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the several standards of definite usage from which the poetic forms deviate
and which they assume. It is significant that the major categories of poetic
analysis are provided by the sister disciplines of logic and grammar.
Poetry is nothing but the general possibility of reformulating standards
and commonplaces: of course, not randomly, but knowingly, and in such
a way that the sense is not lost, but is preserved through a fanciful trial.
Influenced by Aristotle's definition of metaphor, most Western inven-
tories of the figures have been based largely on patterns of word usage:
morphemic figuration. Metaphor for Aristotle is indeed the basic figure,
for it is a word used in other than its literal sense. 29 Syntactical structures
likewise are distorted (for example, when the predicate precedes the
subject); in the common figure chiasmos, a second phrase is added show-
ing this reversal. Many figures are defined by the variations of letters
within a word: "e'er", "ne'er",30 "... when his golden hayre / In th'Ocean
billowes he hath bathed fayre In the Indian poetic, an important
place is reserved for grammatical categories; but even when allowances
are made for the variations in grammatical standard between Sanskrit
and Greek or English, a certain difference of emphasis is plain. There are
almost no figures which, properly speaking, are syntactically defined
(cf. yathāsamkhya, krama); only one figure (in one author) is defined
as a word usage (Vamana's vakrokti, which resembles Aristotle's meta-
phor). Patterns of letters are discussed only in reference to rhyming
and in certain kinds of puns. Indeed, the Indian figures were conceived
not at all from the ang of the word and its conventional usage, but rather
were oriented to the proposition, were fundamentally logical in concep-
tion. This difference of approach is crucial. It not only belies De's reduc-
tion of all figures to "tricks of phrasing", confusing poetic with a Western
rhetoric, but it states boldly the sense in which the system of alamkāras
represents an inventory of the poetic imagination-and defines poetic
utterance in its concrete universality.
INTRODUCTION
30
***
* Aristotle, Poetics, 1457b, 7ff. A modern view, very similar, in Wellek and Warren,
Theory of Literature, pp. 183ff.
The Tudor rhetoricians made figures out of the largely grammatical Greek principles
of euphony: syncope, aphacresis, crasis, metathesis, and the like. In English, the dimin-
ished capacity for such elisions made their often artificial use that much more striking.
On the grammatical underpinning of the poetic, see below, p. 22, pp. 64ff. For the
Tudor figures, see W. Taylor's "Tudor Figures of Rhetoric", unpublished dissertation
(Chicago, 1937).
11 Spenser, Prothalamion.
Even the figures which are explicitly grammatical in their reference define patterns,
repetitions, of usage; see below, pp. 64ff.
the several standards of definite usage from which the poetic forms deviate
and which they assume. It is significant that the major categories of poetic
analysis are provided by the sister disciplines of logic and grammar.
Poetry is nothing but the general possibility of reformulating standards
and commonplaces: of course, not randomly, but knowingly, and in such
a way that the sense is not lost, but is preserved through a fanciful trial.
Influenced by Aristotle's definition of metaphor, most Western inven-
tories of the figures have been based largely on patterns of word usage:
morphemic figuration. Metaphor for Aristotle is indeed the basic figure,
for it is a word used in other than its literal sense. 29 Syntactical structures
likewise are distorted (for example, when the predicate precedes the
subject); in the common figure chiasmos, a second phrase is added show-
ing this reversal. Many figures are defined by the variations of letters
within a word: "e'er", "ne'er",30 "... when his golden hayre / In th'Ocean
billowes he hath bathed fayre In the Indian poetic, an important
place is reserved for grammatical categories; but even when allowances
are made for the variations in grammatical standard between Sanskrit
and Greek or English, a certain difference of emphasis is plain. There are
almost no figures which, properly speaking, are syntactically defined
(cf. yathāsamkhya, krama); only one figure (in one author) is defined
as a word usage (Vamana's vakrokti, which resembles Aristotle's meta-
phor). Patterns of letters are discussed only in reference to rhyming
and in certain kinds of puns. Indeed, the Indian figures were conceived
not at all from the ang of the word and its conventional usage, but rather
were oriented to the proposition, were fundamentally logical in concep-
tion. This difference of approach is crucial. It not only belies De's reduc-
tion of all figures to "tricks of phrasing", confusing poetic with a Western
rhetoric, but it states boldly the sense in which the system of alamkāras
represents an inventory of the poetic imagination-and defines poetic
utterance in its concrete universality.
INTRODUCTION
30
***
* Aristotle, Poetics, 1457b, 7ff. A modern view, very similar, in Wellek and Warren,
Theory of Literature, pp. 183ff.
The Tudor rhetoricians made figures out of the largely grammatical Greek principles
of euphony: syncope, aphacresis, crasis, metathesis, and the like. In English, the dimin-
ished capacity for such elisions made their often artificial use that much more striking.
On the grammatical underpinning of the poetic, see below, p. 22, pp. 64ff. For the
Tudor figures, see W. Taylor's "Tudor Figures of Rhetoric", unpublished dissertation
(Chicago, 1937).
11 Spenser, Prothalamion.
Even the figures which are explicitly grammatical in their reference define patterns,
repetitions, of usage; see below, pp. 64ff.