in-
stead of a particle. The complement is the adverbial of place out of heaven.
The cooccurrence ofthe locative adverbial limits the analogues for stare to
the same set of transitive verbs of motion adduced in the analysis of
Thomas' rage, with more or less the same poetic effect.
Finally, I will deal with a set of deviations in which the analogizing pro-
cess entrains the kind of conflation which produces a typical metaphoric
effect. Consider the following sequences, from Hart Crane, Miss Marianne
Moore, and Eliot:
What words can strangle this deaf moonlight
[But] why dissect destiny with instruments
My self-possession gutters
In the line from Crane, words become animate, because strangle regularly
cooccurs with animate nouns; the same effect is induced on moonlight by
its cooccurring with deaf. In Miss Moore's line the word destiny is con-
:flated with the notion of animation and the notion of a subtype of abstract
noun, since we dissect not only (perhaps dead) animate beings, but also
ideas, problems, etc. Destiny is neither an animate noun nor a member of
this particular subclass of abstract nouns; it is close enough in its valence
to both these classes, however, so that the conflation occurs, with conse-
quent enrichment of the expression. I would suggest that the notion "man-
kind" is elicited by the analogizing process. In considering Eliot's line, we
observe that the intransitive verb gutter is limited in its cooccurrence range
to just about the words (burning) candle or flame, so that self-possession
 INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DEVIATION IN POETRY 237
and flame are fused in a metaphor.2o As I see it, the whole question of
metaphor is bound up with conflations of the sort discussed here. Meta-
phors, then, can be described typologically, depending on the degree of re-
moteness in which the invoked analogue stands to the given form. It may
then turn out that a scale of metaphoric effectiveness can be correlated with
this typology.
Hunter College
New York, New York 10021

20 These would also be inventions in Ziff's terminology.