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acting the pernicious tendency toward the "automatization" of our
responses. And yet one may note here a certain shift of emphasis. To
Jakobson, the immediate critical problem is not the interaction
be–
tween the perceiving subject and the object perceived, but the rela–
tionship between the "sign" and the "referent," not the reader's
attitude toward reality, but the poet's attitude toward language. For
him
the task of locating the
differentia
of imaginative literature
be–
came fundamentally a matter of delimiting "poetic speech" from other
modes of discourse.
The earlier Formalist writings tended to confuse the issue
by
equating the dichotomy of poetic vs. "practical" (communicative)
language with the semanticists' distinction between cognitive and
emotive uses of speech. In what was obviously a concession to the
popular affective theory of poetry, the Formalist critics spoke of
poetic language as an "expressive" or alogical mode of communi–
cation. In his essay on "Poetry and the Trans-Sense Language,"
Shklovski bracketed together interjections, emotionally loaded archa–
isms, and euphonic devices such as alliteration. Jakubinski quoted
approvingly the theory about the potential expressiveness of pho–
nemes, advanced by the French student of verse, Maurice Grammont,
who tried to analyze the sound-patterns of French verse from the
standpoint of the emotional coloring of individual vowels and con–
sonants.
But this emotionalist position was soon discarded. In the course
of their struggle against Symbolist aesthetics, the Formalists became
increasingly wary of the mystical "correspondences" between the
sounds and the emotions which the "verbal magic" was to evoke.
"It is as erroneous," declared Jakobson, "to equate poetic speech
with emotive speech as it would be to reduce poetic euphony to
onomatopoeia." The poet can and does occasionally make use of
the resources of expressive language, but in doing so he furthers
his
own aims.
What are the "aims" of poetic speech, as distinguished from
those of an affective utterance? J akobson stated the matter with ut–
most clarity. He conceded that poetry is more akin to the emotive
than to the cognitive mode of discourse. In the former, he admitted,
the "relation between sound and meaning is more organic, more
intimate" than in cognitive language: the attempt to convey inef-
