SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE AND ROMAN JAKOBSON ON THE MUSIC OF POETRY

Following the same discriminating process adopted by Coleridge and Jakobson, my thesis aims to define their conception of poetical language by means of consecutive binary distinctions. First, it examines their concept of "literariness" as the specific difference of verbal works of art from non-artistic verbal works. Second, it analyses their concept of "verse" in its specific difference from other verbal works of art. Such an interpretation overcomes both the reduction of Jakobson's theory to a conception of "art for art for art's sake" and the impass encountered by most scholars in the explication of Coleridge's conception of "poem." Literary formalism has been indiscriminately charged with denying the cognitive element of poetry. Coleridge and Jakobson, on the contrary, showed that the superior expressiveness of poetic utterances inheres not in the "superaddition" of poetic devices, but in the semantic intensity that they acquire in the literary work of art.