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LEO BERSANI
Jakobson's poetic theory is a linguistic formulation of a familiar
fact. What he calls "the superinducing of an equivalence principle
upon the word sequence" is another way of describing the superim–
posing, in verse, of metrical form on the more ordinary speech form.
Alliteration, rhyme, and meter of course provide the most obvious
examples of what Jakobson means by the "equivalence principle."
The repetition, in a linear (syntagmatic ) sequence, of the same letter
at the beginnings of words, or of the same sounds at the ends of dif–
ferent verses, or of the same number of syllables or stresses in dif–
ferent lines : these common data seem to justify J akobson's ingenious
formulation of poetic speech in terms of an interference of one of
the two fundamental poles of speech with the other. The argument
becomes more intricate - and more questionable - when Jakobson
writes: "Rhyme is only a particular, condensed case of a much
more general, we may even say the fundamental, problem of poetry,
namely parallelism." Jakobson wants to generalize the principle of
sound repetition or equivalence into a principle of equivalence on
all
levels of language - most crucially, on the semantic level. Gerard
Manley Hopkins is, as we might expect, frequently referred to in
Jakobson's essay; the latter quotes Hopkins's remark that in verse
". . . the more marked parallelism in structure ["structure" here
means rhyme, meter, rhythm, assonance, etc.] ... begets more marked
parallelism in the words and sense...." J akobson sums up his own
position in these terms : "Briefly, equivalence in sound, projected into
the sequence as its constitutive principle, inevitably involves semantic
equivalence, and on any linguistic level, any constituent of such a se–
quence prompts one of the two correlative experiences which Hopkins
neatly defines as 'comparison for likeness' sake' and 'comparison for
unlikeness' sake.' "
Now it goes without saying that rhyme in poetry is often a way
of drawing our attention to similarities or contrasts in meaning. Jakob–
son would hardly be receiving the attention he enjoys if he had told
us only that. I think that the source of his appeal for the French
structuralists lies in his holding out the promise that comparatively
simple observations about poetry can be the point of departure for
a scientific programming of all the possible forms and combinations
available to the human poetic function. (He has been optimistic about
"the possibility of writing a grammar of the meter's interaction with
the sense" in verse, and he has shown interest in attempts to establish,
