SOURCE: “Structuralist Analysis of Poetry: Some Speculations,” in Lingua, Vol. 49, No. 1, September 1979, pp. 1–10.

In the following essay, Messing analyzes Corso's poem “Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway” in terms of Roman Jakobson's theories on poetics.

1.

During his long and active career Roman Jakobson has always maintained that linguistic and literary studies were closely related. In several publications from his Russian Formalist and Prague School days he dealt with such problems as the formal features of poetic language and the analysis of versification. After leaving Prague, however, he did not concern himself specifically with these topics for many years. Then came his famous lecture, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, originally delivered in 1958 (Jakobson 1960), which laid down a unique program for the linguistic analysis of poetry. He raised the twin claims that (a) poetics, which is mainly concerned with the question, ‘What makes a verbal message a work of art?’, merits the leading...