Unreadable Poetry - A Stylistic Model PDF

Davide
Castig
lione
Difficu
IN PO lty
E T RY
A St
ylistic
Model
Difficulty in Poetry
“Castiglione’s work is a triumph of clarity and rigour in a field all too often
plagued by vagueness. His comprehensive account of prior approaches to
poetic difficulty is both respectful and critical. He then demonstrates, via
experiments and clear exposition, how we can investigate a complex literary
phenomenon such as poetic difficulty without sacrificing scientific standards.”
—Lesley Jeffries, University of Huddersfield, UK
“Drawing on a range of scholarship across stylistics, cognitive poetics, and lit-

erary studies, and grounded in the detailed analysis of numerous examples, this
monograph presents a rigorous and comprehensive framework for the analysis
of difficulty in poetry. This original and significant work will be of interest to
researchers and advanced students across literary studies and stylistics.”
—Nigel McLoughlin, University of Gloucestershire, UK
Davide Castiglione
Difficulty in Poetry
A Stylistic Model
Davide Castiglione
Department of English Philology
Vilnius University
Vilnius, Lithuania
ISBN 978-3-319-97000-4 ISBN 978-3-319-97001-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949314
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

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To my parents,
with love and gratitude
Acknowledgements
Wallace Stevens’ ‘What We See Is What We Think’ is reprinted by

permission of Random House and Faber and Faber. ‘What We See Is
What We Think’ from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace
Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed
1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an
imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of
Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Susan Howe’s, ‘The Midnight’, copyright © 2003 Susan Howe.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Extracts from ‘Speech! Speech!’ by Geoffrey Hill, copyright © 2002
by Geoffrey Hill. Reprinted with permission of Counterpoint Press.
Dylan Thomas’ ‘When once the twilight locks no longer’ is printed
with permission of Weidenfeld & Nicolson and New Directions
Publishing Corp copyright © 1939 by New Directions Publishing Corp.
Charles Bernstein’s ‘Safe Methods of Business’, copyright © by Charles
Bernstein is reprinted with permission from the author and reprinted
from Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1987; rpt. Salt Publishing 2004.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Bibliography 9
Part I Theorising Poetic Difficulty
2 Previous Routes to Difficulty in Poetry 13

2.1 Scholarly Traditions 13
2.2 Side Themes 36
2.3 Summary and Conclusion 57
Bibliography 60
3 New Coordinates of Difficulty: An Interdisciplinary

Framework 65
3.1 Introduction: Redefining Poetic Difficulty 65
3.2 Empiricism and the Scientific Method 66
3.3 Stylistics, Foregrounding and Systemic-Functional
Grammar 69
3.4 Language Processing and Comprehension 74
ix
x
Contents
3.5 Components of Significance and Literary

Comprehension 79
3.6 A Pragmatics of Reading: Relevance Theory 85
Bibliography 90
4 Genes of Difficulty: The Indicators 95

4.1 Readerly Indicators 96
4.2 Linguistic Indicators 102
Bibliography 159
Part II Analysing Poetic Difficulty
5 Organisms of Difficulty: The Data 169

5.1 Selecting Primary Data: The Corpus of Poems 170
5.2 Eliciting Secondary Data the Empirical Tests and
Readers’ Background 181
Bibliography 192
6 Processing Baseline: The Easy Poem 197

6.1 Establishing the Category: Mark Strand’s ‘The Late
Hour’ 198
6.2 Testing the Category: John Betjeman’s ‘Loneliness’ 213
6.3 Conclusion 217
Bibliography 219
7 Transient Difficulty: Utterances Towards Obscurity 223

7.1 Establishing the Category: Wallace Stevens’s
‘What We See Is What We Think’ 225
7.2 Testing the Category: Hart Crane’s ‘at Melville’s
Tomb’ and Dylan Thomas’s ‘Once the Twilight
Locks no Longer’ 241
Contents
xi
7.3 Problematising the Category: Geoffrey Hill’s

Stanza 33 254
7.4 Conclusion 271
Bibliography 275
8 Permanent Difficulty: Against Thematic Significance 279

8.1 Difficulty as Literal Resistance: Formal Symbolism as
Icon of Disorder 280
8.2 Difficulty as Persuasive Nonsense: Semantic Deviance
and Argumentation 316
8.3 Conclusion 332
Bibliography 333
9 General Conclusions 337

9.1 Integrating the Main Approaches 338
9.2 Addressing Side Themes 348
9.3 Envoy 364
Bibliography 364
Author Index 367
Concept Index 375

List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 A definition of difficulty in poetry 66

Fig. 3.2 Stages in the development of a science (Adapted from
Cohen et al. 2000: 16) 68
Fig. 3.3 Kintsch’s construction-integration model (Adapted from
Harley 2008) 76
Fig. 3.4 Overview of the frameworks at work in the model 88
Fig. 5.1 The pencil-and-paper questionnaire
for the comprehension task 183
Fig. 5.2 On-screen instructions for the reading task 186
Fig. 5.3 The personal questionnaire (Study 1) 187
Fig. 5.4 The personal questionnaire (Study 2) 189
Fig. 6.1 ‘The Late Hour’: breakdown of easiness (text effects
and lack of LIDs) 212
Fig. 6.2 ‘Loneliness’: breakdown of easiness (text effects
and lack of LIDs) 216
Fig. 7.1 Linguistic classification of enjambment types
(Adapted from Levin 1971: 183) 236
Fig. 7.2 ‘What We See Is What We Think’: breakdown
of difficulty (text effects and LIDs) 240
Fig. 7.3 ‘At Melville’s Tomb’: breakdown of difficulty (text effects
and LIDs) 253
xiii
xiv
List of Figures
Fig. 7.4 ‘When Once the Twilight Locks No Longer’: breakdown

Fig. 7.5 Stanza 33 and ‘The Late Hour’: two interpretive comments
by a participant 269
Fig. 7.6 Stanza 33: breakdown of difficulty (text effects and LIDs) 271
Fig. 8.1 Extract from Canto LXXXI: breakdown of difficulty (text
effects and LIDs) 294
Fig. 8.2 ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’: an interpretive comment
by a participant 304
Fig. 8.3 ‘Never to be’ in discourse: data from COCA 309
Fig. 8.4 ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’: breakdown of difficulty
(text effects and LIDs) 315
Fig. 8.5 Extract from Patriarchal Poetry: breakdown of difficulty
(text effects and LIDs) 315
Fig. 8.6 ‘A Box’: breakdown of difficulty (text effects and LIDs) 330
Fig. 8.7 ‘Safe Methods of Business’ (first stanza): breakdown
Fig. 9.1 Difficulty: sequential application of the model 339
Fig. 9.2 Participants’ enjoyment of five poems 341
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Main conceptual differences between obscurity

and difficulty 56
Table 4.1 RIDs according to previous empirical research 98
Table 4.2 RIDs and posited prototypical text effects 102
Table 4.3 LID 1—Orthographic deviation 105
Table 4.4 LID 2—Graphological deviation 108
Table 4.5 LID 3—Morphological deviation 110
Table 4.6 LID 4—Phonological foregrounding 114
Table 4.7 Sample behavioural data on imageability from the MRC
Psycholinguistic Database 120
Table 4.8 LID 5—Difficulty of vocabulary—relevant dimensions 125
Table 4.9 Common source and target domains 134
Table 4.10 LID 6—Semantic dimensions 137
Table 4.11 LID 7—Syntactic dimensions 145
Table 4.12 LID 8—Aspects of discourse 157
Table 5.1 The corpus of poems: an overview 173
Table 6.1 Wordlist for responses to Q3—‘The Late Hour’ 200
Table 7.1 Wordlist for responses to Q3—‘What We See
Is What We Think’ 227
xv
xvi
List of Tables
Table 7.2 Transitivity analysis of deviant verb–noun collocations

in ‘At Melville’s Tomb’ and in ‘Once the Twilight Locks
No Longer’ 244
Table 7.3 Wordlist for responses to Q3—Stanza 33 257
Table 7.4 Sample occurrences of ‘Yes I know’ in the COCA 259
Table 8.1 Wordlist for responses to Q3—Pound’s extract from
Canto LXXXI 282
Table 8.2 Wordlist for responses to Q3—Howe’s ‘A Small Swatch
Bluish-Green’ 298
Table 8.3 Head–modifier parsing possibilities in the first
prepositional phrase of ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’ 300
Table 9.1 The four typologies: breakdown of difficulty based
on LIDs and RIDs 345
1
Introduction
Try this everyday test: get hold of someone and ask them if they read
poetry habitually, especially poetry written from the last century to the
present day. If the answer is a more or less embarrassed (or even defi-
antly uttered) ‘no, not really’ (which will be in most cases), then ask
them why. The most likely complaint or excuse will run along the lines
of ‘it’s too difficult, too complicated, it makes little sense to me’. At this
point, you may object that, as poetry appears to be a fundamentally
elite genre, you too should be more selective in choosing your inter-
viewees, and so look for someone highly educated. You find this person,
she/he has various interests and is well read, and yet the answers you get
are more or less the same.
You are not easily put off, so in our third scenario, you go to a
poetry reading group. This scenario can be made real. While anecdo-
tal evidence is not the soundest of proofs, I will run such a risk in an
introduction. In 2014, I was a regular member of a Nottingham-based
poetry reading group. We met once a month, during which time we had
to read one collection by a contemporary poet. From our chats, I real-
ised that some members were reading other collections in parallel, just
for their own pleasure. These were strong poetry readers then. I recall
© The Author(s) 2019 1

D. Castiglione, Difficulty in Poetry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1_1
2
D. Castiglione
this particular meeting during which, to my surprise, some members

repeatedly resorted to the word difficult, which they mostly glossed as
‘hard to understand’ or ‘what does the poet mean?’
As I had been researching into poetic difficulty for some years already,
I became even more persuaded that such a subject should not be the
preserve of the specialist but may be relevant to a wider audience. I wish
I had brought a recorder with me, but nonetheless in that meeting I
diverted myself with mentally mapping their intuitions onto the stylistic
and processing model that I was developing and that it is presented in
this book. And two years later, in 2016, many of my students at Vilnius
University referred to Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore and W. S. Graham
as difficult solely based on their poems, that is, without having previ-
ously read any criticism on them. Had they, they would have realised
they were not alone in their assessment.
What is suggested by this mixture of hypothetical scenarios and real-
life anecdotes is that difficult (like its most direct rival obscure) is one
of those ‘powerfully synthesising and summarising evaluative terms’
(Toolan 2014: 15) capable of condensing a range of effects that are
clearly perceived if imprecisely verbalised. What they also suggest is
that their typically negative connotation is not a given, but will proba-
bly (though not always) fade into a less judgmental attitude with more
expert and/or less prejudiced readers. In Perloff’s words: ‘the stumbling
block […] is not so much obscurity as convention’ (1991: 205). While
prior extensive exposure to poetry may shift one’s aesthetic reaction to
difficulty from rejection to curiosity or even approval, hardly can the
impact and lingering taste of difficulty be overstated: sensitivity to dif-
ficulty is not so easily silenced. That is perhaps why even professional
critics every so often rely on this imprecise, unduly connoted, yet some-
how apt term. The ubiquity of this usage will become compellingly clear
throughout Chapter 2.
The derivational transition from difficult to difficulty is more insid-
ious than it may appear at first glance, for it turns disparate localised
attributions into a conceptual space where all such attributions coex-
ist, in reality or as potential. This book is about difficulty in poetry: it
details the linguistic conditions for its emergence, the cognitive mech-
anisms involved when facing difficult poems, the range of preferential
1 Introduction
3
readerly outcomes and some key aesthetic typologies arising from the
dynamic interaction of the aforementioned factors. It is therefore
interested in the essence of difficulty through and beyond its multifari-
ous real-world manifestations. Difficulty is approached through a new
model that, once consistently applied, will originate a theory of diffi-
culty in the scientific sense of the word: a machine for testable predic-
tions built around a coherent set of falsifiable hypotheses (Popper 1994
[1979]). Its aims are descriptive and explanatory, rather than normative
and exegetic: they are less about what difficult poems supposedly mean
than about how they mean differently. Nothing like this was previously
available for difficulty, as shown throughout Chapter 2.
The book is divided into two parts. The first is titled ‘Theorising
Difficulty in Poetry’, it comprises Chapters 2–4, and it takes almost
half of the book’s length. Here, I review the received notions of diffi-
culty (Chapter 2), propose a definition-driven interdisciplinary frame-
work within which to locate this phenomenon (Chapter 3) and detail
a new analytical model stemming from this framework and preliminary
to the analyses proper (Chapter 4). The second part is titled ‘Analysing
Difficulty in Poetry’ and comprises Chapters 5–8. In this part, I present
the data from poetry and from reader-response tests (Chapter 5) and in
the three chapters that follow analyse different typologies of difficulty
through some representative texts: from the converse of difficult, that
is, the accessible poem (Chapter 6), to the difficult-obscure (Chapter 7)
and the difficult-resistant and difficult-nonsensical poem (Chapter 8).
The general conclusions (Chapter 9) contextualise the key analytical
findings against the background of previous knowledge, showing how
the model advances our understanding of poetic difficulty. In the para-
graphs that follow a less cursory outline of each chapter is given.
Chapter 2 reviews previous approaches to difficulty and related
notions (especially ambiguity and obscurity), identifying three main
traditions: the typological, the reader oriented and the stylistic. While
the merits of each approach are acknowledged, a much tighter integra-
tion is advocated so as to avoid their shortcomings: a top-down spec-
ulation that is over-reliant on the scholars’ own intuitions (typological
approach); a generally dismissive attitude towards the text and an occa-
sionally misleading idealisation of readers (reader oriented); a reluctance
4
D. Castiglione
towards general explanations, with too context dependent a picture of

how single linguistic features contribute to global aesthetic effects (sty-
listic). The second part of the chapter discusses more contingent, scat-
tered remarks on difficulty, clustering them in side themes with a social
or philosophical nature: the pluralism of difficulty, poets on their own
difficulty, philosophical influences, elitism, intentionality, the rep-
resentation problem, the meaningfulness–meaninglessness dilemma and
the problematic difficulty–obscurity divide. Each approach and side
theme is then re-examined in the General Conclusions, so the book has
a circular structure.
Chapter 3 opens with a new definition of difficulty in poetry. This is
both the point of arrival of the theoretical efforts of Chapter 2 and the
guiding principle for the choice of the main frameworks (and of the dis-
ciplines within which they have been elaborated) on which the model
will be based. First of all, I advocate an empirical and scientific method
whereby difficulty is treated as a real-world phenomenon rather than as
an ineffable quality. As the manifestation of the phenomenon (the expe-
rience of difficulty) is a strong function of a poem’s textuality, stylistics
is the discipline best suited to investigate it. Within or around stylis-
tics, foregrounding theory is used to filter out salient features that con-
tribute to this effect, while systemic-functional-linguistics provides the
required descriptive apparatus. As difficulty is articulated by readers, the
cognitive impact of certain textual configurations is postulated through
models of language processing and by appealing to psycholinguistic
findings. These models are implemented with an interpretive stratum
(significance) which is deemed central to poetry. Following structural-
ist scholars, significance is reinterpreted as the outcome of higher-order
inferences that fulfil expectations of literary relevance. And speaking of
relevance, Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995 [1986]) is also
borne in mind insofar as it offers a framework to understand the pre-
carious trade-off between the energy investment required by difficult
poems and the promise of aesthetic fulfilment.
Chapter 4 is the core of the book: if I were forced to save only one
chapter, it would be this one. This is because it minutely describes
the model that subtitles the book, enabling other scholars to apply it
consistently. In doing so, it brings stylistics as close as it can get to the
1 Introduction
5
scientific principle of replication. The skeleton of the model rests on an

intuitive distinction between readerly indicators of difficulties (RIDs)
and linguistic indicators of difficulties (LIDs). Within an experimental
setting, these may be conceived of as the two global variables of diffi-
culty. This distinction echoes the one between text features and effects
in Dixon et al. (1993), with a crucial difference: specifying a single text
effect (difficulty) allows one to significantly narrow down the set of lin-
guistic features and the possible readerly outcomes. The RIDs and the
LIDs are closed sets: while future research may expand or refine them,
their number will still be manageable for analytical purposes. The
scope for expansion is admittedly much bigger for RIDs than for LIDs,
since most of my efforts were put into detailing the linguistic basis of
difficulty.
RIDs are, for instance, statements of rejection, longer reading times
and markers of interpretive hesitation or multiplicity. They have been
derived from a meta-analysis of empirical studies on poetry read-
ing as well as from readerly data elicited by specifically designed tests
(see Sect. 4.1). As for the LIDs, I identify a total of thirty-three (e.g.
novel metaphor, syntactic ambiguity and lack of narrativity) cutting
across eight levels, from orthography to discourse. The LIDs are spe-
cific enough that their identification will be reasonably unproblematic
for stylisticians; a more fine-grained taxonomy (e.g. syntactic ambigu-
ity either as word-class ambiguity or ambiguity of syntactic functions)
would bring their number well above one hundred. Crucially, proto-
typical cognitive effects are given for each LID based on the process-
ing operations they are most likely to challenge. These assumptions are
themselves based on psycholinguistic evidence or are implicated by the
comprehension models reviewed in Chapter 3. A description of poten-
tial effects is thus incorporated in the model: examining the LIDs in a
poem already allows the researcher to predict what kind of challenges
readers will most likely face.
Chapter 5 presents the data—and the rationale for its selection—
to which the model will be applied. Eleven representative poems
(or shorter extracts for longer poems) by ten authors are chosen for
this purpose. The authors are: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wallace
Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Geoffrey Hill,
6
D. Castiglione
Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein for difficulty; the accessible Mark
Strand and John Betjeman work as a sort of control group or baseline
measure. Regrettably, for want of space and due to other considerations,
poems by other important difficult authors are not included for anal-
ysis (e.g. T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, John Ashbery
and Jeremy Prynne). Nothing, of course, prevents these and other poets
from becoming the focus of future publications. Even so, the corpus
has a strong methodological advantage over previous studies: it rests on
intersubjective critical judgment, not solely on the intuition of a single
critic. Indeed, all the authors listed above have already been discussed
as difficult by at least one professional critic. The second part of the
chapter outlines two empirical studies that provide the RIDs for a sub-
set of the poems analysed. The first study, a pencil-and-paper task, aims
at exploring the degree of comprehension elicited by the poems. In the
second, an online reading task, reading times are recorded to measure
the resistance opposed by the poems used in the first study.
Chapter 6 is the first of three analytical chapters and illustrates how
a model built around the notion of difficulty is also capable of explain-
ing the lack of difficulty itself. Strand’s ‘The Late Hour’ and Betjeman’s
‘Loneliness’ are virtually devoid of LIDs. By contrast, they feature aids
to comprehension, processing and interpretation in the dimensions of
accessibility, readability and interpretability, respectively. Shared cultural
schema, immersive techniques and concrete settings enhance accessi-
bility; syntax/line match, narrativity, repetition and stanzaic structure
enhance readability; interpretability is ensured by an appeal to intrin-
sically meaningful themes which can be retrieved top-down as they rest
on such schemas. This is an important point, because even accessible
poems cannot be as accessible and straightforward as, say, a business
letter or a recipe. Instead, they draw on a ‘ready-made’ sort of literary
meaning. High intersubjective topic agreement, high reading speed and
a tendency to closely paraphrase or summarise the text are some of the
most notable RIDs elicited by this aesthetic type.
The four poems analysed in Chapter 7 encapsulate dramatically dif-
ferent means of meaning-making, which makes them properly dif-
ficult according to the model. The poems are Stevens’s ‘What We See
Is What We Think’, Crane’s ‘At Melville’s Tomb’, Thomas’s ‘When
1 Introduction
7
Once the Twilight Locks No Longer’ and Hill’s stanza 33 from the
collection Speech! Speech! Their accessibility is thwarted by reliance on
textual schemas rather than on cultural schemas. For instance, while it
takes little effort to infer the topical ‘forlorn lover’ schema in Strand’s
poem, Stevens’s poem alludes to the more conceptual ‘parable’ textual
schema. Accordingly, their themes feel less embodied, more mediated by
semiosis: the relationship between senses and consciousness (Stevens),
a mythological rendition of the creative process (Thomas), an indirect
homage to a beloved writer (Crane) and a satire on media power and
the degradation of language (Hill).
These poems produce greater resistance at the readability level too,
mostly due to a systemic syntax/line mismatch and a more extensive use
of novel metaphors (which also affect accessibility by creating ideational
indeterminacy). Although present, significance—the key precondition
for interpretability—requires to be built bottom-up from the specifics
of the text rather than activated from pre-existent schemas. In short,
these poems instantiate several LIDs (especially local, word-to-clause
level ones) and the RIDs they prompt indicate a looser grasp of their
meaning: lower intersubjective agreement, longer reading times, ten-
dency to elaborate rather than paraphrase content. Their type is that
of transient difficulty: their individualised meaningfulness engenders
obscurity, thus favouring an exegetic attitude expected to yield rewards
that may offset the initial investment of cognitive energy.
The five poems in Chapter 8 enhance difficulty even further. Besides
intensifying some of the challenges common in the type of transient
difficulty, they undermine interpretability itself. They do so in essen-
tially two ways: by renouncing textual schemas and even textuality alto-
gether (Stein’s extract from Patriarchal Poetry, Howe’s ‘A Small Swatch
Bluish-Green’); or by using them formally, either devoid of their func-
tion (Pound’s extract from Canto LXXXI ) or playfully turning them
against their own function (Stein’s ‘A box’, Bernstein’s extract from ‘Safe
Methods of Business’). Significance is thus put into question, although
it survives in a reduced and deferred form: that of formal symbolism,
that is, of inferencing on form itself as a compensatory strategy for the
impossibility of meaningful access into the poems. This I have called the
type of permanent difficulty, for the initial impairment finds no relief
8
D. Castiglione
in thematic significance: experiencing and re-experiencing the resistance

of the text and its mostly verbal, incoherent and non-representational
world is what these poems seem to be asking us to do.
This radical attitude shows in a systematic deployment of discourse
and syntax LIDs, with a simultaneous loss of importance of lexical and
semantic LIDs: while this may appear counterintuitive, it is explained
by the fact that in this type language is neither a vessel for plain com-
munication (like in accessible poems) nor for oblique communication
(like in transient difficult or obscure poems); by contrast, language is
generally used against or irrespective of its communicative function.
This is why typical strategies of sense-making fail or are barely applica-
ble here, as signalled by the kind of RIDs elicited: statements of rejec-
tion, admissions of helplessness, an acknowledgment of iconic chaos or
deliberate nonsensicality, or at best very eisegetical (reader-centred) and
erratic interpretations.1
Finally, Chapter 9 summarises the theoretical and analytical advances
of the model by re-examining the issues in Chapter 2. I show that the
model is a holistically integrated structure that brings together stylis-
tics, reader-response criticism and typological approaches, limiting their
downsides while enhancing their strengths. For stylistics, I propose a
replicable, stepwise method of difficulty analysis; for reader-response
criticism suggestions for future experimental testing and an expanded
range of RIDs; for typological criticism a new aesthetic taxonomy of
difficulty that is both theoretically sound and empirically testable. In
addition, I gather the insights provided by the model on various neigh-
bouring regions of difficulty. For instance, the apparently relativist
pluralism of difficulty is recast in combinatorial terms, depending on
the countless configuration of LIDs in each poem; elitism is linked to
LIDs that emphasise long-term memory (e.g. specialised vocabulary
or intertextuality) over short-term memory (e.g. semantic incongru-
ence and syntactic ambiguity); intentionality is grounded in discourse
features that, by projecting a unitary speaker onto the text, make read-
ers approach the poem as an utterance endowed with communicative
purpose; the parallel with abstract art (lack of figurative representation)
is grounded in LIDs such as pronouns deprived of reference and novel
metaphors, all of them variously impacting on the ideational level; the
1 Introduction
9
meaningfulness–meaninglessness dilemma is linked to stylistic strate-

gies that pursue thematic significance (e.g. abstract nouns and generic
sentences) or else eschew it (lack of coherence, lack of informativity and
ill-formed syntax). In addition to these issues, I outline future research
paths investigating the re-reading of difficult poems (which could shed
further light on the transient vs. permanent difficulty type) as well as
a revision of the model that would enable the analysis of difficulty in
non-poetic and even in non-literary genres.
Note
1. Of course, these typologies are more internally various and their bound-
aries fuzzier than is possible to show within the word limits of this
introduction.
Bibliography
Dixon, P., Bortolussi, M., Twilley, L. C., & Leung, A. (1993). Literary
Processing and Interpretation: Towards Empirical Foundations. Poetics, 22,
5–33.
Perloff, M. (1991). Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Popper, K. (1994 [1979]). Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sperber D., & Wilson, D. (1995 [1986]). Relevance: Communication and
Cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Toolan, M. (2014). The Theory and Philosophy of Stylistics. In P. Stockwell
& S. Whiteley (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (pp. 13–31).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Part I
Theorising Poetic Difficulty
2
Previous Routes to Difficulty in Poetry
This chapter sets out to provide a full-blown identikit of poetic

difficulty as a worthy if elusive object of scholarly research (Sect. 2.1)
and as a central aesthetic and cultural concept (Sect. 2.2). By the end of
the chapter, the reader will have acquired a full awareness of the impli-
cations and ramifications of difficulty, as well as of rival concepts such as
ambiguity and obscurity. This broad background is also essential to fully
appreciate the theoretical advances brought by the new model that will
be developed and applied in subsequent chapters.
2.1 Scholarly Traditions

Difficulty in poetry is a complex concept to handle. As a consequence,
scholars have approached it from different angles and starting from
different assumptions. In this section, three main scholarly traditions
are identified and reviewed: the typological, the stylistic and the
reception-oriented. The overall architecture of the section is therefore
conceptual, as it gathers studies that are similar in some important
respects—be it their emphasis, aim, approach or a combination of them.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1_2
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D. Castiglione
The contributions of each tradition are discussed at length, their

strengths and shortcomings carefully assessed. Equal emphasis is given to
the internal variety of each tradition and to the interconnections across
traditions, with their fertile cross-breeding of ideas in the face of substan-
tial shifts and reorientation of concerns. In addition, such conceptual
exposition is balanced by a chronological one that allows one to trace,
within each tradition, the development of ideas, the evolution of frame-
works and the falling into disuse of certain terms to the advantage of
others.
2.1.1 Typological Approaches
Typological approaches strive to comprehend literary phenomena by

decomposing them into a few major subtypes, typically according to
external (assumption-driven) criteria that precede textual analysis.
Before embarking on their studies, critics from this camp may call to
mind the zoologist before Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) was
published: they had no taxonomic system, or at best a coarse-grained
one, to classify their specimens. This analogy is not to imply that sci-
entific taxonomy and typological criticism work alike with respect to
their method of classification. But the drive behind both enterprises
ultimately boils down to the desire of imposing some ordering principle
onto a multifarious reality.
With his landmark study Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), William
Empson is the first critic who attempts to systematically elucidate a phe-
nomenon intuitively related to obscurity and difficulty. His preliminary
definition concentrates on the communicative excess associated with
ambiguity:
‘Ambiguity’ itself means an indecision as to what you mean, an intention

to mean several things, a probability that one or other or both of two
things has been meant, and the fact that a statement has several
meanings. (1930: 7)
Ambiguity is seen as a multifaceted phenomenon, for Empson out-

lines four alternative but non-mutually exclusive scenarios in order to
2 Previous Routes to Difficulty in Poetry
15
encompass it. The first two are coloured psychologically (‘indecision’,

‘intention’); the third and fourth are instead presented as independent
from human agency (‘probability’, ‘the fact’).
This problematic divide partly underpins Empson’s classification,
making it rather erratic. On the one hand, Empson’s types are some-
times associated with figures of speech from classical rhetoric; thus, they
are supposedly easy to tell apart: once the rhetorical trope is recognised,
the type of ambiguity follows. For instance, under the first type Empson
groups ‘comparison’ and ‘false antithesis’ (1930: 28); the third type
encompasses the pun, the allegory and extended comparisons; tautology
and contradiction belong to the sixth type. On the other hand, impres-
sionistic psychological claims often dictate how the types are to be dis-
tinguished or mapped onto poetic passages: ‘different readers apply their
consciousness in different ways, and a line which taken alone would be
of the third type many become of the fourth type in its setting’ (1930:
168); ‘an ambiguity of the fifth type occurs when the author is discov-
ering the idea in the act of writing, or not holding it all in his mind at
once’ (1930: 195). The vague phrasing of these quotes, especially the
latter, is a hindrance to the applicability of the typology.
A closer look at how Empson discriminates between the third type
and fourth type helps further uncover the unresolved tension between
text and reader, rhetoric and posited effect. In the third type, ‘two ideas,
which are connected only by being both relevant in the context, can be
given in one word simultaneously’ (1930: 130), whereas in the fourth
type ‘two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among them-
selves’ (1930: 168). The two criteria at work are the blend (third type)
versus conflict (fourth type) of meanings, and the size of the linguis-
tic unit affected (word vs. statement—statements tend to be of clausal
length). Yet, sidestepping his own definitions, Empson invokes as deci-
sive the slippery criterion of authorial self-awareness: ‘I put into the
third type cases where one was intended to be mainly conscious of a
verbal subtlety’ (1930: 168). Of course, the shortcomings of Empson’s
classification appear all the more manifest from our current vantage
point, after notable advances in linguistics and categorisation studies
have been made (e.g. Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory 1973).
16
D. Castiglione
No less than three decades later, John Press (1963) contributes a

far-reaching study on the equally contentious issue of obscurity in
poetry. Press’s obscurity is reminiscent of Empson’s ambiguity in that
the former critic locates obscurity in a ‘departure from the common-
place language of daily speech’ (1963: 11) and the latter locates ambi-
guity in ‘the degree of logical or grammatical disorder’ of a poem
(1930: 62). The two critics however diverge in their ontological atti-
tude, that is, in how they characterise the very existence of these
concepts. Empson views ambiguity in essentialist terms as a real, tex-
tually and mentally embodied phenomenon, whereas Press polemically
describes obscurity as ‘one of those convenient platonic abstractions…
into which men retreat to guard their prejudices from the blast of
uncomfortable facts’ (1963: 2). The critic’s circumspection does not
prevent him from exploring extensively both the textual side of obscu-
rity and its contextual embeddedness, as indicated by the chapter titles:
‘vocabulary and syntax’, ‘reference’, ‘themes and images’, ‘common read-
ers’, ‘indifferent writers’, ‘private countries’ and ‘public worlds’. The
exhaustiveness they suggest should not be mistaken for systematicity:
what Press provides is not so much a typology of obscurity as an ency-
clopaedic catalogue of local arguments. Obscurity is associated, among
other things, with ‘recondite vocabulary’ (1963: 12), word order (18),
‘complete fidelity to the intricate nature of his [John Donne’s] cho-
sen themes’ (25), ‘shadowy and vague’ purport (31), ‘compression of
thought’ (33), ‘want of meaning’ (34), even to shifts in the world and
society (45) and cultural differences (48). No matter how insightful the
single remarks, their open-endedness threatens to dissolve the bounda-
ries of the notion and along with them the notion itself.
Empson’s typological enterprise would have been truly revived only
in 1978, when philosophically minded scholar George Steiner pub-
lished ‘On Difficulty’. In this influential essay, difficulty is given titu-
lar prominence over ambiguity and obscurity for the first time, and as
Vincent remarks, ‘He [Steiner] has, after all, become an unavoidable fig-
ure for critics discussing difficulty’ (2003: 8). Steiner’s starting point is
the very much common-sense question ‘what do we mean when we say:
‘this poem, or this passage in this poem is difficult?’ (1978: 18; emphasis
is the author’s). In order to answer it, he develops a fourfold typology
17
that is appealing on account of its immediacy of application. His four

types—contingent, modal, tactical and ontological—are ordered
according to a cline of increasing abstraction: from the written artefact
to the very conditions of its existence.
Contingent difficulty is determined by a mismatch between the
encyclopaedic knowledge presupposed by a text and that available to
readers. Steiner locates this type in the lexical level (e.g. rare or technical
words) and argues that solving a contingent difficulty by looking it up
in a dictionary or encyclopaedia leads to empirical understanding but
not to ‘genuine comprehension’ (1978: 28). This type is clearly sensi-
tive to cultural and chronological changes that create gaps between texts
and readers, thus paralleling one of Press’s arguments mentioned earlier.
Modal difficulty has to do with the reader’s inability to cope with unfa-
miliar modes of expression. Vincent (2003: 5) glosses it by writing that
‘the reader experiences the state of not inhabiting the subjectivity, or
epistemic position, that could make sense of a poem’. As I understand
it, this difficulty type is also likely to involve the notion of literary com-
petence, including readers’ familiarity with the conventions regulating
literary production and reception (Culler 2002 [1975]). Tactical dif-
ficulty ‘has its source in the writer’s will or in the failure of adequacy
between his intention and his performative means’ (1978: 33). This
type concerns those stylistic devices contrived by poets and assumedly
resulting in difficulty. Vincent attempts to question it by showing how
intentionality, associated by Steiner with the tactical level (‘the writer’s
will ’), also applies to the contingent level (on intentionality, see
Sect. 2.2.3). To do so, he mentions an interview in which John Ashbery
admitted of having purposefully used an unfamiliar word, which should
belong to the contingent type according to Steiner (Vincent 2003:
7). Vincent’s criticism seems misdirected, though, as Steiner nowhere
claims that the contingent type—despite its very name—excludes
intentionality. A fairer objection would rather contest Steiner’s deci-
sion to illustrate his tactical difficulty through syntactic and grammat-
ical examples only, possibly to preserve a neat but artificial one-to-one
correspondence between linguistic levels and difficulty types. Finally,
ontological difficulty ‘confront[s] us with blank questions about the
nature of human speech, about the status of significance’ (1978: 41).
18
D. Castiglione
Steiner locates its roots in the nineteenth-century disenchantment of

the artist and the society, spurring poets such as Stephane Mallarmé and
Gerald Manley Hopkins to embrace a poetics of the exoteric in order
to break ‘the chain of exemplary inheritance’ (43) originating with
Homer’s public-focused narrative.
Although Steiner assesses his own classification as provisional, he
appears confident that its types, or a combination of them, can accom-
modate all the difficulties experienced by readers (1978: 47). And
indeed, his remains the most solid attempt at a typological classifi-
cation of this kind. Its applicability can be glimpsed, for instance, in
Alan Baker’s review of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry collection Speech! Speech!
(2002). Without citing Steiner nor drawing upon his terminology,
Baker explains the difficulty of Hill by reference to ‘the mass of learn-
ing applied to it’ (contingent difficulty) and the difficulty of Prynne by
reference to his writing techniques (tactical difficulty). Consider also
how closely this remark by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky pre-
dates Steiner’s modal difficulty: ‘the usual poetic language for Pushkin’s
contemporaries was the elegant style of Derzhavin; but Pushkin’s style,
because it seemed trivial then, was unexpectedly difficult for them’
(1998 [1917]: 21).
Even though Steiner’s is a strong typology, it is made necessar-
ily crude by its essay-length treatment, as the critic himself readily
acknowledges (1978: 47). Each type is so broad and internally fuzzy
that it would warrant the writing of a monograph on its own—indeed,
the present work could be partly seen as an in-depth systematisation of
tactical difficulty. As a consequence, the appealing ease at classifying the
difficulty of poetic texts adds little to our qualitative understanding of
the textual mechanisms producing it, of the cognitive impact they exert
on readers and of their interaction.
My goal in reviewing these pioneering works in ambiguity, obscu-
rity and difficulty has mainly been to expose their theoretical or meth-
odological shortcomings, which appear justifiable in the light of the
complexity of the matters involved. These shortcomings are significant
because, along with an increasing distrust for essentialism brought by
post-structuralism, they might have discouraged later critics from
19
embarking on comparably wide-ranging studies that revolve around

such elusive concepts.
2.1.2 Stylistic Approaches
What the previous review has left unmentioned is the centrality that
the three critics accord to the poetic text. Indeed, Empson, Press and
Steiner all extensively engage with close reading practices, drawing on a
wide range of canonical authors—from Geoffrey Chaucer and William
Shakespeare to Percy Bysshe Shelley and Gerard Manley Hopkins, up to
Wystan Hugh Auden and Dylan Thomas. Still, their readings are sub-
jected to the proposal of a theoretical edifice (Empson, Steiner) or form
the basis for an array of digressive reflections (Press). In short, they are
overtly influenced by the critics’ own ideas and intellectual position-
ing, rather than aimed at elucidating the inner workings of the poems
through a rigorous linguistic analysis. This is precisely the endeavour
pursued by stylistic approaches, less keen on establishing typologies and
more concerned with identifying the linguistic components of poetic
difficulty.
Their flourishing, coeval with Press’s monograph, took place under
the aegis of Roman Jakobson’s foundational essay ‘Closing statement:
Linguistics and poetics’ (1960). It would be misguided, however, to
overemphasise the shift from typological to stylistic approaches to the
point of setting the two completely apart. After all, Jakobson himself
endorses Empson’s stance openly:
Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused mes-

sage, briefly, a corollary feature of poetry. Let us repeat with Empson
(1947): ‘The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of
poetry’. Not only the message itself but also its addresser and addressee
become ambiguous. (1960: 5)
Jakobson thus extends the scope of poetic ambiguity to the whole com-
municative context, an assumption that some of the authors reviewed
in this section begin to explore. Forty years later, this assumption still
20
D. Castiglione
holds sway as Nigel Fabb asserts that ‘verbal art is experienced as aes-
thetic because it exploits to the full every option for making verbal
behaviour difficult’ (2002: 217). And it is always Jakobson who makes
the connection between ambiguity and difficulty explicit by associat-
ing ambiguity with the medieval distinction between ornatus facilis
and ornatus difficilis (1960: 5). Compared to ornatus facilis, ornatus
difficilis is characterised by a higher density of tropes (Garavelli 2010
[1988]: 280).
The first attempt to differentiate between ambiguity and obscurity is
to be found in this tradition, specifically in Winifred Nowottny’s work
on the language of poetry (1962). Nowottny echoes Empson’s defini-
tion of ambiguity while usefully clarifying it: ‘[ambiguity] is now asso-
ciated with such concepts as ambivalence, tension, paradox and irony,
and with interest in metaphor and symbol as means by which the poet
can evade or transcend unequivocal assertion’ (1962: 147). To illus-
trate it, the critic discusses a word class ambiguity by Andrew Marvell
in which sound can be parsed as both noun and verb, an example sim-
ilar to those Empson provided for his second type. While definition
and exemplification go some way towards clarifying ambiguity, obscu-
rity remains at best undetermined. First, in the chapter on ‘Obscurity
and symbolism’ the word difficulty appears repeatedly, signalling the
tenuous boundaries between the two concepts. Second, Nowottny par-
aphrases obscurity as the ‘freedom to multiply significant meanings’
leading to a ‘language purified of colour [that] seems to the reader to
be opaque’ (1962: 219). Obscurity thus absorbs one of the senses that
Empson ascribed to ambiguity (i.e. the multiplicity of meanings) and
simply becomes an intensified version of it. Ambiguity would involve
only two linguistic meanings or readerly interpretations between which
there is some well-established relationship (e.g. implied vs. communi-
cated meaning in irony; literal vs. figurative in metaphor; reversal of
commonly accepted facts in paradox). Obscurity, on the other hand,
would imply the simultaneous presence of several linguistic meanings or
readerly interpretations. What Nowottny seems reluctant to acknowl-
edge is that, for obscurity to be perceived as such, such putative richness
should remain at least partly out of reach, obscurity being convention-
ally associated with closure and impenetrability from the mediaeval
21
form of trobar clus (literally, ‘closed form’) onwards. What is more,

Nowottny’s metaphorical expression ‘language purified of colour’ works
against the elucidation of the concept and undermines the critic’s avow-
edly descriptive commitment. This limitation is less Nowottny’s fault
than a side effect of a still uneasy cohabitation of linguistic analysis and
literary criticism. Indeed, the mixture of description and evaluation is
not unique to her, Jakobson himself having been criticised along similar
lines (Attridge 1987: 18).
Nowottny’s contribution is taken further by Geoffrey Leech’s 1969
monograph, which is still a standard reference work on account of its
rigour. Leech further refines the notion of ambiguity (a) by semantically
grounding it onto the well-established meaning relations of homonymy
and polysemy (1969: 205), and, after Empson but more unequivo-
cally than he did, (b) by rhetorically linking it to the pun. Ambiguities,
according to Leech, contribute to the ‘indeterminate significance’
(1969: 215) of the poetic text. Such global indeterminacy is pragmati-
cally enhanced by the distance between the given situation provided by
the text and the inferred one reconstructed by the reader. The resulting
‘contextual implication’ (1969: 190) is much less constrained in poems
than in other text types, making poetic communication particularly
open-ended.
Ambiguity, then, is instrumental to a poem’s overall significance.
Such implicitly positive connotation, which Leech shares with Empson
and Jakobson, seems to extend to obscurity as elsewhere Leech claims
that ‘dysfunctional features, e.g. distortions of linguistic norms,
obscurities and ambiguities, challenge the reader to find new avenues
of interpretation’ (2008 [1987]: 116). Although obscurities and ambi-
guities—the textual instantiations of the concepts themselves—are
seen as obstacles, they also challenge the reader, demanding a proactive
attitude and stimulating their intuition and problem-solving abilities.
By contrast, ‘difficult’ poets are those ‘who leave relatively few cues for
interpretation’ (1969: 148), a claim that points towards a lack of gener-
osity on their part.
The expression ‘distortion of linguistic norms’ in the former of the
quotes above calls closely to mind Empson’s ‘degree of logical or gram-
matical disorder’ of a poem (1930: 62) and Press’s ‘departure from the
22
D. Castiglione
commonplace language of daily speech’ (1963: 11) mentioned earlier.

These distortions go under the name of linguistic deviation. A lin-
guistic deviation ‘is a disruption of the normal processes of communi-
cation: it leaves a gap, as it were, in one’s comprehension of the text’
(1969: 61). The ‘gap’ mentioned by Leech is imbued with negative
connotations as it cues a defective or incomplete grasp of the poem on
the part of the reader. And yet, this seems a typical aspect in the expe-
rience of difficulty both intuitively and empirically, as the next chap-
ter will forcefully argue. Leech’s catalogue of such deviations includes
neologisms, changes in the transitivity rules of verbs, typographic and
semantic deviation (Leech 1969: 43–48). Semantic deviation, in turn,
encompasses the following tropes: oxymoron, paradox, tautology, ple-
onasm and periphrasis (1969: 132, 137–143). The notion of linguis-
tic deviation is paramount in the model proposed in the present work;
therefore, one full chapter (Chapter 4) is devoted to those deviations
that are instrumental in creating a range of difficulty effects.
One decade later, George Dillon (1978) contributes a monograph on
the processing of literature that is as impressive as undeservedly under-
cited. Dillon innovatively combines linguistic analysis and findings
from psycholinguistics to demonstrate that ‘paradoxically, we can learn
about how we read simple texts by analysing the source of our trou-
bles with difficult ones’ (1978: xxix). His selection of texts reflects this
commitment:
Most of the examples are drawn from five writers with deserved reputa-
tions for difficulty: Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Henry James, Wallace
Stevens, and William Faulkner. Each of these is difficult in some areas but
not in others. We can in fact establish a taxonomy of difficulty: a prin-
cipal source of difficulty in Stevens has to do with appositives; relations
of Subject and Object are more problematic in Milton than in others;
identification of main verbs is unusually problematic in James, and so
on. Further, we can describe which structural predilections of particular
authors create difficulties of perception and comprehension. (1978: xxx)
The selection spans from prose to poetry, from the sixteenth to the
twentieth century. By suggesting that difficulty can be thought of as a
23
map in which ‘some areas’ (1978: xxx) are occupied by specific stylis-
tic options, Dillon is paying tribute to Empson’s typological approach
while letting the typology emerge from the texts rather than from
assumption-driven criteria. Yet, Dillon does not truly belong to a typo-
logical (or taxonomic, in a more scientific vein) tradition, as the taxon-
omy remains a possibility not pursued in the remainder of the work.
What the above quote importantly suggests is that Steiner’s concern
with the concept of difficulty as such has been replaced by a focus on its
local instantiations—a shift already initiated by Nowottny (1962) and
Leech (1969). This gain in rigour has been invaluable in terms of shed-
ding light on the specifics of difficult literary texts, but it has also halted
our theoretical understanding of difficulty at the point where Steiner
left it. In this book, I will attempt to overcome the impasse by bringing
together the large-scale scope of typological approaches and the analytic
focus of linguistic approaches.
Dillon’s comparative work appears to inspire Wallace Chafe (1991),
reporting how a group of readers unanimously deemed an extract from
Henry James more difficult than one from Edith Wharton. In order to
explain their response, Chafe traces James’s difficulty back to decontex-
tualised proper names, syntactic embedding, negation, passive construc-
tions and nominalisations. These linguistic features expand Leech and
Dillon’s lists; some of them had previously been pointed out as stylistic
markers of James’s abstraction by Seymour Benjamin Chatman (1972).
Toolan (1993) and Sell (1993) also propose stylistic cases of diffi-
culty, but contrary to Chafe, they restrict their attention to difficulty
in poetry and refrain from comparing two or more texts. Toolan’s
approach to Geoffrey Hill’s ‘On Society and Commerce’, defined as ‘a
difficult poem’ (1993: 33), is straightforward. He begins by assuming
that the subject of the poem will be reflected in its title, as convention-
ally titles have the function of topic markers. Next, he identifies pat-
terns of lexical cohesion signalled by semantically related words. He
goes on elucidating phrases and passages that are challenging at the syn-
tagmatic level—that is, in terms of how words are linearly arranged—
by relying on the paradigmatic, or associative, axis of language. Here is
how Toolan discusses the anomalous collocation fatted marble:
24
D. Castiglione
the odd phrase ‘fatted marble’ surely calls to mind […] the only common
collocate of ‘fatted’, in ‘fatted calf ’; and the latter expression’s association
with (propitiatory?) sacrifice has a complex relevance both to this stanza
and the whole poem. (1993: 39)
This procedure is particularly apt to account for Hill’s context-activated

puns (e.g. ‘classic falls’, ‘catches his death’, ‘in relief ’) and polysemous
words (e.g. ‘custom’, ‘use’). Throughout the analysis, it becomes increas-
ingly clear that these subtle manipulations both allude to and deviate
from everyday language patterns, thus stimulating novel inferences that
arguably contribute to the impression of a ‘depth of meaning’ in the
poem.
While Toolan’s approach extends from text to (linguistic) context,
Sell goes the other way. He first outlines the reception of Eliot’s The
Waste Land and then borrows conceptual tools from pragmatics, the
branch of linguistics that studies communication in the wider context.
In particular, he suggests that The Waste Land flouts each of the four
maxims that constitute Grice’s cooperative principle (Grice 1975) and
that are assumedly required for any effective and unequivocal commu-
nicative exchange to take place. For instance, the maxim of manner,
requiring clarity, order and conciseness of expression, is flouted by ‘the
abruptness with which the voices are introduced’, which ‘was one of
the things which caused the first readers most difficulty’ (1993: 144).
The maxim of quality, according to which the speaker should be trust-
worthy, is likewise undermined by Eliot’s irony: ‘the teller is not being
entirely frank […], and it is precisely here that The Waste Land has
always seemed such a riddle’ (144).
Each of these strategies invites ‘readers to do a lot of the sense-making
for themselves’ (138) just like, according to Leech, obscurities ‘challenge
the reader to find new avenues of interpretation’ (2008 [1987]: 116).
As Sell’s application shows, the contextual scope of pragmatics acts
as a bridge between typological and linguistic approaches: like the
former, literary pragmatics examines texts through the lens of top-down
categories (here, Grice’s maxims); like the latter, by drawing on lin-
guistics it guarantees a degree of accuracy and internal consistency that
typological approaches cannot hope to match. If applied warily, Grice’s
25
idealised conversational rules can work as a useful baseline against which

to chart the meanders of literary communication.
Exploring the language of the Hermetic poetry of Hölderlin, Trakl,
and Celan, Fois-Kaschel argues that their obscurity—a term she favours
over difficulty—is dependent on ‘la distorsion des paradigmes séman-
tiques et la rupture de l’ordre syntaxique ’ (2002: 58; [‘the distortion of
semantic paradigms and the break of syntactic order’]; trans. mine).
Contrary to the expectations set up by this claim, Fois-Kaschel reveals
herself unwilling or unable to ground obscurity in the stylistics markers
she discusses (decontextualised proper names, archaisms, neologisms,
ellipsis and verbless constructions). This is possibly due to her habit
of lingering extensively on aspects of morphological deviation that are
peripheral to comprehension, and more generally to her traditional lin-
guistic approach that excludes cognitive explanations. On Fois-Kaschel’s
account, obscurity implies the presence of a ‘message dissimulé’ [hid-
den message] that needs deciphering (‘déchiffrement ’, 2002: 261). The
use of déchiffrement presupposes the existence of one core meaning to
be arrived at by means of exegesis. Thus, obscurity is viewed as a barrier
concealing a univocal proposition—a conceptualisation clearly at odds
with Nowottny and Leech’s, who accorded obscurity an inherent multi-
plicity of meanings.
The authors considered so far all examine the relationship between
the language of poetry and difficulty from a synchronic perspective.
Even when they discuss poems belonging to vastly different periods, like
Leech and Dillon, or when they outline the initial reception of a liter-
ary work, like Sell, seldom if ever do they comment on the diachronic
development of poetic language. A corrective to this trend is Adamson
(1999), a major work in historical stylistics that traces the relationship
between literary forms and the historically embedded aesthetic norms
that shaped them from the end of the eighteenth to the end of the twen-
tieth century. Analysing a wide range of poetic extracts, she relates the
linguistic innovations of Ezra Pound, David Jones, T.S. Eliot and later
poets to ‘the deliberate courting of difficulty in Modernist aesthetics’
(1999: 643). The most prominent linguistic techniques she associates
with difficulty or diminished intelligibility are the non-standard spelling
of eye-dialect (graphological level), phrase-based syntax, the removal of
26
D. Castiglione
connectives and the insertion of parentheticals (syntactic level), opacity

of deictic reference and abrupt shift of tenses (semantic/pragmatic level).
The lens through which many of these innovations are interpreted is
that of an estranging mimesis of spoken language:
Olson’s topic-skipping may well be the most naturalistic in reproducing

the associative leaps and self-interruptions we all practice when we talk
to ourselves or to an intimate friend, but put in writing and addressed to
a public audience, it strikes many readers as a perversely difficult form of
communication. (1999: 597)
By premodifying ‘difficult’ with the adverb of manner ‘perversely’,

Adamson plausibly assumes that readers will feel negatively about the
difficulty experienced. Readers are bewildered not because they are
unfamiliar with ‘topic-skipping’ as a discursive feature as such, since
unconsciously or not they practice it themselves daily. Rather, what
comes across as baffling is the fact that the contextual cues on which we
rely in our everyday talks are not available in the written medium, and
so we are left puzzling over semantically incoherent stretches of text.
There is an intriguing paradox at work here: following Leech, poems
invite richer, looser contextual implications than other text types; yet,
such contextual implications need to be teased out in a contextual vac-
uum, that is, in the absence of relevant environmental cues.
Adamson also provides a sociological explanation as to why difficulty
in poetry seems to be a primarily American phenomenon. The ‘ongoing
experimentalism’ of American writing would be favoured by a ‘system of
small presses and campus poets’ that is much less developed in Britain,
where less risk-taking writing styles have grown out of ‘a centralised lit-
erary establishment dominated by large publishing houses looking for
mass markets’ (1999: 678). Adams offers a complementary argument,
pointing out the historical and even psychological drive behind the
divide noticed by Adamson: ‘American literature since Thoreau has had
a strong tradition of unconventionality generated by a desire to free
itself from Europe, creating its own conventions’ (Adams 1991: 37).
This detailed discussion of linguistic approaches to ambiguity, obscu-
rity and difficulty forcefully shows that there is an unescapable linguistic
27
basis to these phenomena. It also points to the possibility that moti-

vated boundaries between these rival concepts could be drawn by exam-
ining the extent to which stylistic configurations can be mapped onto
widely agreed-upon conceptualisations. While each contribution has
something to offer in this respect, what is crucially missing is a system-
atising effort that would place all these intuitions and claims back into
a coherent framework. What also emerges is the gradual renunciation of
defining difficulty in intrinsic terms. Perhaps this trend reflects a wider
reorientation of literary and linguistic studies, required to be increas-
ingly specialised but also less audacious in foundational terms.
2.1.3 Reception-Oriented Approaches
The reception-oriented approaches flourishing in the 80s opposed the

idea that poems can be reduced to the linguistic artefacts dissected
by the early stylistics of the 60s and 70s. Instead, they conceived of
poems in terms of meaningful readerly experiences, where the linguistic
make-up of texts is at best a prompt for such experiences to arise. This
attitude clearly extended to difficulty as well:
Of course, the difficulty is itself a fact – of response; and it suggests, to

me at least, that what makes problematical sense as a statement makes
perfect sense as a strategy, as an action made upon a reader rather than as
a container from which a reader extracts a message. (Fish 1980: 23)
According to Stanley Fish, it is misguided or at least unfruitful to pair

difficulty with meaning retrieval. He rejects the DIFFICULTY IS A
CONTAINER conceptual metaphor of exegetic approaches to inter-
pretation and instead endows difficulty with agency (‘action made upon
a reader’), which ties in well with the general understanding of poems
as dynamic events typical of this tradition (see also Rosenblatt 1994
[1978]). Taken at face value, Fish’s definition of difficulty is so general
as to become uninformative—uninformative, that is, beyond signalling
the author’s mistrust of the essentialist accounts dominating the first
stage of difficulty studies.
28
D. Castiglione
A contemporaneous but more theoretically nuanced discussion is

offered by Michael Riffaterre, among the most text-oriented reception
theorists. Riffaterre insists that literary reading is a text-driven, ‘restric-
tive process’ (1984 [1978]: 150), and although he too refrains from pro-
viding any essentialist definition, he contrasts obscurity and nonsense
functionally (1984 [1978]: 115–166):
Obscurity bespeaks literariness not just the way nonsense does, symbol-
izing artifice, or cancelling utilitarian communication. Obscurity beto-
kens literariness by symbolizing the reader’s participation in an activity
reserved to an elite. (1984 [1978]: 150)
In nonsense, then, formal experimentation plays havoc with semantic

plausibility—a point echoed by Adamson, claiming that nonsense writ-
ing ‘promoted the stylisation of semantic deviance’ (1999: 612). In this
respect, nonsense bears some affinities with Steiner’s tactical difficulty
owing to its text-driven nature, as well as to Leech’s obscurity in so far
as semantic deviation is involved in both phenomena. Obscurity, in
Riffaterre’s formulation, is by contrast characterised in socio-pragmatic
terms as the enactment of reading practices that are out of reach for the
general audience. The bond between obscurity and cultural elitism rests
on readers’ literary competence, as the author’s mosaic analogy nicely
illustrates:
It is only in isolation that the poem is difficult and, when made easy, trite.
It makes sense only when read as a metonym of the whole genre – like the
antique tessera that was just a shard by itself, but a message when fitted to
its matching piece. And its significance lies not in hidden depths, but in
the fact of its being a variation on a motif. (1984 [1978]: 163)
Faithful to his structuralist agenda, Riffaterre distances himself from the

‘hidden depths’ envisaged by scholars of hermeneutic persuasion. As a
result, obscurity neither is the source of meanings that it was for Leech,
nor the outer shell concealing a message that it was for Fois-Kaschel. It
is, more concretely, a phenomenon of disturbance, resulting as it does
‘from an interference of the genre’s structures and of those of descriptive
29
systems’ (150). It is possible to trace a parallel between this conceptual-

isation of obscurity and Steiner’s modal difficulty, but in almost reversed
form: whereas in modal difficulty the reader’s literary competence is
insufficient to satisfactorily cope with the poem, following Riffaterre
obscurity feeds precisely on the collision between a strong literary com-
petence, inclusive of knowledge about genre conventions, and generic
linguistic knowledge. One may further infer that the experience of
obscurity, far from being an indictment, is covertly deemed a privilege
acquired through literary expertise.
Despite the sophistication of Riffaterre’s arguments, it is Fish’s con-
ventionalist position that became dominant in successive generations
of US-based scholars. A clear example of such inheritance is the essay
collection The Idea of Difficulty in Literature (Purves 1991), where most
authors reject the textual determinism of structuralist-semiotic accounts
and grant instead more emphasis on the influence of social factors and
individual inclinations. For instance, Alan Purves considers difficulty ‘a
social construct’ (1991: 2) and locates it within an interactional frame-
work: ‘The difficulty of a text (D), then, varies with the amount of
knowledge (K) presumed by the community sufficient for an individ-
ual to demonstrate an adequate (A) and appropriate (A1) articulation
of a response to that text’ (1991: 166). In this statement constructed
as a mathematical formula, difficulty is deprived of any stable linguis-
tic basis, being at the mercy of two extra-textual parameters: knowl-
edge and articulation. Similarly, to Susan Hynds, ‘“difficulty” is not a
feature of particular texts, but the result of the similarity or disparity
between dimensions of the text and the socially embedded and moti-
vated interpretive processes of particular readers’ (Hynds 1991: 117).
Almost twenty years later, this position still holds sway among literary
theorists, as Peter Lamarque confidently claims that ‘poetic difficulty
arises out of the very expectations that the practice of reading brings
to it’ (2009: 419). These authors’ interactional view of difficulty is
taken into account and developed in the model proposed in the present
book—especially Purves’s insight that difficulty can only be measured
indirectly, through the articulation of one’s response to literary texts.
At the same time, however, their conventionalist position is rebutted as
30
D. Castiglione
it misguidedly minimises the influence of language on the perception,

experience and elaboration of difficulty.
One decade after Purves’s edited collection, The Difficulties of
Modernism by Leonard Diepeveen (2003) documents the reception of
difficult modernist art and literature by drawing on a large number of
letters, reviews and essays written between 1910 and 1950. The author
characterises difficulty as a ‘powerful aesthetics’ and argues that modern-
ist writers relied upon it to consolidate their place in the literary canon:
Modernism’s difficulty set up the terms and protocols by which readers

read and gained access to modernist texts, and it became a litmus test:
one could predict both a given reader’s response to modernism by his or
her reaction to difficulty, and a writer’s place in the canon by the difficulty
of his or her work. (2003: xi)
Two aspects of difficulty stand out on Diepeveen’s account: (a) difficulty

as a response phenomenon—an instinctive, often uncontrolled readerly
reaction; and (b) difficulty as a historically bound aesthetic construct,
one that modernist writers promoted as a positive and even unavoidable
stage of literary development. This duality of raw psychological response
and self-conscious semiotic justification is an important one, and I will
expand upon it in subsequent sections; at any rate, one should not lose
sight of the fact that these two sides feed into each other despite belong-
ing to different ontological dimensions—the world of private con-
sciousness and the world of public knowledge, respectively.1
Similar to Purves and Hynds, Diepeveen further maintains that dif-
ficulty ‘does not reside in a set of formal strategies’, but rather that it
‘arises from the extreme responses it elicits, provoking people to anxiety,
laughter, or anger’ (2003: 45). A few years later, the point is reiterated
along similar lines by Keith Sutherland: ‘difficult art baffles, intimi-
dates, stretches and upsets’ (2010: 767). Alert to such negative responses
typically provoked by difficult poems, Charles Bernstein in his 2011
essay ‘The difficult poem’ adopts a reader-friendly exposition in order
to ‘explore some ways to make your [i.e. the common reader] experi-
ence with the difficult poem more rewarding’ (2011: 3). An unapolo-
getically difficult poet himself, Bernstein outlines a set of key questions
31
that should work as a mental checklist for readers to attribute difficulty

to the poems they are reading: Do you find the poem hard to appre-
ciate? (Q1); Do you find the poem’s vocabulary and syntax hard to
understand? (Q2); Are you often struggling with the poem? (Q3); Does
the poem make you feel inadequate or stupid as a reader? (Q4); Is your
imagination being affected by the poem? (Q5) (2011: 3–4).
All questions but Q2 identify difficulty with the readerly experience
of it, postulating a few typical and negatively connoted responses (e.g.
‘hard’, ‘struggling’, ‘inadequate’, ‘stupid’). In particular, Q4 echoes
Diepeveen’s and Sutherland’s claims about the polarised, emotionally
coloured responses prompted by difficult poems. Q5 is more tenden-
tiously phrased: leaving aside the vagueness of the expression itself, it
is nowhere proven that the response postulated is a preserve of difficult
poems only. The only text-oriented question is Q2, mentioning vocab-
ulary and syntax and thus encompassing Steiner’s contingent and tac-
tical types, respectively. Interestingly, like other poets’ writing on the
issue (see Sect. 2.2.7), Bernstein does not hold poets responsible for the
production of difficulty: ‘it is not their [i.e. the poets’] fault that their
poems are harder to understand than Billy Collin’s, but some poems just
turn out that way’ (2011: 4; emphasis added). The thorny issue of inten-
tionality is hardly avoidable in a treatment of difficulty; therefore, it will
be dealt with later on in this chapter (Sect. 2.2.3).
Bernstein’s aims are extended in the essay collection Reading the
Difficulties (Fink and Halden-Sullivan 2013), to which Bernstein him-
self contributes with a mockingly accessible poem. Like its 1991 prede-
cessor, this collection adopts a tenaciously readerly perspective. In the
introduction, the editors echo Fish’s anti-textualist position by claim-
ing that ‘there is much more to the experience of “difficult” verse than
deciphering non-traditional surface features’ (Fink and Halden-Sullivan
2013: 1). Soon afterwards they give difficulty an ideological motiva-
tion by connecting it to poets’ ‘resistance to expectations for a relatively
unified vision of dominant cultural values’ (2013: 2). Hank Lazer like-
wise contends that a readerly approach driven by the need to ‘get’ the
poet’s message is unproductive (2013: 28), a stance rooted in an explicit
refusal to consider poetry in terms of self-expression (Lazer 2013:
32). The point closely calls to mind Vincent’s questioning of Steiner’s
32
D. Castiglione
idealised reader for her demands of ‘penetrative comprehension’

(2003: 4).
Looking at the titles and dates of publication of these studies, one
cannot but notice a steadily increasing interest in difficulty: while more
than a decade elapsed between Purves (1991) and Diepeveen (2003),
the remarks and contributions by Lamarque (2009), Sutherland (2010),
Bernstein (2011) and Fink, and Sullivan (2013) followed each other
in quick succession. This revival of the reception-oriented tradition
also makes it clear that difficulty has by and far overtaken obscurity in
popularity, establishing itself as a central, if still fuzzy, critical term. As
for the approach taken by these authors, two strands can be identified:
one concerned with the interaction between reader and text, although
from a speculative angle (Riffaterre 1978; Fish 1980; Lamarque 2009;
Bernstein 2011); and one that takes a more contextual and socially
committed stance (Purves 1991; Hynds 1991; Diepeveen 2003; Fink
and Halden-Sullivan 2013). None of these studies, however, ven-
tures into an empirical validation of their claims. While a few empiri-
cal studies have been conducted on how poetry is read and understood
(see Chapter 4), only Iris Yaron to date has empirically tested poetic
difficulty.
Her empirical papers (2002, 2003) distinguish two key mechanisms
in the processing of difficult poems: selection and combination. These
terms come from Jakobson’s oft-quoted statement that the poetic func-
tion ‘projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into
the axis of combination’ (1960: 358). Yaron turns this general definition
into a postulated reading practice: readers facing difficult poems would
focus on its sparse intelligible elements (selection) and search for units
that are semantically related to the elements previously selected (com-
bination). The two mechanisms are not to be conceived of as sequential
but rather as intertwined (2003: 162). But is this strategy a default read-
erly behaviour or else an artefact of experimental design? This seems to
me the crucial question. The experiments conducted by Yaron give rise
to the suspicion that the latter scenario is the likelier one.
Her 2002 paper on selection mechanisms aims at demonstrating that
‘difficult and obscure texts do not meet the conditions which allow a
construction of a representation’ (2002: 135–136). Yaron’s follow-up
33
argument is that such cognitive stumbling block results in a deline-

arised reading and in extra attention being paid to conspicuous ele-
ments (2002: 138–139) to the detriment of negligible (non-accessible)
ones. Conspicuous elements indicate psychological salience and in turn
comprise intelligible and strange elements. Intelligible elements can
be familiar, everyday words, or else ‘resonant’ words, that is, thematic
words imbued with cultural significance (e.g. ‘love’, ‘life’ and ‘sublime’).
It is by accessing familiar and resonant words that readers gain some ini-
tial understanding of the obscure poem. Strange elements are words or
phrases that attract readers’ attention by virtue of their low frequency
or morphological and/or semantic deviance (e.g. the coinage smooth-
loomingly in Cummings’s poem).2 Even at the cost of interrupting the
flow of my exposition, I need to briefly point out that such categories
are inherently subjective and lack a firm linguistic basis. This is easily
shown by the fact that participants classified as strange both a mildly
uncommon word like feckless (freq. 268 in the Corpus of Contemporary
American English, COCA henceforth) and a morphologically deviant
one-off neologism like smoothloomingly (0 occurrences in the COCA).
In order to give empirical substance to the aforementioned claims,
Yaron sets up two experiments aimed at eliciting response data from
readers facing a rather traditional poem by Mark Strand and a more
innovative one by E. E. Cummings. In the first experiment, participants
were divided into two groups, each of which was given one poem only.3
A recall task, testing the participants’ verbal memory after two readings,
put in evidence that strange elements were recalled more than twice as
frequently for Cummings’s poem (95% vs. 40% of the participants).
Yaron quite straightforwardly links this result to her assumption that
difficult poems force readers to focus on conspicuous elements.
To turn these results into a finding on the processing of difficult
poems, however, is questionable. As readers were specifically instructed
to pay attention to predetermined categories (i.e. conspicuous ele-
ments), the results do not prove the difficulty of the poem but merely
show which words were perceived as foregrounded. Incidentally, such
foregrounding is easy to account for if we consider a couple of textual-
linguistic facts: in the Cummings poem the ratio of elements classified
as strange is higher (3% vs. 0.62% of the total word count), and these
34
D. Castiglione
elements themselves are much stranger than in the Strand poem (e.g.
smoothloomingly versus feckless ). But Yaron does not venture into such
an explanation, presumably not to disavow her anti-textualist position.
What I also find questionable is her postulating an all-purpose heuris-
tics for meaning-making to cope with as varied a set of texts as diffi-
cult poems are. It is instead my contention that the stylistic variety of
difficult poems demands a wider range of coping strategies and enacts
several possible combinations of cognitive sub-processes. Part II will
demonstrate at great length that this is indeed the case.
An arguably more meaningful result concerns the participants’ recall
of complete textual sequences (clauses and sentences) for the Strand
poem as opposed to their recall of shorter fragments (generally phrases
and words) for the Cummings poem. Interestingly, the length of the
sequences inversely reflects the accuracy of their recall: readers tended to
paraphrase passages of Strand’s poem, but faithfully preserved the origi-
nal wording of Cummings’s units (2002: 150–151). Yaron convincingly
argues that readers, unable to construct a mental representation out of
semantic content for the Cummings poem, halted their processing at
the poem’s linguistic surface, lingering on it for longer.
While this result fits the critic’s assumption that difficult poems
prompt a delinearised reading, it is again best explained through a lin-
guistic scrutiny of both poems. The Strand poem is formed of full sen-
tences, and its enjambments are never too extreme (see Chapter 6 for an
analysis). By contrast, sentences in the Cummings poem are frequently
interrupted by parentheticals, and their boundaries are hard to iden-
tify due to an almost absolute lack of punctuation (see Chapter 8 for
an analysis). Unable to parse clear-cut sentences, participants granted
more attention to phrasal units, which as a result were recalled more
frequently. Although Yaron directly attributes this difference in response
to the presence or lack of difficulty, I think it is more pertinent to stress
the role of linguistic deviations in the transition from the observed
response to the assessment of difficulty.
Yaron’s 2003 paper argues that the conspicuous elements selected
attract semantic or situational associates that are combined to enable
a more structured understanding of the difficult poem. For instance,
35
the neologism dreamhorse in a Cummings’s poem will activate a horse

schema (2003: 156) featuring words such as ‘tail’, ‘neigh’, ‘race’ and
‘fast’. Without going again into the specifics of the two experiments that
are part of this study, suffice it to say that Yaron sets out to demon-
strate that elements stereotypically connected to the conspicuous
words will be accessed first, whereas elements more loosely associated
will be accessed later. Like in her 2002 study, her results conform to
her hypotheses, but there is a danger of circularity in terms of her over-
all procedure: (1) assumptions on how difficult poems are read inform
the format of the test; (2) Cummings’s poems are deemed as difficult
a priori, that is, even before participants have approached them; and
(3) when the tests are administered and Cummings’s poems used, the
results are easily accommodated into the initial hypotheses.
Yaron’s 2008 definition of the difficult poem rests on such empirical
findings:
A poem is considered difficult if the representation constructed by the

reader is defective. Such defective representation is produced when some
or all of the potential obstacles in the text, intentional or unintentional,
become effective obstacles in the domains of language and/or coherence
and/or the world referred to. This means that they disrupt construction of
the representation. (2008: 146)
The attribution of difficulty is put into relation with an incomplete,

negatively connoted (‘defective’) cognitive import (‘mental representa-
tion’) triggered by obstacles belonging to various textual domains.
Although such representation belongs to the realm of private conscious-
ness, it can be indirectly measured through behavioural responses—
this is indeed what Yaron’s empirical studies attempt to do. Despite the
methodological reservations expressed so far, Yaron’s ambitious attempt
to bring together literary theory, cognitive linguistics, discourse compre-
hension studies and empirical approaches to literature is praiseworthy as
it paves the way for a systematic and verifiable study of poetic difficulty.
Much of the present work is both a reaction against and a follow-up to
Yaron’s research.
36
D. Castiglione
2.2 Side Themes

My conceptual and chronological review in Sect. 2.1 has shown that
difficulty and related notions have been consistently made the object
of essay- and book-length academic enquiries. But the strong experien-
tial basis of difficulty acknowledged by virtually all the scholars, espe-
cially those in the reception tradition, has also given rise to an array
of occasional remarks by critics who were primarily concerned with
other issues. I believe it would be a mistake to dismiss such remarks as
marginal due to their contingent nature, for if taken all together they
form a constellation of side themes that enable a much more nuanced
and holistic picture of difficulty—one that the model proposed in later
chapters cannot afford to ignore. Eight side themes will be discussed:
(1) the pluralism of difficulty (especially the incidence of the dia-
chronic factor); (2) elitism; (3) intentionality; (4) philosophical roots;
(5) the representational problem; (6) the meaningfulness–meaningless
dilemma; (7) the say of the poets themselves; and (8). the difficulty/ob-
scurity divide.
2.2.1 The Pluralism of Difficulty and the Diachronic

Factor
The alert reader will have noticed that, while earlier studies refer to dif-
ficulty in the singular (Steiner 1978; Purves 1991), later ones refer to
difficulties in the plural (Diepeveen 2003; Fink and Halden-Sullivan
2013). This grammatical shift does cue the transition from essentialism
to relativism in how difficulty is conceptualised: no longer do scholars
feel confident or willing enough to constrain difficulty into a unitary
phenomenon. Virtually all of them would agree that there is not such a
thing as difficulty, for countless influencing factors and competing indi-
vidual perspectives can be pointed out. Keith Tuma mentions many of
these in a fast-paced, passionate outline of such pluralism of difficulty:
And it is nowhere written in stone that academics must value difficulty.

Nor do complaints about (or celebration of ) difficulty typically make
37
clear exactly what difficulty means; poetry some would call difficult today
is not difficult in the same way that, say, Pound is, requiring knowledge
of esoteric traditions and a range of languages and histories. The difficulty
in reading Maggie O’ Sullivan or Allen Fisher is largely a matter of resist-
ing the habits of interpretation taught by the professors who schooled
you and them. For Paterson difficulty means cultural elitism, as if the
two were synonymous; for Mottram it means that which resists easy con-
sumption. Neither view is much help. (1998: 59)
Tuma hurriedly shuffles together issues of education and diachronic

development on the one hand, and poets’ individual beliefs on the
other, including the contentious issue of elitism that will be addressed
in the next Sect. (2.2.2). His take-home message seems to be that ask-
ing oneself ‘what difficulty means’ is ultimately a moot point. At the
same time, one can sense a note of dissatisfaction in the last statement:
what looked like a celebration of diversity is in reality a farewell to rig-
our and clarity. We are not forced to choose between reductionist clarity
and unwieldy pluralism, however. Both perspectives can be reconciled,
given a sufficient level of theoretical sophistication and analytical sensi-
tiveness. This is one of the challenges taken up by the model proposed
in this work. In this regard, one cannot but agree with Vincent when
he argues that ‘any definitional project’ of difficulty should account for
‘the flux of its status’ (2003: 12). Still, my nominal reliance on diffi-
culty as opposed to difficulties is itself a defence of essentialist attempts
in the face of mounting post-structuralist relativism. One can accom-
modate more internal variety having firmly established the bounda-
ries of a concept first. Relativists who start by wildly multiplying the
senses of a concept, by contrast, tend to retain a fundamentally more
rigid, uncompromising attitude. I think this paradox manifests in the
axiomatic rejection of the linguistic basis of difficulty and of reading
as author-oriented sense-making practice in many exponents of
reception-oriented approaches (Sect. 2.1.3).
The aforementioned influence of diachronic factors on the percep-
tion of difficulty, in particular, is an issue that meets almost unequivocal
critical agreement. Aesthetic assimilation through time turns ‘the tech-
nical experiments of the innovators’ into a ‘normal and obvious mode
38
D. Castiglione
of expression’ according to Press (1963: 74). To give a specific example,

Adamson dryly remarks that ‘free verse and the disconnective syntax of
haiku, which were experimental and iconoclastic forms for Pound […],
are now part of the standard repertoire of schoolchildren’ (1999: 679).
And Sell (1993) likewise concedes that the style of The Waste Land ‘may
actually seem not quite as difficult as it did in the 1920s’ (1993: 146).
This envisioned possibility is worth stressing since it partly undermines
an argument Sell put forward only one page earlier: ‘much of the busi-
ness of reading Eliot’s text still occurs in precisely the same way as for
the first readers in 1921’ (1993: 145). Sell could make such a claim
because the analytic tool he is employing—Grice’s conversational
maxims—is assumed to hold true irrespective of the historical period
taken into account. In other words, by virtue of their broad and sche-
matic nature, the norms encoded in the maxims should be largely
impervious to changes in aesthetic taste. But the lingering contradiction
between the two statements remains.
In order to overcome it, it is possible to draw a distinction between
a chronologically stable facet of poetic difficulty (overlapping with
Steiner’s tactical type) and a chronologically evolving one (overlapping
with Steiner’s modal type). The stable facet is to do with a pragma-
semantic understanding of the kind captured by Gricean maxims and
depends on general linguistic knowledge; the evolving one is to do
with interpretive strategies and depends on aesthetic norms and genre-
specific expectations. The fact that the evolving facet makes intui-
tive sense and is stressed by different scholars should not blind us to
the parallel fact that also the stable facet is real—not just as theoretical
abstraction but experientially. The early twentieth-century responses
documented by Diepeveen (2003) do closely resemble those of
Bernstein’s implied reader in his 2011 essay aimed at a contemporary
readership.
My chief concern throughout the book is with this stable facet of dif-
ficulty, that is, with its experiential reality triggered by any text-based
disruption of deeply ingrained reading and sense-making mechanisms.
These disruptions are fundamental in a literal sense for they occur at
an initial reading stage and are not likely to be lessened by the cultural
39
vantage point of later generations of readers. Of course, an exploration

of advanced coping strategies would also be worth conducting, and I do
mention some of them throughout the book (e.g. reviewing the works
of other scholars, discussing empirical data throughout the analytical
Chapters from 6 to 8). But such strategies, while betraying the long
reach of difficulty, are readerly rather than textual variables. To focus on
them would lead to a rather different work on the sociology of literary
reading, possibly with a pedagogical slant to it.4
Other scholars address the plural nature of difficulty from a per-
spective less wide-ranging than Tuma’s. Some do so by taking poems,
rather than poets, as the basic unit of measure of difficulty. For instance,
Vincent proposes that ‘a poet who is remarkably difficult in one poem
may be the standard of clarity and availability in another’ (2003: 1),
and Bowie similarly claims that ‘Mallarmé’s poems are difficult in differ-
ent ways and at different levels of intensity’ (1978: viii). Commenting
extracts from different poets, Lamarque likewise argues that they
‘seem to resist easy paraphrase, but for different reasons’ (2009: 413).
Unfortunately, these scholars do not show in practice how to classify the
different types and degrees of difficulty that they support in theory. We
are still left with the early attempts of the typological tradition reviewed
in Sect. 2.1.
2.2.2 Elitism
Tuma’s quotation features, among other things, Don Paterson’s belief

that difficulty comes down to cultural elitism. Charges of elitism need
to be taken seriously, for they exacerbate the already negative connota-
tion of difficulty and can offer a ready excuse not to engage with poems
perceived as difficult or prejudicially labelled as such. This indictment
can have far-reaching consequences: according to Tuma, experimen-
tal poetry in Britain has been marginalised precisely due to the ‘belief
that […] the modernist obsession with “difficulty” violates this contract
between poet and audience’ (1998: 121). To push the legal metaphor
further, such violation of the public contract between poet and audience
40
D. Castiglione
may be justified by a stronger drive not to violate one’s contract with

oneself. This latter attitude is polemically stigmatised by Press:
Some poets look upon any concession to the public as a violation of

their poetic integrity, and since they regard intelligibility as the most dis-
graceful concession of all, it is not surprising that their verse should be
obscure. (Press 1963: 100)
Lingering in this quotation and in the previous one is the idea that diffi-
culty, as an aesthetic and even moral pursuit, snobbishly ignores or even
defiantly challenges pragmatic norms of ‘standard’ literary communica-
tion, conceived of as comparably straightforward after all. Incidentally,
Press’s complaint bears witness to White’s argument that it is not pos-
sible ‘to separate the degree of intelligibility of a text from moral and
epistemological considerations’ (White 1981: 13).
Not all authors feel so negatively about elitism in difficult poetry,
however. Some of them take a stance oscillating between matter-of-
fact description and covert approbation. Bowie, for instance, argues
that Mallarmé’s Prose pour des Esseintes is ‘obscure because oracular
utterances are traditionally so, being calculated to confound those […]
unworthy of initiation into the higher mysteries’ (1984 [1978]: 13).
Mellors similarly claims that ‘the Cantos are obscure because they are
meant to contain wisdom which, although clear in essence, can only
be imparted to the “present knowers”’ (2005: 5). The critic restates the
point elsewhere, when he compares the modernist text to an ‘embod-
ied enigma […] for the initiated few’ (2005: 30)—a formulation rem-
iniscent of Jacques Derrida’s depiction of Celan’s poems in terms of
‘enigma’ (1992: 392) and ‘crypt […] beyond any hermeneutic exhaus-
tion’ (404). These formulations are all consistent with Riffaterre’s
characterisation of obscurity (see Sect. 2.3). According to Riffaterre,
obscurity presupposes literary competence as a filter through which lit-
erary works select their own readership. The more dense and recondite
the intertextual network of allusions, the more severe the test and the
fewer the ‘worthy’ readers.5
41
2.2.3 Intentionality
The notion of elitism often implies intentionality via difficulty.

Expressions such as ‘being calculated to confound’ and ‘meant to con-
tain wisdom’ from the previously quoted passages are cases in point.
In general, the link between intentionality and difficulty is a direct
one, as testified by Adamson’s phrase ‘deliberate courting of difficulty
in Modernist aesthetics’ (1999: 643; see Sect. 2.2) or by Yaron’s aside
‘intentional or unintentional ’ (2008: 146) in her definition of the diffi-
cult poem (see Sect. 2.3). Intention is related to difficulty via the shared
relevance of meaning to both concepts. On the one hand, difficult
poems are difficult because they withhold their meaning: this is the per-
spective adopted by Derrida, Bowie, Mellors and Fois-Kaschel among
others. On the other hand, much of the debate on intention originates
from an attempt to locate or circumscribe meaning.
Irvin (2006) identifies four main philosophical stances towards inten-
tion: actual intentionalism, proposing that meaning is entirely deter-
mined by authorial intention; modest intentionalism, according to
which ‘the author’s intention is not sufficient to imbue the work with
a meaning it cannot conventionally support’ (2006: 119); conven-
tionalism, depriving authorial intention of any role in the attribution
of meaning; and hypothetical intentionalism, mediating between
intentionalism and conventionalism and of which Irvin identifies two
subcategories. The former relies on ‘the best hypotheses that a careful,
appropriately informed audience would form about the actual author’s
intentions’ (2006: 122). In the latter, the audience’s hypothesis is attrib-
uted to ‘an idealised author whose intentions are able to account as fully
as possible for the work’s features’ (2006: 123).
The first position, actual intentionalism, is endorsed by Hurley (2007),
who models literary reading on pragmatic principles: against deconstruc-
tionist practices, he argues that ‘illocutionary force is not mortgaged exclu-
sively to the opinion of the interpreter’ (2007: 55). As Toolan puts it:
Once authorial intention is seen to be the meaning of a text (and not, as

in Hirsch, some form of “hidden basis” for that meaning), then there is
42
D. Castiglione
no longer a categorized dualism (meaning vs. intention) or any coherence

to the idea of getting to one via the other. Once you have one, you have
the other. (Toolan 1996: 123)
Intentionalism is advocated, from a different perspective, by Sotirova

(2014). Her target is not the meaning/intention dichotomy as in
Toolan, but rather the idea that stylistics is unequipped to deal with
issues of authorial intention. Contrary to this view, stylistics can elu-
cidate intention by taking into account authors’ own revisions of their
texts. Sotirova proves her point by analysing Virginia Woolf ’s revisions
of Mrs Dalloway, since ‘authorial agency is nowhere more clearly visible
than in the construction of a final text from early drafts’ (2014: 138).
On a more theoretical level, Sotirova also rebuts David Herman’s hypo-
thetical intentionalist contention that readers infer motivation from
deictic shifts in literary works. Sotirova’s counterargument is that ‘by
this rationale any linguistic choice made by an author can be said to be
motivated and so conveys some communicative intention’ (2014: 137).
If all choices presuppose a willing agent, inferring authorial intention
from some features at the expense of others risks becoming an arbitrary
act. Such stance would also be at odds with Charles Altieri’s appealing
hypothetical intentionalist argument that ‘we begin to trust intention
when we see the explaining relations between parts and whole’ (1984:
148). Still, in later chapters, I will investigate the extent to which texts
exhibiting such organic form (that is, a motivated part-whole rela-
tionship) are attributed authorial intention more readily that texts that
openly stage incoherence and chaos. This hypothetical intentionalist
position does not imply that the attribution of authorial intention be
confined to certain textual forms and linguistic features only. Rather,
I propose that indices of organic form (e.g. narrative or argumenta-
tive development and presence of a unitary speaker) more easily enable
readers to represent the speaker (hence, indirectly, the author in lyric
poetry) as a Gestalt or psychological whole, thus foregrounding issues
of intentionality, will and agency rather than, say, blind determinism.
This is because we find more meaning—hence more intention, since
the two notions overlap in non-conventionalist positions—in the tight
interdependence of elements (cultural, semantic and structural) typical
43
of organic forms rather than in the absence or obfuscation of such

interdependence.
As shown by this overview, authorial intention has never been dis-
cussed in relation to difficulty. Conversely, difficulty has often been
associated with authorial intention, albeit cursorily. In particular, crit-
ics tend to appeal to matters of authorial intention when their purpose
is to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ difficulty. Wallace Stevens,
for instance, was praised on the grounds that ‘his intention […] is
far clearer and more earnestly pursued than theirs [i.e. other modern-
ist poets]’ (John Gould Fletcher, quoted in Diepeveen 2003: 58). In
some of Mallarmé’s poems, by contrast, ‘difficulty itself can sometimes
appear as a gratuitous cult of indirectness, a box of tricks, a fad’ (Bowie
1978: 150; emphasis added). The present work endorses a hypothetical
intentionalist position that retains a strong conventionalist element: the
analysable core semantics of the text, derived from the shared consensus
of speakers, is definitely a part of the total meaning of a literary work.
2.2.4 Philosophical Roots
So far we have seen how difficulty has been approached (Sect. 2.1),
addressing its ill-defined status (Sect. 2.2.1) as well as its overlap
with the likewise contentious notions of elitism and intentionality
(Sects. 2.2.2 and 2.2.3). But where does difficulty come from in the
end? What are its ontological and epistemological justifications, if any?
Why does it mark the work of so many poets? When it comes to foun-
dational questions like these, philosophy can provide some answers in
its power to act as a pervasive intellectual force shaping literary works.
Sotirova (2013, Ch. 6), for instance, has shown how the weaving of dif-
ferent characters’ viewpoints—a narrative technique that often gives rise
to interpretive uncertainty—resonate with the notion of liminal, fluid,
transparent selves retraceable in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger,
Henri Bergson and Martin Buber.
Heidegger’s profound influence on difficult poetry is broadly
explored by Steiner (1978) and Mellors (2005), and more circum-
stantially by Lopez (2006: 210). Steiner establishes a relation between
44
D. Castiglione
‘radical modernism in European poetry’ and ‘Heidegger’s theoretic met-

aphor’ (1978: 44). Heidegger’s influential critique of Western rationality
and consequent appeal to the pre-Socratics may at least partly explain
why much twentieth-century poetry opposes ideational transparency
(for more on this issue, see next section) and challenges deep-rooted
hermeneutic practices. According to Mellors, Heidegger’s theorisation
‘of radical alterity’ chimes well with ‘the otherness of the obscure text’
(2005: 11), and the same is true of his Hermetic aesthetics culminat-
ing in the readings of Friedrich Hölderlin, George Trakl and Rainer
Maria Rilke. Not only did Heidegger’s ideas exert a far-reaching influ-
ence on modernist aesthetics and therefore, indirectly, on the experience
of difficulty; his very writing style worked as a model for poets widely
regarded as difficult. For instance, there is documentary evidence that
W. S. Graham drew on Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time
(1927) as a source of stylistic inspiration for containing ‘paradox, con-
tradiction and writing about writing’ (Lopez 2006: 210).
Overall, Heidegger’s influence prevails in high modernist poets writ-
ing in the first half of the twentieth century and in late modernists such
as Paul Celan and J. H. Prynne (Mellors 2005). American avant-gardist
poets mainly operating in the second half of the century exhibit an
altogether different philosophical pedigree—Marxist theory as revived
by the Frankfurt School (Tuma 1998: 16).6 The most influential phi-
losopher for this new generation of poets is Theodor Adorno. Already
in his early 1931 essay ‘Why Is the New Art So Hard to Understand?’,
Adorno drew attention to the ‘strangeness and enigmatic form’ of much
twentieth-century art, ascribing its novelty to its ability to shock the
audience. Adorno’s focus here is admittedly sociological rather than aes-
thetic: ‘I pose the question from the outset, therefore, not for art itself
and its concrete form, but for the public that finds itself confronted to
it’ (2002 [1931]: 127). He highlights the existence of a widening rift
between ‘the production of art, its material, the demands and tasks that
confront the artist when he works’ on the one hand, and ‘the presump-
tions, claims, and possibilities of comprehension of the reader, viewer,
or listener’ on the other (127). This rift is then explained in Marxist
terms as ‘the alienation of production from consumption’ (127).7 But
does the adoption of radical Marxist ideas break the link between
45
elitism and difficulty that was still integral to the Hermetic premises of
Heidegger’s philosophy?
In a way, it does not: a poetics feeding on anti-capitalist beliefs can
easily lead to writing practices implying a carefully selected readership.
This is because most avant-garde poets conceive of mainstream poetry
along the lines of a consumable good (Broom 2006: 226). Avant-garde
poets drawing on Marxism, as a result, lend themselves to critiques of
elitism no less than Hermetic poets drawing on inherently elitist and
conservative belief systems. Relying on Adorno’s ideas as a backbone to
his arguments, Sutherland asserts that ‘the truly radical artwork will not
only smoke out the philistine, but will also provoke him into a “neg-
ative relationship to truth”, the first step on Hegel’s way of despair’
(2010: 767). This quote illustrates well Broom’s apt remark that ‘there is
a kind of cognitive Puritanism to this kind of description of experimen-
tal poetry, with its emphasis on the reader’s work and its suspicion of
easy enjoyment’ (2006: 226; emphasis is the author’s).
Critics sometimes associate the textuality of experimental poetry with
the concept of language game proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in
Philosophical Investigations (1953). Examples of language games include
‘giving orders’, ‘describing the appearance of an object’, ‘reporting an
event’, ‘speculating about an event’ and countless others (Wittgenstein
1986 [1953]: 11). This concept is rendered by Wittgenstein by means
of analogy: ‘think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a
saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws. The func-
tions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects’ (1986
[1953]: 6; emphasis added). So, emphasis is laid on what we actually
do with words, a concern that would have given rise to pragmatics, the
branch of linguistics that studies language use in context. Tracing the
development of poetic techniques from modernism to postmodern-
ism, Marjorie Perloff argues that the ‘tightly woven collage surface’ of
Pound’s Cantos ‘is replaced by a kind of Wittgensteinian language-game’
in the poetry of Clark Coolidge (1991: 56). Tuma likewise calls the
experimental poet Tom Raworth ‘a Wittgensteinian’ in his rejection
of a ‘“picture-theory” of meaning for the contextualism of meaning
as use’ (1998: 238). What Perloff and Tuma imply is that the writing
46
D. Castiglione
of postmodernist poems often relies on invented internal constraints

(‘games’) that do not need to obey to principles of verisimilitude.
This new perspective on meaning can be recast in linguistic terms,
specifically in the shift from referential semantics, which locates mean-
ing in the extra-linguistic realm (i.e. linguistic expressions stand for real-
world referents), to structuralist semantics, which conceives of meaning
as intrinsic to the linguistic system (i.e. linguistic expressions acquire
meaning in relation to each other within any given text, written or spo-
ken). These alternatives chime with different aesthetic norms, which in
turn have consequences on poetic textuality: a referential view of mean-
ing is likely to foreground mimesis, that is the depiction of settings and
scenes through world-building elements; a structuralist view of meaning
would by contrast foreground diegesis, the discourse itself, emphasising
text-internal sense relations to the detriment of external representation.
It is in this theoretical arena that what I call ‘the representational prob-
lem’ and its tight relation with difficulty finds fertile ground to flourish.
2.2.5 The Representational Problem
It is Yaron’s definition (Sect. 2.1.3) that has brought to the fore the link
between impaired or faulty representation and difficulty. Yet this link
had been lingering all along in literary critics’ analogies between abstract
art and difficult poetry. Leech likens the difficult poet to the cubist
painter (1969: 219); Perloff has a chapter titled ‘Against transparency’
in her 1991 monograph on the experimental poetries in the USA; Tony
Lopez (2006: 1) titles a chapter on the avant-garde Language Poets
‘Limits of Reference and Abstraction in American Poetry’. Such per-
ceived opacity or abstraction is in turn argued to shape readers’ interpre-
tive behaviour. Focusing on Mallarmé, Malcolm Bowie speculates that
the typically defensive reaction of a reader facing a difficult poem will
be that of turning it ‘into a picture’ (1978: 10). Even such reduction-
ist reflex, understandably stigmatised by the critic, becomes unavailable
for twentieth-century poets who have radicalised Mallarmé’s rejection
of mimesis. John Wilkinson makes such an argument when he points
to the impossibility of translating ‘into an empirically consistent scene’
47
an extract by Barbara Guest where ‘objects […] consort on equal terms

with abstractions and properties in such a way as to thwart visual repro-
duction’ (2010: 761).
I believe there is more to the ubiquity of these remarks than the appeal
of the analogy as a rhetorical move on the part of critics. There must also
be some kind of intersubjective and experiential basis to them, if even
schoolboy students spontaneously made comparable observations when
given modernist and postmodernist poems to read.8 Yaron’s defini-
tion captures well this experiential effect of difficulty in that it stresses
the challenges posed by difficult poems to the construction of a unified
mental representation.9 While the notion of mental representation has
been criticised on account of its loose formulation in cognitive poetics
(see Green 2015: 404–405), one can still safely argue that it encompasses
an inner projection of referents from the outer world. If this is the case,
then mental representation must have much in common with such pre-
theoretical terms as visual reproduction, picture, image or scene, as well
as with technical concepts as mimesis and reference that I touched upon
in the previous section. I will return on the issue in the next chapter, not
to make my overview unnecessarily laden with theoretical distinctions.
For now, what I want to draw attention to is the fact that very little
attempt has been made to elucidate the linguistic indices of disrupted
or impeded representation. Indeed, the above remarks tend to summa-
rise general readerly impressions or refer to broader issues of poetics.
Even when such remarks are textually exemplified, never do the critics
seem keen on establishing links between the abstract art/difficult poetry
analogy and the linguistic evidence at their disposal. To my knowledge,
the only exceptions are the work of Chatman (1972) on Henry James’s
abstractions, especially with regard to nominalisations, and Adamson’s
suggestive pairing of deixis and pictorial perspective (Adamson 2006).
Praiseworthy as they are, the relevance of these studies to the current
discussion is only indirect: Chatman examines literary abstraction in
the context of late nineteenth-century fiction; Adamson relies on a key
notion from figurative art to examine the representation of the self in
the genres of Renaissance poetry and essay. No study so far has offered
yet a convincing explanation as to why difficult poetry is so often associ-
ated with abstract art. The next chapters will begin to tentatively address
48
D. Castiglione
this issue by considering pertinent semantic factors (e.g. reference,

coherence, concreteness and imageability)—bearing in mind that this
is only the first step of a long, ambitious enterprise that others, if they
wish so, will have to implement and develop.
2.2.6 The Meaningfulness–Meaninglessness Dilemma
Alongside the representational problem stands what can be called the

meaningfulness–meaningless dilemma. Critics often credit difficult
poems with an overwhelming excess of meaning, from Empson’s defi-
nition of ambiguity up to Derrida’s analogical description of Celan’s
poems as crypts ‘beyond any hermeneutic exhaustion’ (1992: 404).10
At the same time, they inexplicably envision the opposite scenario—
the difficult poems’ absolute lack of meaning—as an alternative or even
coexistent possibility. Thus, to Mellors reading difficult literary works
is an ambivalent experience in which ‘the prospect of meaningfulness
is always shadowed by the spectre of meaninglessness’ (Mellors 2005:
167). Analysing a prose poem by Gertrude Stein, Quartermain simi-
larly entertains the idea that ‘declaring too much, the sentence declares
nothing but enjoys serious play’ (1992: 23). More judgmentally, Broom
(2006: 240) criticises Catherine Walsh’s poetry for erring ‘on the side of
too much emptiness’. Finally, Press associated obscurity with ‘want of
meaning’ in one of his remarks (see Sect. 2.1).
These discursive strategies generally reflect a post-structuralist dis-
trust towards the principle of non-contradiction that is at the basis of
rationalist thought. Still, there must be a hitherto undiscovered empiri-
cal basis to such a dilemma, if the above quotes are not to be dismissed
as rhetorical flourishes biased by an antagonist ideology. Once the evi-
dential basis is examined, the dilemma becomes more apparent than
real. A serious methodological hindrance needs to be overcome first,
though. This is the authors’ irresponsibly liberal use of terms such as
‘meaningfulness’ or ‘emptiness’, reflecting their refusal to adopt a univo-
cal metalanguage. Indeed, one should first make a decision about how
to characterise the notion of meaning itself. Meaning in the broad cul-
tural sense of ‘relevance to humans, personal and collective fulfilment’
has hardly anything in common with meaning as a pragma-semantic
49
dimension concerned with, among other things, the communicative

context, the truth conditions of propositions, sense relations (e.g. syn-
onymy and antonymy) and the referential function of language.11 Yet,
certain aspects of linguistic meaning are likely to be salient to attribu-
tions of meaning in the extended, cultural sense of the word: it is on
these in-between aspects that the analysis should focus on in order to
be both relevant to the broader debate and amenable to linguistic anal-
ysis. These aspects may include, but be not limited to: (1) the notion of
coherence as a result of linguistic cohesion and the activation of shared
socio-cognitive scripts and schemata (e.g. the experience of soldiers
in the trenches, the loss of love in human relationships, a walk in the
woods, and so on); (2) a perception of telos, or oriented purposefulness,
in the speaker’s utterances, which in turn rests on the notion of coher-
ence outlined in (1) and also has direct bearings on the issue of inten-
tionality addressed in Sect. 2.2.3; and (3) the presence of lexical words
whose referents are archetypal (i.e. Yaron’s ‘resonant words’) due to their
salience to human experience (e.g. ‘love’, ‘despair’, ‘home’ and ‘country’)
or to long-standing symbolic associations (e.g. ‘white’ with ‘innocence’;
‘blood’ with ‘violence’). Words like these act as privileged pointers to
activate the aforementioned schemas, adding to the perceived coherence
of the poetic text.
As a specific illustration of point 1, I shall mention an experimental
finding by Faust and Mashal (2007: 863). These neurolinguists report
that unrelated noun pairs such as ‘wisdom wash’ (anomaly condition)
are read more quickly than novel metaphorical noun pairs such as ‘con-
science storm’ (metaphorical condition). This is because novel meta-
phors, activating different right-hemisphere patterns in the brain, are
assumed to ‘reflect some kind of systematic, although nonsalient, con-
ceptual knowledge’ (2007: 867). No matter how far-fetched a meta-
phor may appear at first, its identification as a metaphor will depend on
readers finding common ground between its two parts, namely source
(e.g. storm ) and target (e.g. conscience ) domain. Some amount of pro-
cessing is required to establish similarities between the two domains,
hence the impression of meaningfulness (on metaphors and difficulty,
see Sect. 4.2.6.3). Unrelated noun pairs, by contrast, do not prompt
any coherence-building inferential process because the meanings of each
50
D. Castiglione
word are too far apart from each other. As a result, the anomalous com-
bination is not analysed further and is arguably dismissed as nonsensical
or meaningless. Extending this insight to the level of poetic discourse,
one may speculate that poems featuring unrelated lists of nouns will be
generally deemed meaningless; meaningfulness, on the other hand, will
be ascribed more often to poems featuring textually motivated novel
metaphors—the attribution itself partly resting on the inferential ability
(or boldness) of each reader. The stylistic analysis in part II will explore
these proposals more extensively.
2.2.7 The Production Side—Poets on Their Own

Difficulty
The six former sections have dwelt upon a variety of themes that testify
to the wide branching of poetic difficulty into the cultural and philo-
sophical world. It is now time to look at difficulty from a more down-
to-earth perspective, giving the floor to its primary architects: the poets
themselves. This section could then be read as a complementary com-
panion to Sect. 2.3, where I addressed the reception side of difficulty.
So, what do poets have to say when their being perceived as difficult
becomes a constant motif of literary criticism or a constant complaint
of readers? Faced with such charges, a common strategy poets adopt is
that of justifying the difficulty of poetry on extra-literary grounds. This
move allows them to tone down the deep-rooted negative connotation
of the word to the point of revaluing difficulty as a positive or even
intrinsic feature of poetry. The most known example of this attitude is
probably to be found in Eliot’s ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1999 [1921]).
This famous essay was written in a period when the debate around
difficulty was polarised and ridden with strong feelings, as Diepeveen
reminds us. Eliot defends difficulty by portraying poets as the spokes-
people of civilisation and their poetry as its iconic representation:
It appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must

be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity,
and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must
51
produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and
more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to
dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. (1999 [1921]: 289;
emphasis is the author’s)
For Eliot, the complexity of civilisation acts like a moral constraint

on aesthetic choices, bending their direction towards complexity.
Complexity, in turn, is implicitly equated to difficulty. The underlying
argument is that poetry, like any species in their environment under
Darwinian laws of evolution, must adapt to changed external circum-
stances in order to thrive or just to survive. The style of the passage is
telling too: the impersonal tone of the opening sentence (‘it appears
likely’, ‘the poet’) discards from the start all sense of individual respon-
sibility for the proposed mutation of poetry; the threefold repetition of
the modal verb of obligation must underscores the seemingly unavoida-
ble coming-of-age of difficulty.
Eliot’s iconic argument still holds sway among contemporary poets.
Asked why his work is often described as difficult, Geoffrey Hill replied
as follows:
We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves,

we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are
mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more
real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work.
Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than
we are? (Hill 2000: 272)
While Eliot describes poetic difficulty as an inevitable result of outer

complexity, Hill conceives of it as an unalienable right of inner com-
plexity: the difficulty of poetry is both naturalised and toned down
by comparison with the difficulty experienced in life, in interpersonal
relationships and even in one’s relationship with oneself. There is also
an assumption that these two domains of difficulty belong to the same
ontological level, for Hill does not mention specific issues of textuality
and comprehensibility. Poetic difficulty is made existential to an extent
unknown in Eliot, and this move allows Hill to steer the discussion
52
D. Castiglione
away from the technical aspects of writing that do make his poetry dif-
ficult (see Part II, Sect. 7.3). After this iconic argument, Hill advances
a political one that is meant to come to terms with the issue of elit-
ism (see Sect. 2.1.2): ‘I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly
democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification […] propaganda
requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans
of incitement’ (2000: 272). Difficulty is reconceptualised as a resistance
strategy, while simplification is given a decidedly negative connotation
through the association with tyranny and propaganda.
Another notoriously difficult British poet, Prynne, offers yet another
variant of the iconic argument but circumscribes it to the cognitive
relationship between thought and language: ‘often difficult language
in poems accompanies difficult thought, so that the difficulty of lan-
guage is part of the whole structure and activity of poetic composition’
(Prynne 2010: 153). Prynne places the origin of difficulty neither in
the complexity of society (like Eliot) nor in that of the individual (like
Hill), but more empirically in a writing praxis shaped by a sharp intel-
lect. Shifting the focus away from the agent (the poet) to the process
(poetic composition), Prynne appears to subtly deflect the charge of
deliberate difficulty (on intentionality, see Sect. 2.2.3). A further denial
of direct responsibility can be gleaned in Bernstein’s amused and self-
indulgent complaint that ‘some poems just turn out that way [i.e. diffi-
cult]’ (2011: 4; see Sect. 2.1.3).
To the poets’ credit, there is indeed some evidence that difficulty
could be a by-product of certain writing strategies. Ashbery’s compo-
sition method as described by the poet himself merges lack of linear-
ity and lack of authorial agency: ‘I begin with unrelated phrases and
notations that later on I hope get resolved in the course of the poem as
it begins to define itself more clearly for me’ (Ashbery, cited in Altieri
1989: 145). Ashbery’s words seem to imply that the creative process is
not fully controlled by individual will but takes a life of his own. This
makes more believable the poet’s admission of ignorance with respect
to his own difficulty: ‘I never thought of this [the difficulty] until it was
first pointed out to me’ (Ashbery, cited in Diepeveen 2003: 93). Very
close to Ashbery’s composition method is W. S. Graham’s, who used
to keep ‘working lists of interesting and striking words typed out in
53
advance of his drafting a poem, which he composed by inventing mate-

rial to join the listed words together’ (Lopez 2006: 27). The strategy
of relying on sets of words or unrelated phrases as props for composi-
tion is likely to threaten the cohesion of the poem one is about to write
from the outset, with appreciable repercussions on comprehension (see
Chapter 3).
Overall, poets seem keen to excuse their difficulty as a contextual
necessity (Eliot) or an unforeseen outcome (Bernstein, Ashbery, argu-
ably Prynne). What these post hoc rationalisations have in common is
their playing down the share of the poet’s free will in opting for dif-
ficulty. Other poets, however, seem to take fuller responsibility in this
respect. For Hill, art ‘has a right – not an obligation – to be difficult if
it wishes’ (2000: 272), although such right is then justified on broader
moral grounds.12 The Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto also emphasises the
direct, conscious involvement of the poet’s artistic will in embracing
difficulty, but he also calls to mind Ashbery and Prynne in considering
difficulty an intrinsic potential of poetic language. His core argument
is that the physical resistance of the linguistic medium (its perceived dif-
ficulty) is a precondition for the novelty it brings, so the benefits are
likely to outweigh the initial processing costs. The suggestive scientific
analogy that he employs to convey all these ideas is a fitting conclusion
to this subsection:
Just think about the electric wire in the light bulb transmitting the light,
the luminous message, thanks to the very resistance imposed by the
means. If I need to transmit electricity afar I will use very thick wires so
that the electricity swiftly passes through them and gets to destination
without losses. If, instead, I use wires with a very thin diameter, the elec-
tricity labours to pass through and generates a new fact, light or colour.
So it happens in poetic communication, where the means is the language.
(Zanzotto 1999: 1271; trans. mine)
2.2.8 Difficulty or Obscurity?
The last subsection before the chapter conclusion is a question await-

ing an answer: Does it make a difference at all to talk of difficulty or
54
D. Castiglione
obscurity? Are both terms to be kept, or is one to be preferred at the

expense of the other? As the reader will have by now realised, the fuzzy
boundaries between difficulty and obscurity have made these two terms
often synonymic in literary criticism. This does not excuse the lack of
approximation of critical writing; if anything, it is an aggravating cir-
cumstance since it has contributed to the weakness—theoretical and, as
a consequence, practical—in which this area of study still finds itself.
In particular, it is regrettable that most of the reviewed authors do not
seem to find the distinction worth discussing at all. One of the few
exceptions is Prynne (2010: 160), who however provides little more
than a relabelling of Steiner’s contingent difficulty (= obscurity) and
tactical difficulty (= difficulty).
White and Yaron advance more substantial arguments. To White
(1981: 17), obscurity is more appropriate when focus is laid on the ref-
erential function of language, thus evoking the representational problem
(Sect. 2.2.5). Obscurity further triggers associations of closure and con-
cealment, as White’s description of it as ‘semiotic defence’ implies (1981:
4). Difficulty, on the other hand, is concerned with aspects of language
that are more perceptually foregrounded (e.g. grammatical constructions
and syntax), a point made by Vincent too (2003: 1). As a consequence,
difficulty emphasises the labouring of the reader through a text rather
than the thwarted or deferred attainment of its meaning. This argu-
ment is supported by the conceptual metaphor DIFFICULTIES ARE
IMPEDIMENTS TO MOVEMENT (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 188)
as opposed to LIGHT IS UNDERSTANDING underpinning obscu-
rity. If obscurity is the uncertainty of a hermeneutic destination, diffi-
culty is the certainty of one’s struggles to achieve it—or just to get to the
last line of a poem.
This goal vs. process understanding of the two concepts is rein-
forced by the dictionary definitions of the two root adjectives reported
in Yaron (2002: 135): ‘not expressing the meaning clearly or plainly…
not clear to the understanding’ (obscure, College Dictionary); ‘not easy.
Requiring effort or labour… hard to understand, perplexing, puzzling,
obscure’ (difficult, Oxford Dictionary). The shared semantic feature of
‘obscure’ and ‘difficult’ is the barrier they impose on comprehension;
55
their synonymic status is cued by the inclusion of ‘obscure’ in the defi-

nition of ‘difficult’. The difference between them, along with those
discussed earlier, is a more pronounced emphasis on production for
‘obscure’ (via expressing ) and on reception for ‘difficult’ (via requir-
ing ). ‘Difficult’ and its derived noun ‘difficulty’ are then more suitable
descriptors when emphasising the language of poems and the readerly
side of the question, along with the temporal unfolding of the reading
process. Except for the necessary emphasis on language, these aspects
are covered by Diepeveen’s broad but common-sense definition: ‘dif-
ficulty was the experience of having one’s desires for comprehension
blocked, an experience provoked by a wide variety of works of art
(“comprehension” is here defined broadly)’ (Diepeveen 2003: x).
This blockage of comprehension chimes with the effect of ‘occlu-
sion-disorientation’ that Sharon Lattig associates with obscurity and
other synonymic concepts she usefully reviews while surprisingly leaving
out difficulty:
Empson’s ‘ambiguity’, Bernadette Mayer’s ‘bewilderment’, de Man’s

‘undecidability’, the lingering modernist ‘indeterminacy’ and the general
‘equivocation’ embroil perception because they imply a hesitation to act
and to consummate, or fully accomplish, the perceptual process. (Lattig
2007: 172)
Although these descriptors are synonymic in terms of overall effect,

Lattig specifically grounds obscurity in pre-modernist social conditions
(e.g. courtly alienation) and techniques (e.g. the metaphysical con-
ceit). Conversely, difficulty appears indissolubly bound to modernism,
as Diepeveen’s title The Difficulties of Modernism implies (see also
Sect. 5.1.2 on this).
As difficulty and obscurity have both been consistently associated
with (a) a lack of understanding at response level and (b) a distortion of
linguistic norms at textual level; these two criteria obviously fail to dis-
criminate between the two concepts. This warrants the lengthier treat-
ment of their differences over their similarities here. The reader will find
a summary of them in Table 2.1:
56
D. Castiglione
Table 2.1 Main conceptual differences between obscurity and difficulty

Obscurity Difficulty
• Goal-oriented • Process-oriented
• Hermeneutic experience • Reading experience
• Focus on meaning/representation • Focus on form
• Emphasis on production/intention • Emphasis on reception
• Emphasis on concealment • Emphasis on resistance
• Poem as container • Poem as event
• Pre-modernist • Modernist, postmodernist
• Mainly used for symbolist poetry • Mainly used for experimental poetry
While these neat oppositions reflect to an extent the current state-

of-the-art debate, they are also a convenient fiction to operationalise
both concepts in the face of much pre-existent confusion. Of course,
the reader need not be deceived into thinking that such oppositions
are strictly dichotomous: they rather belong to a continuum. It is the
variable interrelation of what makes obscurity and difficulty similar
and what makes them distinct (i.e. the above oppositional pairs) that
may help us decide which term is more appropriate in which context.
This would lead to a substantial gain in the precision of critical writing
without introducing unappealing and soon-to-be-forgotten technical
coinages.
As most differences have already been discussed, I will briefly gloss
those that, if decontextualised, may appear brutally reductive or even
downright wrong. The first is the opposition between meaning and
form. This is a nominal shortcut to say that obscurity, preferred by
scholars of hermeneutic bent, is often associated with matters of depth
or multiplicity of meaning; critics writing on difficulty, by contrast,
emphasise common readerly experiences, and these are often moulded
by troubles at perceptually salient linguistic levels—graphology, mor-
phology, grammar and syntax. The next chapters will expand on the set
of linguistic features thwarting basic processing (difficulty) or higher
inferential operations (obscurity).
Another opposition is that between symbolist poetry, in turn asso-
ciated with Heidegger’s influence, and avant-garde poetry, in turn
associated with Adorno’s influence in its cultural function and with
57
Wittgenstein’s in the generation of its textuality (see Sect. 2.2.4).

Literary labels such as avant-garde, experimental and symbolist (to say
nothing of modernist and postmodernist) are problematic as their use
depends on the perspective adopted by the critic and on complex his-
torical and aesthetic factors: avant-garde is often connoted politically as
a reaction to the old, and it involves a disposition towards a risk-taking,
pioneering aesthetics; experimental emphasises the formal and textual
character of avant-garde literature; symbolist is derived from symbolism,
a highly allusive and metaphorical poetic mode born in the second half
of the nineteenth century. Yet a symbolist like Mallarmé was necessar-
ily experimental and avant-garde in breaking with the previous poetic
tradition, and a modernist like Eliot continued the symbolist tradition
while encapsulating an avant-garde component, as extensively argued
by Perloff (2002: 7–43). The fact that these labels cannot at present
be used as accurate descriptors of textuality in no way diminishes their
importance, which hinges on a preferential association to either obscu-
rity or difficulty. The next chapters set out to show that both these prob-
lematic labels and the obscurity/difficulty divide are better understood
via their mapping onto different sets of linguistic strategies.
2.3 Summary and Conclusion

From Empson’s and Steiner’s effort to build typologies of difficulty to
the poets’ attested strategies to react to allegations of difficulty, passing
through stylistic and reception-oriented approaches and then moving
onto broad issues (pluralism, elitism, intentionality) and down to more
narrowly defined problems (representation, meaningful–meaningless
dilemma, difficulty–obscurity divide): we have travelled a long way to
fully justify poetic difficulty as an aesthetic and cultural concept in its
remarkable complexity and numerous ramifications. The background
of difficulty is so vast that some points along the route would probably
deserve a full chapter of their own, but for present purposes, what is
needed is a map outlining the jurisdiction, that is the fields of compe-
tence, of the model that will be fully developed in Chapters 3 and 4.
58
D. Castiglione
If difficulty were a metropolis, this introductory chapter would have

reviewed the most typical means of transportation for getting into its
centre (Sect. 2.1—approaches to difficulty) and its districts or neigh-
bouring areas (Sect. 2.2—difficulty-related issues). But, as I have shown,
the vehicles suffer some malfunctions, access to some districts is barred,
and there is even little consensus on where the city centre lies. A bet-
ter vehicle—a new model—is therefore needed to explore not only the
periphery of difficulty, but its centre too. In terms of approaches, the
model proposed in the next chapters subsumes all the three reviewed in
Sect. 2.1, but according to this order: stylistic, reception-oriented and
typological. The ensuing hierarchy is not one of merit but of method:
typologies of difficulty are best explained by means of readerly reactions,
but readerly reactions are in turn best explained through reference to
the language of the poems. Linguistic analysis is the foundation; still, if
it were the whole building, there would have been little point in linger-
ing on the merits and the proposals of alternative approaches.
In terms of areas of enquiry, it is unrealistic to expect that the model
will provide direct answers to those issues that are primarily the con-
cern of sociology and cultural theory: elitism, pluralism, the production
side whenever the emphasis falls on the broader context, and the trac-
ing of elusive philosophical influences in the texts of the poems. Rather,
the model is set to define the centre of difficulty with respect to both
rival terms and neighbouring issues. In particular, it will shed new light
on those issues where a linguistic approach grounded in cognition and
aesthetics is more likely to succeed: in subsuming phenomena hitherto
discussed separately by means of a holistic yet analysis-driven account
of difficulty; in tracing relations between readerly responses and linguis-
tic features; in proposing initial solutions to the issue of intentionality
(Sect. 2.2.3), to the representational problem (Sect. 2.2.5) and to the
meaningfulness–meaningless dilemma (Sect. 2.2.6); and in offering evi-
dential basis for or against existing categorisations and aesthetic intu-
itions. Time has now come to move on to the next chapter and so to
start playing with difficulty according to a new set of rules—frameworks
and methods—that will shed a retrospective light on the intriguing
problems and contradictions discussed so far.
59
Notes
1. This distinction may be understood in terms of Karl Popper’s theory of
objective knowledge. Popper (1994 [1979]) identifies three worlds dif-
fering in their epistemological status. World 1 is the world of physical
reality, directly accessible through our senses; World 2 is the world of
private consciousness; World 3 is the semiotic world of publicly acces-
sible discourses, artworks and theories. Conceptualisations of difficulty,
treated in this chapter, belong to this third level.
2. Such postulated approach to obscure poems closely calls to mind fore-
grounding theory (see Chapter 3 for more detail), foregrounding being
‘a special effect or significance’ conveyed by ‘a deviation, or departure,
from what is expected in the linguistic code or social code expressed
through language’ (Leech 2008: 3).
3. This format is known as between-group design as opposed to with-
in-group design.
4. The interested reader may consult Salvatori and Donahue (2005),
a textbook which ‘encourages students to see those moments in their
reading when they feel stymied or confused as gateways rather than
barriers to understanding’ (2005: xi).
5. The reader will have noticed that, except for Tuma, elitism is more
often associated with obscurity rather than to difficulty. I explore the
issue in the penultimate section of the chapter.
6. Critics have for instance documented the influence of Marxist ideas on
Louis Zukofsky, an objectivist poet and a friend of Pound in spite of
their acute political divergences (Quartermain 1992: 60).
7. Interestingly, the notion of an alienated public and the consequent
isolation of the artist merges (and predates) Steiner’s modal and onto-
logical difficulty types. More generally, Adorno’s ideas underpin the
arguments and assumptions of many reception-oriented scholars
reviewed in Sect. 2.1.3, notably Diepeveen, Purves, Lazer, Fink and
Halden-Sullivan.
8. Nicola Thomas, personal communication.
9. Although Yaron does not premodify representation with mental, the
post-modification ‘constructed by the reader’ and her general reliance
on cognitive approaches make it safe to argue that she is really referring
to mental representation.
60
D. Castiglione
10. The idea of meaning excess seems more often associated with obscurity
than difficulty.
11. Even within linguistics, there is no unanimously agreed definition of
meaning, as the divergent premises of different schools of thought nat-
urally led to altogether different formulations.
12. Elsewhere in the interview Hill mentions a ‘genuine’ (as opposed to
contrived, artificial) kind of difficulty, thus preserving a ‘good vs. bad’
dichotomy that had previously surfaced in Bowie (see Sect. 2.2.3 on
intentionality).
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3
New Coordinates of Difficulty:
An Interdisciplinary Framework
3.1 Introduction: Redefining Poetic Difficulty

The extensive review in Chapter 2 has shown that difficulty, even when
promoted to a research object proper, has been treated like an ill-
defined, blurred conceptual region yielding many speculations but scant
explanations. Scholars resisted narrowing down the denotatum of dif-
ficulty, that is, the range of phenomena encompassed by a concept. As
a consequence, the prevailing tendency has been that of exploring dif-
ficulty rather than actually explaining its mechanisms and teasing out
its effects. It then comes as no surprise that the tools so far employed
are partial, scholar-specific, intuition-based: approaches eschew proce-
dures, subjectivity prevails on intersubjectivity, key terms are used lib-
erally, potential insights from other disciplines are generally neglected.
This chapter purports to remedy such shortcomings by recasting the
study of poetic difficulty into more solid and science-friendly concep-
tual foundations.
I begin to pursue this aim by proposing a definition of difficulty in
Fig. 3.1. This is based on a qualitative weighting of arguments, remarks
and insights from Chapter 2. For ease of reference, the definition is

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1_3
66
D. Castiglione
Fig. 3.1 A definition of difficulty in poetry
divided into different steps (a–e) that will be unpacked and discussed
throughout the rest of the chapter. From each step, I extrapolate the
main frameworks and, within them, key concepts assumed to yield
explanatory power in the analytic phase.
3.2 Empiricism and the Scientific Method

(a) Difficulty in poetry is a manifest or at least potentially measurable
real-world phenomenon.
Both ontologically and epistemologically, difficulty has to be thought of

as a phenomenon if it is to escape the vicious circle of self-feeding spec-
ulation and pave the way to scientific explanation. As phenomena are by
definition perceivable or measurable, an empirical approach to difficulty
is required. An empirical approach is one that takes the manifest and
the accessible as a starting point of academic investigation.
This work is empirical in two senses. First, in an extended sense, it cen-
tres on linguistic evidence that can be inspected by everyone, as any work
in stylistics does (see Sect. 3.3).1 In discussing such evidence, I lay bare as
clearly as possible my analytical steps and the reasoning behind the crea-
tion of perceived or observed effects. Second, in a more literal sense, this
work is empirical in trying to account for reader-response data elicited
through tasks and questionnaires in the vein of Yaron (see Sect. 2.1.3)
3 New Coordinates of Difficulty: An Interdisciplinary Framework
67
but with important differences in terms of premises and procedures.

These data were originally part of two single case studies presented in
Chapter 5, one of which has recently been published (Castiglione 2017).
I have decided to integrate them into the stylistic analyses to show the
holistic workings of difficulty more compellingly.
This attitude runs counter to the mistrust for the matter-of-fact
typical of many literary theorists and to their unreceptiveness to the
scientific method, as complained by Miall (2006: 14). As the term ‘sci-
entific’ is one particularly exposed to misrepresentations, let me report
the definition proposed by van Peer and colleagues:
Scientific can be defined here as a kind of reasoning and a kind of

research that is based on real evidence, that is, on evidence from the real
world, which can be inspected by anyone independently from one’s own
conviction. (van Peer et al. 2012: 7)
It is the possibility for independent verification, not an elusive ideal of

objectivity, that informs the spirit of the present work. So, an empirical
orientation is a necessary precondition for a scientific line of enquiry to
be pursued.
If one takes the scientific method to signify a complete suppression
of subjectivity, then there will be little room for cooperation or even just
coexistence between the empirical and the speculative camps. But, as
I have shown, previous speculative work informs my definition and is
therefore subsumed in my empirical orientation. Furthermore, to adopt
the scientific method does not necessarily mean to endorse a determin-
ist view of the world. Karl Popper himself rejected total determinism,
making space for free will in a chapter titled Of Clouds and Clocks (1994
[1979]: 206–255). These two terms allegorically delimit a cline from
uniqueness and unpredictability (‘clouds’, the pole stressed by herme-
neutic-minded scholars) to consistency and predictability (‘clocks’, the
pole emphasised by empiricists). Neither view needs to be exclusive, as
both are instrumental to understand the workings of the endlessly vari-
able and the relatively invariant aspects of literary texts and the readerly
responses to them. In Jeffries’s words:
68
D. Castiglione
The point of scientific approaches to understanding natural phenomena,

including language, is to produce a model of what is happening which
will explain the phenomenon by focusing on significant patterns rather
than reproducing the full complexity of the original data. (Jeffries 2014:
478)
This work aligns with Jeffries’s position for she does not condemn the
reductionism of scientific approaches but conceives of it as a necessary
pathway towards explanation. Resisting the humanist’s penchant for
exegesis, my commitment to explanation implies precisely a refusal to
propose potentially normative interpretations of single poems.
Natural and social sciences alike develop through the stages summa-
rised by Cohen and colleagues in Fig. 3.2.
Stage 1, the identification of the phenomenon, has been the key con-
cern of Chapter 2, finally crystallising in the definition proposed in the
previous section. Contrary to the broad, top-down and subjective cate-
gories of typological approaches, stage 2 requires the reconstruction of
narrow, bottom-up and intersubjective categories. Such categories are
linguistic, cognitive and behavioural (response-based). What the present
work sets out to achieve is advancing our knowledge of poetic difficulty
to stage 2, so as to pave the way for theoretically grounded correlational
research in the future.
This may look like a modest aim, but one has to bear in mind
that the higher stages are normally the results of decades of trial-and-
error work by teams of scientists. Certain well-investigated areas of
l l
l l l l
l l
l l l
l l
Fig. 3.2 Stages in the development of a science (Adapted from Cohen et al.

2000: 16)
69
psycholinguistics, such as bilingualism and language acquisition, have

ticked all the stages outlined in Fig. 3.2. In the empirical studies of lit-
erature, some pioneering correlational and experimental work is being
conducted in areas other than difficulty, but the fairly recent rise of such
an approach, the resistance or indifference of most Humanities schol-
ars and finally the complexity of its research object make the progress
slower than in other areas. Moreover, so many and so ill-defined are the
variables and parameters of difficulty that leaping to successive stages
would amount to building a house on shaky foundations—a superfi-
cial imitation of science, in the footsteps of Yaron’s questionable experi-
ments (see Sect. 2.1.3).
A preliminary, theory-informed analysis of data—poems, readers’
response to them and the literature on difficulty—is therefore essential,
as laws and explanatory hypotheses aimed at explaining a phenomenon
cannot be formulated in a vacuum. Although I do occasionally suggest
ways to manipulate variables after identifying them, or make provisional
attempts at formulating hypotheses, I generally comply with the claim
by Cohen et al. that ‘too premature a formulation of theory before the
necessary empirical spadework has been done can lead to a slowing
down of progress’ (2000: 13).
3.3 Stylistics, Foregrounding

and Systemic-Functional Grammar
(b) As a phenomenon, its [difficulty’s] detection or attribution is a func-
tion of a wide but closed set of linguistic features and compositional
principles that can be variously combined.
The contextualised occurrence of certain linguistic features has been

deemed responsible for the creation of difficulty effects, as highlighted
by my review of stylistic approaches in Chapter 2 (see Sect. 2.1.2). It is
indeed the business of stylistics, a burgeoning discipline straddling lan-
guage and literary studies, to retrace the steps from experienced effects
to linguistic patterns, and vice versa. In Toolan’s words, ‘stylistics […]
undertakes to be precise, analytical and verifiable about the grammar
70
D. Castiglione
that underlies and creates the literariness effects’ (2014: 15). Chapter 4
will be entirely devoted to detail such a grammar of difficulty and to
explain why only certain features, violations and constructions belong
to it.
For the moment, suffice it to say that each given poem will instanti-
ate only some of these features, making them stand out from the rest of
the text (internal deviation) and/or from more general linguistic norms
(external deviation). In stylistics, this idea of prominence is captured
by the notion of foregrounding. While different if partially overlap-
ping definitions of it exist, I side with Simpson’s observation that ‘fore-
grounding typically involves a stylistic distortion of some sort’ (2014
[1993]: 50), which in turn causes the reader to focus on ‘a certain part
of the text’ (Douthwaite 2000: 37), thereby conveying ‘a special effect
or significance’ (Leech 2008: 3). Moreover, foregrounding is a dynamic
notion: besides suggesting ‘the opposite of automatization’ (Mukařovský
2001 [1932]: 226), it is ‘not a category indicating “essentials” of literari-
ness in an absolute or material sense’ (van Peer 1986: 185).
The extent to which a feature is perceived as foregrounded will
depend on the nature and degree of the deviation (e.g. asyntactic strings
are more foregrounded than clauses with a marked but acceptable word
order, which in turn are foregrounded compared to clauses with stand-
ard word order) as well as on its distribution and pervasiveness within a
given poem—Leech’s notion of cohesion of foregrounding (2008: 31).
But while all foregrounded features are assumed to exhibit the literar-
iness of the poetic text, only those arguably contributing to difficulty
are analysed in the present work. Each analysis will then concentrate on
a subset of foregrounding techniques building up to a unitary if inter-
nally composite phenomenon—difficulty. Methodologically, then, fore-
grounding acts as a filter or funnel, selecting and arranging the relevant
information so as to transform a potentially undifferentiated linguistic
description into a principled stylistic analysis.
Having established stylistics as the key discipline at work and fore-
grounding its main conceptual tool, what remains to be clarified is
the linguistic tradition underpinning the stylistic analyses and ensur-
ing accuracy and consistency of descriptive terminology. As Toolan
puts it, ‘in large degree the theories stylisticians at least tacitly invoke
71
are theories of language, which they inherit from the particular kind
of linguistics (systemic-functional, corpus, cognitive, etc.) they chiefly
employ’ (2014: 14). Broadly speaking, the stylistic model developed in
this work draws on functionalist rather than formalist linguistics, for the
reasons exposed by Fabb and Durant:
The difference between functionalist and formalist linguistics has been

important in one part of the recent linguistics of writing, in stylistics; it
has, for example, often been argued that a functional linguistics is more
appropriate to stylistics’ analysis of the linguistic structure of texts than a
formalist linguistics because a functionalist grammar sees a direct corre-
lation between use (e.g. an actual text) and structure, and moreover has
a more extensive theory of how use and structure are related. (Fabb and
Durant 1987: 10)
Halliday’s famous analysis of transitivity patterns in Golding’s The

Inheritors (Halliday 1971) along with the impressive descriptive appa-
ratus of systemic-functional grammar, SFG henceforth (Halliday and
Matthiessen 2004), led SFG to dominate British stylistics for decades
(Stockwell 2014). Not only are SFG and foregrounding compatible,
they are also mutually implicated from a historical perspective: some
of the foremost theorists of foregrounding (e.g. Mukařovský) were
part of the Prague linguistic circle, embracing a functionalist approach
that was to underpin the development of SFG in the late 60s and early
70s. Conversely, British stylisticians who would later elaborate on
foregrounding (e.g. Fowler, Leech, Douthwaite) have often drawn on
SFG.
It is only fair to acknowledge that the recent rise of cognitive gram-
mar (CG henceforth) within stylistics (see Harrison et al. 2014) is
proving a strong alternative to SFG. Yet, beyond the appealing prom-
ise of letting the psychological effect directly emerge from the linguis-
tic description, it remains unclear what practical gains CG can bring
over SFG. An impartial and careful assessment of the merits and lim-
itations of each framework still remains to be carried out. How else is
one to account for the fact that some distinguished stylisticians are still
reluctant to discard SFG (or even more traditional frameworks, for that
72
D. Castiglione
matters) and embrace CG? More realistically, the cohabitation of sev-

eral frameworks can be hailed as a sign that stylistics is a healthy, young
and unorthodox discipline, one singularly open to eclecticism, as I will
discuss shortly. In the light of these arguments, SFG is my main frame-
work and the subsequent paragraphs will offer both an overview of it
and some justifications for its suitability.
SFG distinguishes five dimensions of linguistic description: struc-
ture, related to the syntagmatic axis, from the morpheme up to the
clause; system, related to the paradigmatic axis, in which grammar
and lexis are thought as belonging to a continuum rather than kept
dichotomous as it is the case with formalist grammars; stratification,
referring to the linguistic level of realisation (semantics, lexicogrammar,
phonology, phonetics); instantiation, from the potential of language as
a whole up to any specific instance of language in use2; and metafunc-
tion, identifying three simultaneously occurring levels of meaning in
any text: textual, ideational and interpersonal.
The textual metafunction conceptualises language as matter and
texts as objects, so it is concerned with aspects of textual organisation,
information distribution and grammatical choices. The ideational
metafunction conceptualises language as reflection: it represents ‘a
theory of human experience’ (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 29). It
is at this level that language is referential and can be claimed to have
a pictorial quality, which in turn is of paramount importance for the
representational problem outlined earlier (Sect. 2.2.5). Finally, the
interpersonal metafunction conceives of language as action, and
therefore, it is concerned with the interactional aspects of communi-
cation, such as stance, vocatives and commands. To sum up, language
is simultaneously artefact (textual), representation (ideational) and
exchange (interpersonal). The very idea, borrowed by cultural criticism,
that poetry should resist easy consumption is an attempt at bending if
not sabotaging the interpersonal, exchange-based norms of language.
Philosophically, then, poetic difficulty could be argued to stem from
a desire or willingness to undermine the ideational and interpersonal
metafunctions, thus generating the representational problem and the
meaningfulness–meaninglessness dilemma discussed in Chapter 2.
73
I wish now to return to, and to expand upon, the dimension of

instantiation, for its epistemological implications are important for the
present work. Specific choices made by speakers and writers (instanti-
ations) allow us a glimpse into the potential of language, which is not
a static entity but one very much in a state of flux, moulded by usage.
This means that SFG escapes both total determinism and unrestrained
arbitrariness, as the significance of speakers’ choices is measured against
the (regulatory, although not normative) background of language
potential. Following Popper’s aforementioned analogy, SFG is able to
capture the clock-like nature of language in its consistently non-random
instantiations, while acknowledging its cloudiness, that is, the presence
of indeterminacy and the scope for creativity. This tension between
overall consistency and local unpredictability applies very much to a
sub-potential of language in use as difficult poetry. If it were not like
this, building an explanatory model would be a doomed enterprise from
the beginning.
Of these five dimensions, the ones most in focus will be (a) struc-
ture, accounting for the sequential reading of poems and the sense of
resistance they engender; (b) instantiation, useful in claiming general
validity out of representative case studies; and (c) the metafunctions,
especially the foregrounding of the textual to the detriment of the ide-
ational and interpersonal. Other technical notions from SFG will be
introduced when convenient during the analyses themselves. From this
overview, it can be seen that SFG is, both practically and theoretically, a
suitable framework for my stylistic analyses.
Alongside SFG, I will also resort to Biber et al. (2002) grammar of
spoken and written English (GSWE henceforth). This is less theoreti-
cal than SFG—it is indeed a reference grammar book—but like SFG it
is functionalist in orientation and also features interesting statistics on
the usage of grammatical categories and constructions across different
registers. In other words, it provides data on a variety of norms of usage
that can be usefully contrasted with the linguistic behaviour of difficult
poems. After all, as Austin has argued ‘stylistics must use whatever tool
is best for its scope, overcoming the territorialism and competitiveness
of linguistic schools’ (1994: 136).
74
D. Castiglione
What Austin is invoking here is eclecticism, the principled yet lib-

eral reliance on different tools and frameworks. Eclecticism is at work,
for instance, in Baicchi (2012), who develops a linguistic framework to
explain meaning in interaction. In order to do so, she brings together
frameworks from the linguistic branch of pragmatics (Speech-Act-
Theory and Relevance Theory [RT]—see Sect. 3.6 in this chapter),
SFG (the notion of interpersonal meaning) and cognitive linguistics
(especially blending theory and construction grammar). A similar uni-
tary effort is in Jeffries (2014), who also combines SFG and pragmatics.
Together with Jeffries (2000), also Austin (1994) and Goatly (2008),
among others, endorse eclecticism in stylistics. Eclecticism could be
conceived of as a loose variant of triangulation in the social sciences, the
idea that any phenomenon is best explored through different methodol-
ogies (Dörnyei 2007). The next section, introducing models of language
comprehension and processing and applying them to another portion
of the operational definition of difficulty, shows how interdisciplinary
eclecticism works in practice.
3.4 Language Processing and Comprehension

(c) The real-time encounter of the reader with such textual configura-
tions leads to a slowed down, cognitively taxing online processing
that has been analogically rationalised as resistance, barrier or obsta-
cle to (basic, non-hermeneutic) comprehension.
Linguistics provides the tools to describe texts, but any account of our
reading them cannot dispense with psycholinguistic models of the cog-
nitive processes involved in reading. Most of the notions I am about
to introduce come from the standard reference psycholinguistics primer
The Psychology of Language (Harley 2008). They will form an integral
part of the conceptual and descriptive apparatus of the analyses in
Part II.
Reading begins with decoding, the process through which words
are identified from strings of characters. Once the word is decoded, we
assign linguistic meanings to it by searching our lexicon, the vocabulary
75
sculpted in our mind. This form-meaning mapping is often not direct,

as phonological mediation may take place in between—even in silent
reading, we tend to get to meaning via sound, assigning phonologi-
cal properties to the words on the page before accessing their seman-
tics. Which lexical meaning is selected among the alternatives available
depends on the richness of our lexicon as well as on contextual cues, for
seldom do words occur in isolation. In normal, fluent reading, it is a
matter of milliseconds for these phases to take place, and so the decod-
ing process looks automatic. But whenever a word is misspelt to the
point of being hardly recognisable, or two senses of a word fit the same
context (lexical ambiguity), then ‘problem solving as a repair process’ is
resorted to (Kintsch 1998: 3).
Important as it is, decoding is only the first stage of reading. Since we
are usually confronted with texts, we also need to identify the syntac-
tic form (noun, verb, adverb, preposition…) and function (predicate,
subject, object, complement…) of the words in order to make sense of
the clauses they occur in. This operation is known as parsing (Harley
2008: 287), and it does not presuppose any theoretical knowledge
about syntax on the part of the reader. Indeed, it usually takes place
below the level of consciousness—unless cases of syntactic ambiguity
or ill-formedness elicit problem-solving processes. These two cognitive
operations, decoding and parsing, are the foundations on which com-
prehension hinges (Harley 2008: 361).
To define and detail this last process is paramount, as issues of
impaired or faulty comprehension have surfaced over and over in the
speculative literature on difficulty: to name but a few, Steiner (1978)
distinguishes between empirical understanding and genuine compre-
hension; Leech (1969) posits a relation between linguistic deviation and
gaps in comprehension; Diepeveen equates difficulty with ‘the experi-
ence of having one’s desires for comprehension blocked’ (2003: x); and
Yaron (2002, 2003, 2008) explicitly draws on models of discourse com-
prehension to theoretically account for the experience of reading diffi-
cult poems.
In their classic work on the subject, Teun van Dijk and Walter Kintsch
(1983) regard comprehension as ‘a common sense term which dissolves
upon closer analysis into many different subprocesses’ (1983: 259).
76
D. Castiglione
Activation of word meanings

Formation of propositions
Making of inferences
Integration of a network of inter-related items into

a coherent structure
Resolution of contradiction or incorrect inferences
Fig. 3.3 Kintsch’s construction-integration model (Adapted from Harley 2008)
Fifteen years later, Kintsch redefines comprehension more holistically as

‘a loosely structured, bottom-up process that is highly sensitive to con-
text and that flexibly adjusts to shifts in the environment’ (1998: 94).
Kintsch’s (1998) model of comprehension is usefully diagrammed in
Harley (2008: 386). Figure 3.3 reproduces the diagram in the belief that
in order to understand a poem one has still to go through the basic stages
posited by the model.
Kintsch’s C-I model postulates the existence of two interacting
moments: one in which word meanings are accessed as if out of con-
text (construction), and one in which the surrounding context refines
those meanings in order to revise the ongoing mental representation
(integration).
In the construction phase, decoding (activation of word meanings)
and parsing (formation of proposition) are implemented by inferences.
The making of inferences ‘might involve going beyond the text to main-
tain coherence or to elaborate on what was actually presented’ (Harley
2008: 368). The psycholinguistic literature distinguishes between logi-
cal inferences, resting on semantic entailment (e.g. ‘Vlad is a bache-
lor’ → ‘he is a male’); bridging inferences, whereby we relate new to
previous information to maintain coherence (e.g. ‘the car broke down.
There was a problem in the valves’ → ‘valves is part of the engine,
which allows cars to move’); and elaborative inferences, whereby we
77
draw on world knowledge to expand on the information given (e.g. ‘she

and her boyfriend have just split up’ → ‘they must be in a state of dis-
tress now’).
With their typically low degree of textual cohesion and coherence
(see Chapter 4), difficult poems are likely to impair the making of
bridging inferences; on the other hand, poems perceived as literal and
straightforward should allow for bridging inferences to take place while
discouraging a proliferation of elaborative inferences; such proliferation,
by contrast, should be expected for poems for which several plausible
inferencing paths are possible—in such cases obscurity might be a more
appropriate aesthetic descriptor, involving hermeneutic hesitation and
final undecidability rather than an upfront assault on basic sense-mak-
ing strategies. A more fine-grained categorisation of inferences is pro-
vided by Magliano et al. (1996), who expand the list to eleven in order
to account for certain subcategories attested in literary reading (e.g.
superordinate goal/action, thematic inferences, author’s intent and
reader’s emotion and so on). In order not to make this section exces-
sively jargon-laden, such categories will not be introduced until the
analyses in Part II and only when prompted by the reader-response data
at my disposal.
While the construction phase of which decoding, parsing and infer-
encing are part is concerned with local understanding, the integration
phase is concerned with global understanding as it involves the emer-
gence of ‘an orderly mental structure out of initial chaos’ (Kintsch
1998: 5). For global understanding to occur, readers need to derive a
textbase, that is, ‘the semantic representation of the input discourse in
episodic memory’ (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983: 11), and a situation
model, or the ‘cognitive representations of events, actions, situations’
(1983: 11). As this bifurcation is a by-product of formalist grammars
drawing a neat line between propositional (semantic) and experiential
(pragmatic) content, it needs some qualification in view of my reliance
on SFG. Functionalist (as well as cognitive) grammars encompass both
components more holistically. Within SFG, the ideational metafunction
features both a logical component (e.g. relationship between clauses)
and an experiential one (e.g. processes, participants, circumstances).
I will use the term textbase for the former aspect and situation model
78
D. Castiglione
for the latter. The second stage of integration, the resolution of contra-
dictions, applies to informative and expository text types but not nec-
essarily to poetry: it is indeed well known that contradictions in poetry
are often exploited for aesthetic purposes, usually resulting in paradoxes
not meant to be solved.
In a more recent paper, Kintsch and Mangalath (2011) implement
the C-I model by drawing on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA hence-
forth), a computer program that simulates human understanding. They
propose ‘a generative model of meaning that distinguishes between
decontextualized representations that are stored in long-term memory
and the meaning that emerges in working memory when these rep-
resentations are used in context’ (2011: 347). If difficult poems exploit
defamiliarisation and deautomatisation, as it is plausible to assume,
then the meaning-making process should take place mostly in the read-
er’s working memory, in a bottom-up, text-driven fashion. Arguably,
the feeling of resistance engendered by difficult poems stems from the
fact that the online construction of meaning requires more effort and
active involvement compared to the retrieval of information stored in
long-term memory. By contrast, obscurity might be related to a more
long-term effect, whereby the experience of unattained elucidation
occasionally resurfaces from long-term memory up to the readers’
consciousness.
The C-I model has been developed mainly on the basis of expository
and informative genres, so scholars and psychologists concerned with
literary reading have grown increasingly dissatisfied with it. Both Zwaan
and Emmott, for instance, point out that the model neglects stylistic
elements due to its overemphasis on issues of ‘text cohesion and gist
construction’ (Zwaan 1993: 27) and ‘artificial data and on the propo-
sitional content of them’ (Emmott 2002: 97). The C-I model’s reliance
on dependency grammar, a formalist type of grammar, has also been
under attack. According to Zwaan (2004), such grammar is ill-suited
to account for imagery representation, paramount for a situation model
to be construed. He thus contends that ‘an experiential analysis makes
more subtle predictions than an amodal analysis’ (2004: 56) and draws
on cognitive linguistics to interpret experimental findings related to
embodied comprehension. An additional criticism levelled at the model
79
concerns its overemphasis on bottom-up processes (e.g. decoding, pars-

ing) to the detriment of top-down ones (e.g. elaborative inferences). As
Sanford and Emmott put it, ‘local semantic analysis, including assign-
ment of thematic roles, may be overridden and even determined by the
use of pragmatic (world) knowledge’, a fact which raises ‘a problem for
a strictly stepwise processing account, in which local interpretations
precede more global interpretations’ (2012: 27).
At this point, one may wonder why I have bothered to introduce
the C-I model at all despite its drawbacks. This objection can be coun-
tered by re-examining each criticism on its own. The first two of them
do not call into question the basic architecture of the model, but rather
demand some implementations. Precisely because the model has lit-
tle to say on how the style of literary texts affects comprehension, the
present work integrates it with state-of-the-art research in stylistics. As
for the second criticism, my aforementioned reliance on the ideational
metafunction from SFG ensures that aspects of imagery and representa-
tion are dealt with. The third criticism appears to be the most seri-
ous, as it questions the conceptual architecture of the C-I model. But,
as has already emerged in the ongoing discussion and as will become
increasingly compelling, difficult poems are difficult precisely because
they hinder top-down processes of the kind described by Sanford and
Emmott, thus forcing the reader to a laborious bottom-up mean-
ing construction process. So, while Sanford and Emmott are right in
pointing out that the C-I model does not account for observed readerly
behaviour in all contexts, this very limitation becomes an advantage in
the crucial case of difficult poetry processing.
3.5 Components of Significance and Literary

Comprehension
(d) So deeply and unconsciously do such configurations interfere with
basic cognitive processes that they hinder or delay higher-order pro-
cesses, including the construction of an interpretation and of genre-
specific expectations.
80
D. Castiglione
The C-I model, as we have seen, is not to be discarded but just imple-
mented. The reading of literature, and of poetry in particular, involves
a dialectics between general linguistic processing and genre-specific
expectations that are part of one’s literary competence (Culler 2002
[1975]: 131–152). Hanauer (1998), for instance, has empirically shown
that readers accord much lower poeticity judgements to postmodernist
poems problematising the concept of genre (e.g. by David Antin and
John Ashbery) as opposed to early modernist poems with a more tradi-
tional structure (e.g. by Lawrence and Joyce). Hanauer’s finding empha-
sises the quite obvious but easily forgotten fact that literary competence
is time and genre sensitive: the strong if partial literary competence of
an avid reader of Victorian fiction may not suffice to satisfactorily tackle
contemporary poetry, and vice versa.
The activation of such genre-based reading norms, according to
Zwaan, rests on the reader’s prior recognition that the text they are
reading is a literary one. Such recognition, in turn, is held to be regu-
lated by a specific control system. Control systems are ‘cognitive mech-
anisms that help people act in situations’ (1993: 19; emphasis is the
author’s), so they result in preferential behavioural strategies—includ-
ing genre-specific reading strategies. While any infringement of the C-I
model’s basic processes may account for the perception of difficulty, to
describe higher cognitive operations would enable to draw a cognitively
grounded distinction between difficulty and obscurity.
Comprehension as defined by the C-I model leaves out Steiner’s
notion of ‘genuine comprehension’ (1978: 28) that most literary critics
regard as one of the ultimate aims of the study of literature. As acknowl-
edged by Zwaan, the situation model alone ‘is not capable of capturing
an abstract referential dimension of text comprehension’ (1993: 166).
This extra level can be accommodated into the stage of interpretation,
which in Dillon’s model of literary processing amounts to the recon-
struction of authorial intention (1978: xx).3 Dillon’s characterisation
of interpretation, however, corresponds rather to one of its sub-types,
exegetic interpretation. Eisegetical interpretations, by contrast, ‘are
entirely the reader responsibility’ since in them ‘the reader has used con-
texts which are unintended, unforeseen, or unforeseeable from the writ-
er’s point of view’ (Furlong 1995).
81
Interpretation also features in Hanauer’s poetry text processing

model, or PTP (1997). The PTP model consists of ‘a poetic text cat-
egorisation component, a construction component for generating an
internal representation of a poetic text and a production component
for constructing a written literary interpretation’ (1997: 162). The first
component calls closely to mind Zwaan’s control system for literary
reading: once a text is categorised as literary, the next step consists in
assigning it a genre (e.g. poetry), with more fine-grained distinctions
depending on the reader’s level of literary competence. Hanauer’s phrase
‘internal representation’ brings the second component of his model haz-
ardously close to the notions of textbase and situation model, both of
which involve an internal representation of a text at different levels. The
third component is assumed to vary widely across critics after Fish’s pro-
posal of interpretive communities, and so it is not further specified (let
alone exemplified in practice).
The conceptual problem here is that interpretation in the PTP model
is excessively coloured by a subjective emphasis inherited by Fish’s con-
ventionalist position. By contrast, Jeffries (2014) regards interpretation
as based on the ‘recognition of some kind of consensual meaning of
texts’ and relies instead on the term reading to indicate ‘a more personal
kind of textually prompted significance’ (2014: 470)—what for Fish
and Hanauer would count as interpretation. Jeffries’s distinction effec-
tively captures the principled and public-oriented nature of interpreta-
tions as opposed to the erratic idiosyncrasies of readings. However, it
might also background the centrality of the elaborative inferences neces-
sarily made when producing an interpretation in the hermeneutic sense
of the word. I therefore propose that for a reading to be classified as an
interpretation, it needs to touch upon aspects of significance that can be
consensually derived by means of elaborative inferences.
What follows is my attempt to operationalise interpretation by cir-
cumscribing it so that it yields explanatory power for the phenomena
of difficulty and obscurity. Textually, while comprehension depends
on verbalisation, that is, the level of linguistic meaning (Hasan 1985:
96–97), the outcome of interpretation is theme, ‘the meaning of the
highest stratum’ (1985: 97).4 As can be inferred from Hasan’s own ana-
lytic praxis, themes are formulated as statements or phrases endowed
82
D. Castiglione
with general values or truths (e.g. ‘“The road not taken” is about the
limitations and immutability of human choices’; Hasan 1985: 97). Also
described as ‘what the text is about when dissociated from the particu-
larities of that text’ (1985: 97), that of theme is a necessarily reduc-
tionist notion that levels out individual differences across texts. In
cognitivist terms, it can be seen as a top-down construct akin to scripts
and schemas (Tsur 2008: 272) or as a thematic inference (Magliano
et al. 1996: 210). Of course, theme formulation implies the reader’s
coming to terms with the level of verbalisation, that is, comprehension
is a necessary precondition for interpretation to occur. In short, verbal-
isation enables the formulation of the gist, or topic of a poem; theme
abstracts from verbalisation (typically through the use of hypernyms
and abstract nouns) to express (part of ) the significance of the poetic
text (Leech 1969: 40; Riffaterre 1984 [1978]: 2).5 So deeply ingrained
is the readerly pursuit of significance, that Culler has made it one of the
central reading conventions of the lyric: the convention of significance,
stating that ‘the reader approaches the poem with the assumption that
however brief it may appear it must contain, at least implicitly, potential
riches which make it worthy of its attention’ (Culler 2002 [1975]: 204).
While reductionist, these dichotomies are nevertheless still needed as
they allow for obvious heuristic advantages during the analytic phase in
Part II. In particular, it will be argued that when certain stylistic config-
urations prompt the reader to formulate a theme whose tentativeness
verges on idiosyncrasy, the effect will be one of obscurity. By contrast,
when different stylistic configurations hinder theme formulation in the
first place, initial difficulty will not give way to subsequent obscurity.
Another reason to operationally retain such dichotomies lies in their
currency within literary criticism: one can easily come across compara-
ble pairs such as sense/signification (Richards 1929), denotative mean-
ing/significance (Leech 1969), information/meaning (Perloff 1991) and
meaning/signification (Derrida 1992).
Theme, as we have seen, stands at one remove from verbalisation.
But a further layer of derived significance, formal symbolism (Fabb
2002: 216) can be added. Also known as symbolic iconicity or iconic
grammar, formal symbolism lies in the formulation of any plausible
iconic relation between foregrounded stylistic features (e.g. parallelism,
83
repetition, kind of syntactic constructions…) and either the theme or

topic of the poem. If theme is the outcome of thematic inferences, for-
mal symbolism is the outcome of stylistic inferences building either
on previously made thematic inferences or on topic construction.
Consider the following statements: ‘it is a poem [Pound’s Canto XLV]
which linguistically performs its theme, the insidious effect of usura’
(Brooke-Rose 1976: 60); ‘the syntax moves forward, in linear fashion,
with its multiple conjoined clauses, a trajectory that reflects the motions
described in the dance performance itself ’ (Freeman 2005: 47; on syn-
tactic iconicity, see also Jeffries 2010). In Eco’s words, ‘insofar as the
aesthetic text has a self-focusing quality […] its structural arrangement
becomes one of the contents that it conveys’ (Eco 1979: 271).
Notice that, for formal symbolism to be inferred, linguistic and
structural features are not assigned text-external meanings (e.g. they are
not related to the author’s conjectured psychology). Instead, they are
assigned text-internal meanings, resting as they do on theme formu-
lation, warranted in turn by verbalisation—the language of the poem
itself. This makes the formulation of formal symbolism verifiable and
open to public scrutiny. I further propose that formal symbolism func-
tions as a compensatory strategy for the perceived lack of traditional
significance conveyed by theme formulation. In other words, formal
symbolism is a ‘last hermeneutic resort’, most strongly sought after
if theme formulation fails or is downgraded to unsatisfactory topic
formulation.
Overall, theme and formal symbolism are to significance in inter-
pretation what textbase and situation model are to topic in compre-
hension. Interpretation entails comprehension (but not vice versa) via
an intermediate notion, literary comprehension. This last is still an
umbrella term encompassing processes as diverse as ‘reading a literary
work for pleasure, interpreting a literary work in-depth, evaluating a lit-
erary work (e.g. in the form of a literary critique), and so on’ (Zwaan
1993: 4). Despite their diversity, such processes rest on certain assump-
tions invoked to set literary comprehension apart from general compre-
hension. Following these assumptions, which Zwaan derives from the
work of the Russian formalists, literary comprehension is: (a) enriched
by defamiliarisation; (b) attentive to stylistic features; (c) less subjected
84
D. Castiglione
to truth criteria compared to other text types; and (d) more concerned
with the textbase (the propositional level of a text) than with the situa-
tion model (its referential dimension).
Points (a) and (b) hold true of difficult poetry for reasons dwelt upon
in previous sections and further elaborated in Part II. Both aspects are
involved in the notion of depth of processing (Stockwell 2009; Sanford
and Emmott 2012). Stockwell characterises it as ‘intensity and configu-
ration of reading’ (2009: 45) which is a function of both readerly (e.g.
alertness and attention) and textual variables (e.g. foregrounded textual
elements, called attractors by Stockwell). Likewise, Sanford and Emmott
link deep processing to foregrounding and defamiliarisation (2012:
103) resulting in moderately disrupted reading fluency (112). During
shallow processing, by contrast, ‘the meaning of words or expressions
is not fully analysed or taken into account’, so that ‘the outcome of shal-
low processing is an underspecified mental representation of the text’ (104;
emphasis is the authors’). As will be shown in Part II, some difficult
poems seem to require deep processing but paradoxically prompt shal-
low processing. Sanford and Emmott explain the conundrum by arguing
that ‘if reading becomes too overloaded, for instance through the use of
overly complex sentences, then processing may be more shallow, due to
competition over processing resources’ (2012: 112).
Point (c)—the relevance of truth criteria—is prototypically valid
for fiction as we approach this genre having in mind a model of (or
at least some assumptions about) reality. This is less the case with
poetry though, where often norms of verisimilitude are neither rein-
forced nor overturned but simply do not come into play.6 If (d)—the
primacy of textbase over situation model—is recast in terms of a dis-
tinction between representation and logical relationships, as I have sug-
gested when introducing the notions of textbase and situation model,
then the proposition it expresses becomes questionable and, to say the
least, resistant to generalisation. This is because literature, while also
read for the wisdom it can dispense through maxims realised in generic
sentences, often owes much of its evocative power to the depiction of
settings and characters.7 But again, different poems will foreground dif-
ferent components, so any generalisation has first to pass the severe test
of textual evidence.
85
Most of the processes introduced so far can be located within the

neurocognitive model of literary reading outlined in Jacobs (2014),
which is the state of the art in terms of empirical accuracy and
comprehensiveness.
Jacob’s model distinguishes a textual level, a neuronal level, an
affective-cognitive level and a behavioural level. Textually, difficulty is
prompted by defamiliarised linguistic patterns of a specific kind (see
Chapter 4). On an affective-cognitive level, these patterns lead to, or
even overturn, explicit processing and aesthetic feelings. On a behav-
ioural level, the interaction between such patterns and the cognitive
processes described in this and the previous section manifest in the
physical world through slowed down reading (see Chapter 4). In this
book, I am not concerned with the neuronal level, as the pursuit of
such an aim would presuppose a collaboration with a neurolinguist—a
scenario that has not so far concretised.8 Till then, one is probably not
in the position to rebut Tsur’s assertion that ‘pointing out correspond-
ences between poetic effects and the topography of the brain has little to
contribute to our understanding of how literature works’ (2010: 512).
Finally, another kind of manifestation that can be added to the model is
the reader’s failure at constructing acceptable interpretations (both spo-
ken and written) or, alternatively, their success at constructing interpre-
tations that, however, bear the signs of laborious problem-solving and
uncertainty at above-average level.9 Incidentally, this last proposal inte-
grates Jacob’s neurocognitive model of literary reading with the third
component of Hanauer’s PTP model.
3.6 A Pragmatics of Reading: Relevance Theory

(e) The trade-off between the presence of readerly investment or lack
thereof—and as a result between positive and negative reactions—
obeys the literary-pragmatic principle of relevance.
The interpretive process with its stipulated conventions does not occur
in a vacuum but it presupposes a tangible interaction between text and
reader that takes place within a communicative context. This clearly
86
D. Castiglione
calls for a pragmatics of reading. Without a pragmatic framework, one

is hard put to explain how the cognitive operations channelled by and
through language (Sect. 3.3) and involved in reading (Sects. 3.4 and
3.5) translate into certain text effects that vary considerably across read-
ers and texts (see Chapter 4). Literary pragmatics is the ideal bridge
between stylistics and reader-response criticism, as has been seen in
Sell’s pragmatic approach to The Wasteland (Sect. 2.1.2) or as is the case
with Jeffries’ model of textual meaning that includes a pragmatic com-
ponent (2014). In Pilkington’s words, ‘an account of rhetoric and style
only makes sense in the context of a pragmatic theory concerned with
cognitive processing effects’, since ‘stylistic effects cannot be explained as
a direct function of linguistic form’ (2000: 125).
The pragmatic theory Pilkington is advocating is Relevance Theory
(RT henceforth) originally propounded by Sperber and Wilson (1986)
and since then adopted by many scholars variously concerned with the
interface between cognition and communication. The idea underpin-
ning RT is that ‘human cognitive processes […] are geared to achieving
the greatest possible cognitive effect for the smallest possible processing
effort’ (Sperber and Wilson 1995 [1986]: vii). This trade-off depends
on relevance, a theoretical concept related to people’s ability to ‘con-
sistently distinguish relevant from irrelevant information, or in some
cases, more relevant from less relevant information’ (119). At first sight,
the relevance demanded by poetic difficulty looks counterintuitive to
the point of overturning the relevance principle of ordinary communi-
cation: not only is poetic language assumed to convey only maximally
relevant information by virtue of its contrived density; but more prob-
lematically, difficult poems are geared to maximise processing effort—a
strategy that does not always yield cognitive (text) effects that are
rewarding enough as to justify such high expenditure of energy, as my
overview of empirical studies in the next chapter will show. This risk is
readily admitted by Pilkington: ‘in literary communication it may hap-
pen that the effort required is beyond the capability of the reader and he
becomes confused or frustrated’ (2000: 101).
Prynne’s cursory dismissal of RT as ‘instructive’ but ‘too elemen-
tary to achieve nuanced analysis of poetic discourse’ (2010: 163) can
be countered by recalling (a) the growing body of work drawing on
87
RT and producing precisely a wealth of nuanced stylistic analyses (e.g.

Chapman and Clark 2014) and (b) by placing RT alongside the other
frameworks outlined so far. Within the proposed model, I regard RT
as instrumental in accounting for the meaningfulness–meaninglessness
dilemma (Sect. 2.2.6), that is, the bifurcation leading to the two most
likely destinations of the difficulty route: obscurity and nonsense. This
is because RT is concerned with the inferential stage of comprehension
(see Sect. 3.4) on which readerly attributions of meaningfulness (or lack
thereof ) depend. RT for instance proposes that while in direct commu-
nication a few main assumptions are strongly activated,10 the indirect-
ness of poetic language is accounted for by a more diffuse activation of a
wide range of weaker assumptions.
In an interdisciplinary work like this, it is useful to warn the reader
that RT endorses a generativist view of cognition that differs from
that of the mainstream cognitivist frameworks outlined in Sect. 3.4.
Likewise, its technical vocabulary is of a different breed too, owing
more to the philosophy of language than to discourse studies. There
is little point in teasing out the theoretical implications of such diver-
gences here, as these do not affect my stylistic practice and hypotheses
on how linguistic features are processed. For this reason, my reliance on
RT is confined to a post hoc explanation of the inferences identifiable in
the response data introduced during the analyses and of the mechanisms
underlying such key text effects as readerly investment or rejection.

This chapter has laid out the conceptual foundations of the model the
development of which will be completed by the end of the next chap-
ter, where I list and examine several readerly and linguistic indicators of
difficulty. The frameworks have been directly derived from the defini-
tion of the phenomenon at stake, which in turn is consistent with the
received view of difficulty explored in Chapter 2. Each framework pro-
vides tools and procedures to tackle specific components and phases of
poetic difficulty. This ensures that it is the research object that which
dictates the approach, rather than a priori adhesion to some scholarly
88
D. Castiglione
traditions or fashionable research programmes. Combined together,

the theories, models, frameworks and concepts that I have introduced
account for the cognitive mechanisms of linguistic processing and strat-
egies of literary sense-making. Without an understanding of these, the
study of difficulty as a phenomenon (rather than as a subjectively articu-
lated experience) would remain intuition-based and unverifiable.
Due to the number of frameworks, and the sometimes confusing but
space-saving reliance on acronyms, these are summarised in Fig. 3.4.
Conceptualising difficulty as a phenomenon rather than as a sup-
posedly mysterious quality means to embrace an empiricist out-
look based on observation, analysis and intersubjective validity. This
empirical attitude invests the study of difficulty at all levels—lin-
guistic, cognitive and contextual. Each level is best seen as a facet of
a three-dimensional figure—it does not make sense if taken in isola-
tion. That is why the frameworks suited to tackle each facet need to
work in synergy, with the contextual hinging on the cognitive and the
cognitive hinging on the linguistic. For each facet, I have introduced
the relevant frameworks and suggested how they could help establish
the analyses on firmer ground than previously, or explain certain rela-
tionships between effects and cognitive operations (e.g. the difficulty–
obscurity divide as a function of the prevalence of bridging versus
elaborative inferences).
Although wide-ranging, this is still only the frame, the skeleton of
the model. The meat will be served as a list of instantiations at the lin-
guistic (textual) and pragmatic (contextual) level in the next chapter.
EPISTEMOLOGICAL STATUS LEVEL OF ANALYSIS FRAMEWORKS
Text analysis
Evidential basis (Stylistics, foregrounding, SFG)
difficulty as linguistic
phenomenon Discourse processing
Effects (C-I model)
Cognitive Literary processing
Negotiation of effects (PTP model, Jacob’s model,
components of interpretation)
Empiricism contextual
(inductive), Pragmatics of reading
scientific method (Relevance Theory – RT)
Fig. 3.4 Overview of the frameworks at work in the model

89
These instantiations I call linguistic indicators of difficulty (LID hence-

forth) and readerly indicators of difficulty (RID henceforth), to which I
now turn.
Notes
1. For the sake of simplification, I am not addressing Toolan’s (2014)
subtle objections to the idea that the categories of linguistic descrip-
tion upon which stylistics hinges are objective or even based on firmly
shared consensus.
2. The dimension of instantiation revives but makes less rigid the
Saussurean distinction between langue and parole, that is, between the
language as a whole and its specific instantiations.
3. van Dijk (1985: 104) usefully distinguishes between intensional and
extensional interpretations: the former term refers to the application
of rules within linguistic theories and roughly amounts to the making
of logical inferences; the latter refers to looser cognitive interpretations
encompassing bridging and elaborative inferences that are open-ended
and not aprioristically established by a theory. Unless otherwise stated,
interpretation in this book is always used extensionally, thus coinciding
with the sense of the word within literary criticism.
4. This is not to be confused with theme used as the counterpart of rheme
in linguistics.
5. A distinction very close to this can be found in van Peer (2002: 253):
‘the ‘topic’ of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is the journey into the
heart of the jungle; its ‘theme’, however, could be said to be ‘isolation’
or ‘the savagery of the civilized’’.
6. For an exception, see Riffaterre (1973), who extensively analyses
Wordsworth’s ‘Yew Tree’ and demonstrates how its appeal to factual
realism is in reality undermined by the semiotic significance of the
poem’s linguistic and structural choices.
7. See Leech and Short (2007 [1981], Chapter 6) for some of the key sty-
listic indices of literary representation.
8. The interested reader is referred to Kane (2004). The neurological find-
ings she reports suggest that the language of poetry elicits numerous
functions in the right hemisphere, specialised in the emotive aspects of
language (e.g. prosody, loose semantic associations).
90
D. Castiglione
9. By ‘acceptable interpretation’, I simply mean an interpretation that the

producer is satisfied with. As a consequence, ‘acceptable’ need not be
treated in terms of subjective morality. While this clarification seems to
introduce a great deal of relativity into the model, it should be enough
for an interpretation to fulfil Culler’s convention of significance in
order to be deemed acceptable by its producer.
10. Assumptions are defined in RT as ‘thoughts treated by the individual as
representations of the actual world’ (Sperber and Wilson 1995 [1986]: 2).
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4
Genes of Difficulty: The Indicators
The previous chapter introduced an array of instruments from stylistics,

literary theory and cognitive psychology with the aim of gauging poetic
difficulty along new coordinates. But what are the agents that have the
power to trigger such instruments, the molecules of this elusive real-
world phenomenon? This is what this chapter is about.
I call indicators such agents signalling the presence of poetic diffi-
culty and divide them into two extended yet closed sets: readerly indi-
cators of difficulty (RIDs) and linguistic indicators of difficulty
(LIDs). RIDs are typical behavioural responses through which one can
assess the text effects most often interlaced with difficulty. LIDs are typ-
ical textual patterns found in poetry described as difficult and for which
there is some evidence of processing disruption or overload. The basic
idea is that LIDs elicit RIDs, and more specifically that certain LIDs
(sometimes in isolation, more often in synergy) elicit certain RIDs. Of
course, the relation between pattern and effect is neither direct nor uni-
vocal—one should not think of a straight one-to-one relation but rather
of a distorted yet predictably oriented path between the source and the
reverberations it sets in motion.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1_4
96
D. Castiglione
For a poet, deploying a LID is like throwing pebbles in a lake: wave-

lets (RIDs) will form and eventually reach the reader on the other side,
but in the meanwhile their original shape and magnitude will have been
modified by winds, undercurrents, the gliding of a swan. These distur-
bances are all those factors addressed by scholars’ eager to emphasise the
variability of difficulty: aesthetic change, level of literary competence,
mood, personal motivation and so forth. Still, without the pebble there
would be no wavelet in the first place. Taking a readerly rather than
authorial perspective, the chapter first examines the RIDs, then moves
to the LIDs—the most fully worked out aspect of the model.
4.1 Readerly Indicators

At the cognitive level, difficulty alters the decoding and inferential
processes introduced in Chapter 2. As a consequence, these normally
unconscious processes enter consciousness and acquire the status of
problems or challenges. These reading readjustments occurring inter-
nally, inside the reader, have consequences that manifest externally, in
the liminal space between the reader and their surroundings. These
result in text effects including, for instance, ‘suspense, surprise, humor
and other affective reactions’ (Dixon et al. 1993: 9). Although experi-
enced and articulated by readers, text effects have the text as their prime
agent—hence the name. While their psychological nature presupposes
a theory of behaviour to specify their denotation, it is beyond my scope
to venture into such direction. Still, it is worth considering their status
in literary criticism and, more broadly, in informal responses by readers.
Examining how critic Terry Eagleton describes perceived text effects,
Toolan (2014) praises the heuristic effectiveness of such adjectives
as ‘shambling, strident, alienated, terse, passionate, placid and so on’ for
their being ‘powerfully synthesising and summarising evaluative terms’
(2014: 15; emphasis is the author’s). It is not so much the impression-
istic nature of these terms that which Toolan objects to Eagleton, but
the latter’s inability to ground them in the grammar of literary texts.
The stumbling block Eagleton is facing here, and that stylistics should
help overcome, is part of a theoretical problem sharply examined by
4 Genes of Difficulty: The Indicators
97
Nigel Fabb (1995). Fabb characterises these kinds of statements on

readerly response as dense descriptive schemas (1995: 143). In con-
trast to the articulate schemas of grammar, which consist of one-to-
one, code-like pairings of forms and terms, dense schemas exhibit
a ‘lack of finite differentiation’ that makes them ‘non-articulate, non-
verifiable descriptions’ (145). Recast in these terms, Toolan’s stated
enterprise for stylistics lies in the attempt of converting dense schemas
into articulate ones. The present work can be seen as an endeavour to
convert the dense schema of difficulty into the articulate schema of a
model assigning a stable and verifiable basis to all the relevant effects
and components.
Because they are described in terms of dense schemas, text effects
have fuzzy boundaries: not only do they often overlap, but can be
mutually implicated as is manifestly the case for difficulty and obscu-
rity (see Sect. 2.2.8). On the positive side of the ledger, this means that
a text effect is best understood in relation to its neighbours. This per-
haps counterintuitive claim begins to make intuitive sense if one calls to
mind the many affective responses attached to the phenomenon of diffi-
culty (see esp. Sect. 2.1.3) and consider how these have shaped the con-
cept of difficulty underpinning my definition. But the speculative bend
of many such attributions sits uncomfortably in the epistemological
premises of the present work, which is grounded in scientific empiricism
(see Sect. 3.2). This is why it becomes crucial to survey the available
evidence regarding the responses associated with difficult poems—the
RIDs. These are listed in Table 4.1 and discussed immediately after.
As is clear from the ‘Research aim’ column, only the study by Yaron
is explicitly concerned with difficulty in poetry. The table reports what
I think stands as her most robust finding, the others being questionable
for reasons of experimental design (see Sect. 2.3.1). The difficult poem
literally impeded assimilation through paraphrase, halting readers to its
surface as the textual metafunction is foregrounded at the expense of the
ideational metafunction. This may at first appear to suggest that diffi-
cult poems—at least if we take Cummings’ ‘What a Proud Dreamhorse’
to be a representative sample of the population—favour shallow over
deep processing. But this is not quite right and things are, in fact, more
nuanced. The shallow versus deep opposition is not, as the conceptual
Table 4.1 RIDs according to previous empirical research
Study Research topic Overview of method RID
Spiro (2011) Variation of aesthetic Ranking of anonymised poems Lowest appreciation rank for poem
98
judgements according to 8 participants (4 professional deemed as ‘the most ambiguous’

expertise level and 4 leisure readers)
Goodblatt Online comprehension of meta- Think-aloud protocols for Higher number of alternative
and Glickson phors from poetry poems presented interpretations related to
(2010) incrementally on screen difficulty in poetry
D. Castiglione
7-point scale on vehicle-target comprehension

dissimilarity in metaphors
13 participants
Zyngier et al. Cross-cultural evaluation of Predictions about complexity Intercultural consensus on
(2007)a complexity by experts textual complexity but not on its
Simple open questionnaire evaluation
115 participants
Eva-Wood Influence of feeling on poetry Think vs. think-and-feel-aloud Interest ratings independent from
(2004) comprehension protocols both conditions only for the
10 participants poem deemed the most difficult
by the researcher
Yaron (2002) Mechanisms involved in Recall task followed by general Difficult poems elicit fragmented
difficult poetry processing explanation of the poem protocols but also better
40 participants retention of linguistic form
Hanauer (1998) Poetry vs. encyclopaedic items Recall task, reading times, Poetry is read more slowly and
processing comprehension ratings considered more difficult than
38 participants encyclopaedic items
Peskin (1998) Differences between expert Think-aloud protocols Diminished comprehension for
and novice readers in poetry 16 participants (8 experts and 8 novices negatively impacts on
reading novices) appreciation
aUse literary prose extracts
99
metaphor seems to imply, one between linguistic strata realised at dif-

ferent levels (e.g. surface lexicogrammar versus deep semantics) but
between poor and good recall. This behavioural response in turn
depends on the readerly variable of attention and on the textual variable
of foregrounding (Stockwell 2009: 45). Being unable to build a coher-
ent world for the difficult poem (i.e. to construct a situation model
out of semantic input), readers accurately recalled its text, that is, their
memory preserved the poem’s lexicogrammar (i.e. its words and their
syntagmatic arrangement) better than for the accessible poem.
The remaining RIDs need to be discussed more cursorily as the stud-
ies from which they have been elicited were not specifically designed to
explore difficulty. Such RIDs are either accidental (i.e. a by-product of
a different research question) or only loosely related to difficulty (e.g.
the notion of complexity studied by Zyngier et al. 2007). The most
consistent RID is the participants’ lower appreciation for, or interest
in, poetry they find difficult to understand. This is especially true for
novice readers (Peskin 1998: 256), although in another study (Spiro
2011) professional and leisure readers alike concurred in assigning the
lowest appreciation score to Libby Houston’s poem ‘Desolution’, with
‘its capacity to confuse and obscure meaning’ (2011: 243). Typical
comments on this poem run along the lines of ‘I like the flow of the
language but I don’t understand this!’ or ‘I feel it is too deliberately
obscure’ (2011: 239). Similarly, Eva-Wood found that the difficulty of a
poem can be such as to override the benefits that certain reading condi-
tions bring to more accessible poems. Comparing responses from think-
aloud (TA) and think-and-feel-aloud (TFA) protocols, she points out
that, while Robert Frost’s ‘Away’ received higher interest ratings in the
TFA than in the TA condition, this contrast was ‘less pronounced’ for
Lisa Mueller’s poem ‘There Are Mornings’. Such deviant response pat-
tern is attributed ‘to the brief, abstract, and less accessible nature’ of the
latter poem (2004: 185).
These findings conform to the widespread perception that difficulty
is viewed negatively, especially among novice readers. More unexpected
is the fact that even the professional readers in the Spiro study granted
the lowest interest ratings to the poem they found most difficult. This
response token resonates with the proposal that processing fluency
100
D. Castiglione
boosts aesthetic pleasure (Reber et al. 2004).1 Still, such proposal seems
to ignore the multifaceted nature of aesthetic pleasure, flattening it to
raw psychological reactions unshaped by ideas of challenge and discov-
ery. That processing fluency is not the only factor playing a role can
also be argued ex absurdo, by imagining a counterfactual situation in
which we enjoy more reading a terse business letter than a dense literary
excerpt.
That expository genres are read faster than literary ones has been
experimentally proved by Hanauer (1998). Like Zwaan (1993), he takes
a cross-genre perspective by comparing how poetry and encyclopaedic
items are read according to measures of recall, reading times and com-
prehension judgements (1998: 68). His hypothesis is confirmed that
poetry is read more slowly and considered more difficult than ency-
clopaedic items. Goodblatt and Glickson (2010) revive the traditional
association between difficulty and ambiguity in Empson’s sense (i.e.
interpretive multiplicity—see Sect. 2.1.1). They have found an inverse
correlation holding between comprehension scores and the number of
alternative readings permitted by some metaphysical metaphors (e.g.
Donne’s extended analogy between courtship and fishing in ‘The Bait’)
and dependent on the direction of cross-domain mappings (2010:
249; see Sect. 4.2.6.3 in this chapter).
Given their reliance on early modern poetic texts and interest in
interpretation, Goodblatt and Glickson address difficulty indirectly,
through the neighbouring text effect of ambiguity. Another argua-
bly associated text effect is that of complexity, addressed by Zyngier
et al. (2007) through a cross-cultural perspective and using literary
prose extracts. They characterise complexity as involving ‘the percep-
tion by the reader of a multiplicity of parts or units, forming patterns’
and therefore as more related to ‘pattern organization rather than chaos
or chance’ (2007: 656). Their finding is that readers value complex-
ity differently depending on their culture of provenance: in Brazil and
Ukraine, complexity does not correlate with literary value as much as in
the Netherlands. Taken as an aesthetic criterion, therefore, complexity is
primarily a Western ideal. Taken as a phenomenon, however, complex-
ity seems to hold irrespective of one’s own culture, as all respondents
101
agreed on the presence of complexity or lack thereof in the passages they

read. Something similar should hold true of difficulty.
The mutual implication between complexity and difficulty lies in
the relevance of foregrounding to both concepts: when justifying the
choice of one of the extracts (from Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway ), the
researchers argue that ‘part of the difficulty lies in the foregrounding
of its description, a concatenation of shifting circumscriptions, and of
the inferences to be made’ (2007: 667; see also Sect. 3.3). But recall-
ing the definition of complexity reported in the previous paragraph,
one soon realises that the relationship between the two concepts is less
direct than this. According to that definition, complexity involves the
perception of a gestalt, an organised and internally articulated whole.
Yet difficulty has been characterised precisely in terms of incompleteness
and incoherence. Is there a way out of the conundrum? My proposal,
which I will substantiate through the stylistic analyses in Part II, is as
follows: difficult poems tend to be complex in the way defined above;
their complexity proper, however, is typically realised at the abstract lev-
els of theme and formal symbolism, not at the experiential level of situ-
ation model. The charges of incoherence and chaos typically levelled at
difficult poems cease to apply once the two components of significance
are derived. This argument is in line with Riffaterre’s emphasis on the
semiotic logic governing the poem at the expense of its representational
coherence (Riffaterre 1984 [1978]).
In summary, the RIDs for which we already have some empirical,
intersubjective evidence are the following: (1) better retention of lin-
guistic form in readers’ memory; (2) poorer access to, and elaboration
of, the experiential world of the poem; (3) decreased appreciation, inter-
est or enjoyment; (4) more processing time spent during reading; (5)
increased awareness of different interpretive routes; and (6) likely inter-
subjective agreement on the presence and magnitude of difficulty in a
poetic text. Table 4.2 speculatively maps these RIDs onto difficulty-re-
lated text effects. The ‘/’ symbol marks the coexistence or lack thereof of
negatively versus positively connoted text effects.
Importantly, RID (3) may not hold true of the general reading popu-
lation as it appears to correlate with an insufficient level of literary com-
petence. The presence of this RID stems from a selection bias already
102
D. Castiglione
Table 4.2 RIDs and posited prototypical text effects

RID Posited prototypical text effects
1 > Retention of linguistic form in Visual and aural attention
memory
2 < Access to experiential world Confusion, puzzlement, sense of
depicted closure
3 < Appreciation, interest or Rejection, indifference, sense of
enjoyment ratings distance
4 > Reading time Fatigue, effort/attention, fascination
5 > Awareness of different Cognitive overload/positive challenge
interpretive routes
6 > Agreement on presence of Metacognitive focus, awareness of
difficulty hurdles
criticised by Stockwell (2009: 12) and affecting most of the studies

surveyed—an overwhelming reliance on secondary school students or
university undergraduates. This leaves out or under-represents literary
experts (e.g. critics, lecturers) as well as highly educated readers with no
specific training in literature and linguistics. Due to limited resources,
my work is no exception to this trend; it will nevertheless expand the
list of RIDs in the hope that these will be tested against a more hetero-
geneous population in future. The addition of these new RIDs will fol-
low the results of the empirical tests introduced in Chapter 4.
4.2 Linguistic Indicators

In terms of stratification, difficulty cuts across all linguistic levels, from
graphology to semantics; in terms of structure and sequence, its instan-
tiations range from local (i.e. words, phrases and clauses) to global
aspects of textual cohesion and coherence; not to mention the pertinence
of semantic criteria such as abstractedness, of discourse factors such as
the frequency of lexical items, of specific constructions such as nom-
inalisations, passives and embedding. The task of compiling a princi-
pled checklist is haunting—let alone showing its interconnections with
the cognitive processes introduced in Chapter 2 and with the RIDs just
overviewed. But it needs to be tackled, for LIDs stand at the core of my
model and act as a guiding principle for the stylistic analyses in Part II.
103
Each of the subsections that follow is devoted to a different LID or

to a group of related ones. For each LID, I specify which cognitive pro-
cesses it is more likely to impair or else to prompt, alongside the RID
it contributes to elicit. The exposition is ordered according to the axis
of stratification: I start with those LIDs at the surface (perceptual) level
of orthography and typography and then proceed to those instantiated
through lexicogrammar and semantics. The other axis underpinning
the exposition is the structural one—in general, local LIDs instantiated
at word or phrase level are discussed first, while global ones pervading
full poems are discussed later owing to their major complexity. This
ordering also mirrors the distinction between the construction (local)
and integration (global) phases of comprehension according to the C-I
model (see Sect. 3.4).
Summarising tables follow each section for ease of exposition. These
also feature, alongside the processing operations involved and the RIDs
elicited, the length of the textual portion affected by each LID. This is
measured in ideational units, of which Halliday and Matthiessen iden-
tify three types: (a) elements, realised at word or phrase level and of
which there are three distinct subtypes: participants (things and quali-
ties), circumstances (times, places and causes) and processes (states and
events) (1999: 58). A configuration of elements is a (b) figure (1999:
52). Figures are grammatically realised in clauses and construct reality
as holistic gestalts. Just as clauses are strung together to form texts, so
figures combine to form (c) sequences, ‘series of related figures’ (1999:
50). While elements and figures represent the experiential side of idea-
tion, sequences represent its logical side, concerned with the interrela-
tion of such smaller, hierarchically inferior units (1999: 511).
4.2.1 Orthographic Deviation
The code which enables the preliminary phase of language comprehen-

sion, decoding, is the orthographic (Harley 2008: 230). In the writ-
ten medium, to decode implies to identify known words from strings
of printed characters. Any non-standard use of orthography may thus
potentially disrupt the reading process from the outset: it can slow it
104
D. Castiglione
down in milder instances, since word identification is deautomatised; in

more serious cases, it may force decoding to a halt by making word rec-
ognition impossible: when this happens, reference cannot be assigned.
This literally creates comprehension gaps in the text, for unrecognised
words need to be skipped or else accommodated by means of higher
level inferences. This diminished intelligibility can be a side effect of
specific aesthetic pursuits. In eye-dialect, for instance, non-standard
spelling often contributes to a comic or satirical portrayal of the charac-
ters (Adamson 1999: 600–601; see also Leech and Short [2007] 1981:
169). Yet, if the phonetic imitation of speech is pushed too far, local
unintelligibility may occur, as when Bernard Shaw transcribes ‘if you
had’ as fewd (Adamson 1999: 600).
Three scenarios are possible at this point. If the word is only mildly
misspelt, the reader eventually restores its correct form after some
decoding work. If the resemblance to an original word is less evident,
however, the word remains unrecognised and is classified as a pseudow-
ord (a non-word that is still plausible in a language; Harley 2008: 176).
In this case, the reader may associate it with existing words in her lexi-
con whose form more or less resembles that of the pseudoword. This is
what Quartermain (1992: 184–186) does when in a line by Howe he
links the pseudoword rea to real. This repair strategy is a consciously
performed form-based inference and as a result is more cognitively tax-
ing than automatic decoding. Clearly, pseudowords can also be seen
as case of morphological deviation, as often with Joyce’s portmanteau
words (see Attridge 1988). Finally, if the non-word bears no affinities
whatsoever with existing words (e.g. ‘jukpydhs’), it will be either dis-
missed as an asemantic string of characters or, given the appropriate
context, rationalised as a magic formula or an exotic proper name (e.g.
Swift’s ‘Houyhnhnms’, the intelligent horses in Gulliver’s Travels ).
While this threefold distinction (misspelt word, pseudoword and non-
word) can be applied to prototypical cases of each category, one should
not lose sight of the fuzzy boundaries between the categories (e.g. rea
could be interpreted as both a misspelt word or a pseudoword). The
alternative, even opposite readerly behaviours posited for these three lin-
guistic realisations obey the principle of relevance and are to be assessed
on an individual basis. Table 4.3 offers a bird’s eye view of such strategies.
Table 4.3 LID 1—Orthographic deviation
LID category LID linguistic Comprehension Comprehension process Likely RIDs
realisation + process (likely) prompted
(ideational unit thwarted
affected)
Non-word Perceptual Ø or contextual infer- < Reading times
(e.g. Swift’s decoding encing (aesthetic < Access to situation model (if non-word
Houyhnhnms; (word re-interpretation of dismissed)
iwkkyol ) recognition) string) or
(element) > Reading times
> Interpretive awareness
> Retention of linguistic form (if infer-
encing work prompted)
Pseudoword Perceptual Linguistic inferencing > Reading times
(e.g. Howe’s rea; decoding (form-based word > Interpretive awareness
stell ) (word association; e.g. > Retention of linguistic form (if pseu-
(element) recognition) rea → real;) dowords are internally foregrounded
Orthographic and not the norm)
deviation Misspelt word Perceptual Ø or contextual > Reading times (due to decoding work)
(ascending (e.g. decoding inferencing < Retention of linguistic form (if misspell-
cline) Portagoose for (word (aesthetic re-interpreta- ing dismissed as misprint/non-relevant)
Portuguese— recognition) tion of string, e.g. rep- or
Pound) resentation of speech > Interpretive awareness
(element) by foreign or unedu- > Retention of linguistic form (if infer-
cated characters) encing work prompted)
105
106
D. Castiglione
4.2.2 Graphological Deviation
Orthography is only one aspect of graphology, which also sub-

sumes punctuation, character type and size, text divisions and layout
(Douthwaite 2000: 207). All these aspects can be exploited as fore-
grounding devices, from mispunctuation to the layout of calligrams.
Twentieth-century poetry exploits such devices to a larger extent than in
previous centuries because of its drive towards experimentation (Leech
1969: 49). One telling example is the insertion of non-linguistic nota-
tion in this line by Howe: ‘on a [p < suddenly… on a > was shot thro
with a dyed < dyed a soft]’* (Howe 1990; cited in Quartermain 1992:
183–184; see also Castiglione 2013: 133 for an analysis). Eliciting aes-
thetic surprise, a choice like this, makes us ponder its motivation and
significance. So the comprehension process affected is inferencing rather
than decoding—which was usually the case for orthographic deviation.
Other realisations of graphological deviation may primarily impact
on other cognitive processes. Take the following example: ‘I am close to.
my sister’ (Douthwaite 2000: 209). Here, the misplaced full stop runs
counter the syntactic structure of the clause, and as a result it delays
parsing and with it the ‘formation of proposition’ steps in the construc-
tion phase of comprehension. Readerly attention is redirected to asyn-
tactic fragments while inferences are elicited to justify such an unusual
and grammar-threatening choice. A related strategy, though not gram-
mar-threatening and affecting slightly larger portions of text, can be
observed in an experiment by Emmott et al. (2006). By manipulating
paragraph formatting, the researchers have shown that mini-paragraphs
enhance readerly attention, depth of processing and retention of infor-
mation. Conversely, longer paragraphs diminish comprehension by tak-
ing a more severe toll on readers’ memory. Alternatively, graphological
deviation can affect word recognition more or less as orthographic devi-
ation does: the use of a forbiddingly tiny font, or of words crossed out,
like in the erasure series by conceptual artist Emilio Isgrò.
Although cursory, this overview has shown that LID2, grapho-
logical deviation, is typologically broader than LID1, orthographic
deviation, thus involving a wider spectrum of cognitive processes and
107
affecting longer stretches of text. What is common to all cases discussed,

and likely to be generalisable, is that graphological deviation should typ-
ically (i.e. unless the deviation itself has become conventional) prompt
inferencing as an added layer to delayed or impeded decoding/parsing.
When applied to the poem as a whole, such inferencing is instrumental
to formulating theme and/or formal symbolism. Table 4.4 offers a bird’s
eye view of this LID.
It goes without saying that the predictions set out in the table are
necessarily schematic, owing to the huge influence of the linguis-
tic co-text—especially at inferencing level. What all the realisations of
this LID have in common, though, is that they are very much likely
to increase reading times. This behavioural measure reflects the impair-
ment of basic processing (decoding or parsing) as well as the prompt-
ing of higher processing (inferencing). Besides being foregrounded in
the text, then, these devices foreground the disruption of the reading
process and the interpretive activity meant to overcome it: both tempo-
rary impairment and problem-solving become consciously experienced.
Other subcategories of graphological deviation (e.g. spacing, layout,
formatting, use of uppercase characters) are not included as their rela-
tion to difficulty is questionable: space-out lines, for example, are likely
to ease the reader’s processing by singling out information units in
accordance with what Emmott et al. (2006) found for mini-paragraphs;
unconventional layouts, although widespread in twentieth-century
poetry (van Peer 1993), can provide guidance towards the formulation
of theme and formal symbolism.
4.2.3 Morphological Deviation
Differently from the non-linguistic, perceptual levels of orthography

and graphology, linguistic meaning needs to be taken into account at
the level of morphology. This stems from the very definition of mor-
pheme as ‘a minimal meaningful recurrent segment of a word’ (Jackson
and Ze Amvela 2007: 244). When addressing deviant morphology, one
has to make a preliminary distinction between deviant use of inflection,
resulting in easily amendable grammatical errors (e.g. ‘they goes’, ‘three
Table 4.4 LID 2—Graphological deviation
LID category LID linguistic Comprehension Comprehension process Likely corresponding RIDs
realisation + process (likely) prompted
(ideational unit thwarted
108
affected)
Non-linguistic Parsing Contextual inferencing > Reading times (due to thwarted
notation (formation of (aesthetic re-interpre- parsing and prompted inferencing)
(figures) propositions) tation of non-linguistic > Interpretive awareness (due to
D. Castiglione
notation) contextual inferencing)

< Access to situation model (due to
interference of non-linguistic symbols)
Mispunctuation Parsing (for- Contextual inferencing > Reading times (due to thwarted
(figures) mation of (aesthetic re-interpre- parsing and prompted inferencing)
propositions) tation of misplaced > Retention of linguistic form (through
punctuation marks) new partition of information)
> And < access to situation model
(heightened attention to single
Graphological world-building fragments, but
deviation disruption of global representation)
(ascending > Interpretive awareness (due to deep
cline) processing)
Word deletion Perceptual Contextual inferencing > Reading times (due to thwarted
(elements) decoding (aesthetic re-interpre- decoding and prompted inferencing)
(word tation of word and > Visual attention (multimedial approach
recognition) deletion if word not encouraged)
totally deleted; of > Interpretive awareness (due to
deletion only if word contextual inferencing)
totally deleted) < Access to situation model (if word
totally deleted)
109
house’) and deviant use of derivation, resulting in new lexical entries

(e.g. E. E. Cummings’s ‘unworld’—Cureton 1979: 218). While the for-
mer deviance may cause annoying interferences that slow the reading
process down, the latter impacts on comprehension more decisively.
Therefore, this third LID involves deviant derivational morphology
only.
From a processing perspective, morphologically deviant words
may be perceived as an intermediate case between the subcategories
of pseudoword and misspelt word in LID1 (orthographic deviation):
like misspelt words, neologisms created through a lax application of
word-formation processes (e.g. derivation, compounding, conversion,
clipping and blending) carry the lexical meaning of the recognisable
base; like pseudowords, the one-off integration of the base with the
grammatical meaning of the affix creates a new entry in the lexicon.
Take ‘riverrun’, the word opening Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: this is
a noun + verb compound structurally modelled after examples such as
‘brainwash’. We know from general usage patterns that ‘brainwash’ is
a verb because ‘wash’ is the Head of this subordinate compound, so
it establishes the word class of the compound and carries most of its
meaning: ‘brainwash’ is a verb and means to wash the brain; it is not
a noun for a brain doing the washing. But differently from ‘brain-
wash’, with ‘riverrun’ we cannot rely on corpus concordances that tell
us whether this compound is a noun or a verb. So the interpretation of
‘riverrun’ is bidirectional as both ‘river’ and ‘run’ can be taken as Heads:
‘riverrun’ can be alternatively paraphrased as a running river or as run-
ning along a river.2 Its meaning, while as easily retraceable as for mis-
spelt words, is therefore more diffuse. And we find an even lower degree
of stability in pseudowords: assuming a loose context, the inferred
meaning of ‘stell’, for instance, could result from a merging of formally
related words such as ‘stall’, ‘steel’ or ‘spell’.
The discussion above applies to neologisms created by means of com-
pounding. But morphological deviation can also result from derivation
(i.e. creation of new words by affixation) and conversion (i.e. creation
of new words by change of word-class paradigm), in which cases the
cognitive processes affected will differ to some extent. These two latter
types of deviation are briefly discussed after Table 4.5.
Table 4.5 LID 3—Morphological deviation
110
LID category LID linguistic Comprehension Comprehension Likely corresponding RIDs

realisation + process process (likely)
(ideational thwarted prompted
unit affected)
D. Castiglione
Compounding Decoding Integrating > Reading times (due to thwarted decoding and
(e.g. Joyce’s (reference (local) parsing, and prompted integration)
riverrun ) assignment) (elements inte- > Retention of linguistic form (due to
(figures) Parsing grated into unconventionality of neologism)
(word-class figures) < Access to situation model (due to one-off
identification) creation of previously inexistent referent)
Conversion Parsing Revised decoding > Reading times (due to thwarted parsing and
(e.g. whys, to (word-class (reference extra decoding work)
desk ) assignment + of element < Access to situation model (new referent more
(elements) formation of expanded) indeterminate in acquiring semantic properties
proposition) of a new word class)
Derivation Decoding Revised decoding > Reading times (due to extra decoding work—
(e.g. unlove, (reference (reference unusual application of derivational rules)
Morphological birdfully ) assignment) of element > Retention of linguistic form (due to
deviation (elements) expanded) unconventionality of neologism)
(ascending
cline)
111
Instances of deviant (i.e. grammatically unacceptable) derivation

and conversion in the poetry of E. E. Cummings have been systemat-
ically examined by Cureton (1979). With regard to deviant derivation,
Cureton emphasises that its poetic effects mostly reside in ‘the read-
er’s attempt to modify the lexical meaning of the base to satisfy the
affix-meaning and the affix-base selectional restrictions’, adding that the
selectional restrictions (i.e. the syntagmatic combinations allowed for
in a language) ‘seldom remain broken’ (1979: 243). Recast in processing
terms, deviant derivation deautomatises the decoding process with-
out blocking it—a view in line with the cognitive effects and RIDs in
Table 4.5.
The neologisms originating from deviant conversion, on the other
hand, appear more fundamentally deviant: in this case, it is not a mat-
ter of over-applying word-formation rules, but of mapping syntac-
tic forms (e.g. nouns, verbs, prepositions…) onto syntactic functions
(e.g. subject, predicate, object…) that they do not normally perform.
For instance, discussing verb–noun conversion, Cureton notices that
‘Cummings builds person (ams ), tense (weres ), number (aren’ts ) and
negation (can’ts ) directly into his nominal conversions’ (1979: 236).
This operation implies transferring a whole set of semantic properties
and syntactic functions from one-word class to another—a re-decoding
work likely to be more taxing than for derivational deviance. In conclu-
sion, morphological deviation is potentially an interesting LID, but it is
also so distinctive of Cummings’s poetry that it is unclear how extensive
and representative its use is among the general population of difficult
poems.
4.2.4 Phonological Foregrounding
In the previous chapter, it was mentioned (Sect. 3.4) that during

decoding readers do not leap from word recognition straight to lexi-
cal access, but instead subvocalise the written word before accessing its
meaning. Given that this phenomenon, known as phonological medi-
ation, is assumed by some psycholinguists to occur by default during
silent reading, it must occur even more compellingly for poems, which
112
D. Castiglione
often foreground their phonetic properties. Now, some sequences of

words take us longer to utter than others since they confront our artic-
ulatory apparatus with consonant clusters or demand a nimble shift
of the tongue from, say, a front to a back vowel position or vice versa.
Likewise, the subvocalisation of foregrounded phoneme sequences in
silent reading may result in longer reading times—one of the RIDs
introduced earlier. Miall and Kuiken (1994: 403) indeed found that
phonological foregrounding (i.e. alliteration and adjacent stresses)
positively correlates with longer reading times.
Phonological foregrounding can be obtained by placing stresses in
such a way as to deviate from the prosodic norms of a language. Stress,
Pilkington argues, ‘lengthens the time taken to process the word on
which it falls’, and as a consequence ‘triple meters with two weak syl-
lables […] speed up the verse’ (2000: 133; emphasis added). It follows
that, conversely, reading will be slowed down by sequences of adjacent
stresses creating a spondaic rhythm (− −). This prosody is linguistically
realised through a succession of one-syllable lexical words, each carry-
ing a main stress: in Hopkins’s ‘all / Life death does end’, for example,
each adjacent syllable carries a main stress. Such slowing down effect
increases when punctuation marks are inserted in between each word,
as it happens in lists. There is indeed evidence that people spend more
time fixing punctuated words over unpunctuated ones (Carroll et al.
2015). In poetry processing, phonological mediation is likely to play
a determinant role in converting the ‘dense punctuation’ LID into the
‘longer reading times’ RID. This is because punctuation in poetry per-
forms a prosodic function in assisting ‘the reader to re-create an origi-
nal oral rendition of the text’ (Tartakovsky 2009: 215). With more time
spent on each stressed and punctuated word, lexical access to them is
also likely to be semantically richer (Pilkington 2000: 132).
Alliteration is the ‘repetition of a coherent sequence of segments
which begins with an onset’ (Fabb 1999: 227) and like stress and punc-
tuation, it has been argued to impede silent reading and to slow process-
ing down (Sanford and Emmott 2012: 97–99). This behavioural effect
arguably reflects phonological mediation as well as the higher activa-
tion that each alliterating word, by virtue of being thus foregrounded,
elicits in the reader. The proposal that alliteration holds within the line
113
or across adjacent lines only (Fabb 1999) may lead us to postulate that
the processing of this feature will occur online, in the reader’s working
memory. This will create a text effect of resistance that is very much in
line with difficulty. When reading Hopkins’s hemistich ‘pitched past
pitch of grief ’, for instance, the dense recurrence of the voiceless plo-
sive bilabial /p/ and of the voiceless postalveolar affricate /ʧ/ enters
subvocalisation, thus impeding silent reading. Additionally, the alternate
pattern of phoneme arrangement implies more tongue-work than if the
phonemes were in linear sequence (e.g. /p/ and /r/ in Leonard Cohen’s
line ‘past the palaces that rise above the rot’), which is reflected in sub-
vocalisation. Through phonological foregrounding, it is as if difficult
poems demanded to be heard with the eye while trying to communicate
in two modes (written and spoken) simultaneously.
The main insights of the foregoing discussion are summarised in
Table 4.6, followed by a further discussion on other important issues
that have not as yet been touched upon.
The first thing to notice is that adjacent stresses, dense punctuation
and alliteration are non-mutually exclusive types, differently from those
under the graphological deviation label (non-linguistic notation, mis-
punctuation and word deletion). This means that they can (and often
do) occur together and build up to the same effect. The likeness of their
processing outcomes can be easily appreciated by looking at the fourth
column in the table; as for RIDs, however, I assume a somewhat differ-
ent behaviour for alliteration, which I feel is aesthetically more intrusive
than heavy punctuation and adjacent stresses. This intrusiveness might
initially prevent the reader’s immersion in the world represented—in
technical terms, the construction of a situation model.
The table also makes it clear that adjacent stresses, dense punctuation
and alliteration are related to difficulty only behaviourally: while they
prolong reading times and thus contribute to a textual effect of resist-
ance, they do not hinder comprehension and so remain peripheral to
the cognitive side of difficulty. If anything, by enhancing decoding and
by prompting aesthetic inferencing, they encourage deep processing,
the outcome of which is a richer and fine-grained understanding of the
poem.
Table 4.6 LID 4—Phonological foregrounding
LID category LID linguistic Comprehension Comprehension process Likely corresponding RIDs
114
realisation process thwarted (likely) prompted

Adjacent Ø Decoding > Reading times (due to subvocalisation
stresses (enhanced by rhythmic and enhanced decoding)
(spondaic emphasis on single > Heightened attention (due to
D. Castiglione
rhythm) lexical items) emphasis brought by stress)

Contextual inferencing > Access to situation model (due to
(aesthetic interpretation enriched lexical access following
of adjacent stress) enhanced decoding)
Dense Ø Decoding > Reading times (due to subvocalisation
punctuation (enhanced by selective and enhanced decoding)
attention to single > Heightened attention (due to
lexical items) emphasis brought by punctuation)
Contextual inferencing > Access to situation model (due to
(aesthetic interpretation enriched lexical access following
of dense punctuation) enhanced decoding)
Phonological Alliteration Ø Decoding > Reading times (due to subvocalisation
foregrounding (enhanced by simultane- and enhanced decoding)
(ascending ous activation of > Retention of linguistic form (due to
cline) alliterating words) close-range repetition of phonemes)
Contextual inferencing < Access to situation model (at least
(aesthetic interpretation initially, due to foregrounding of
of alliteration) textual as opposed to ideational
metafunction)
115
4.2.5 Vocabulary and Lexical Dimensions
Difficulty of vocabulary is a complex LID as it can be assessed along

various dimensions: (1) low-frequency and unfamiliarity (specialised
vocabulary), indexing the likeliness that the reader will access the lex-
ical item; (2) degree of concreteness and imageability, cueing whether
the situation model will appeal mainly to the senses (concrete, high-
imageability words) or to the intellect (abstract, low-imageability
words); (3) lexical ambiguity (homonymy and polysemy), indexing
the depth of lexical access and its demands on the construction phase
of comprehension; and (4) the presence and type of proper nouns, a
dimension pertinent to the meaningfulness–meaninglessness dilemma
(see Sect. 2.2.6). The section concludes with a table offering an over-
view of all the categories.
4.2.5.1 Core vs. Specialised Vocabulary
Reading comprehension hinges on lexical knowledge to a large extent

because vocabulary ‘serves as a proxy for background knowledge’
(Anderson and Davison 1988: 44). A reader’s breadth and depth
of vocabulary knowledge are the main factors determining her ease
or lack thereof in coping with texts of varying complexity (Cremer
and Schoolen 2013: 1195). Breadth of vocabulary refers to the sheer
amount of lexical items known by the speaker, involving her ability to
recognise them and access their meaning; depth of vocabulary is a more
qualitative dimension, having to do with one’s awareness of the colloca-
tional range and connotative meaning of words (Cremer and Schoolen
2013). Both dimensions matter to poetry reading: as for the former,
specialised vocabulary is often found in notoriously difficult authors
such as Mallarmé, Zanzotto, Hill and Prynne; the latter is made prom-
inent by the fact that meaning in poetry is often ‘fine-grained and con-
text-sensitive to a degree that is not exhibited or demanded elsewhere’
(Lamarque 2009: 415).
Although necessary, vocabulary knowledge is not a sufficient condi-
tion to cope with difficult poems in which issues of foregrounding and
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D. Castiglione
global coherence (see Sect. 4.2.8) come into play. Wilkinson makes this
point when he discusses the difficulty of Prynne’s poems:
Familiarity with the specialised languages often deployed is not a prereq-

uisite for understanding; recognition of the chief transaction governing
the poem tends to define a semantic range which governs some of the
more opaque vocabulary, and the verse’s foregrounding of linkages conso-
nant with the governing transaction, bound strongly by tight sound-pat-
terning, is more constitutive of the meaning-universe of the book than
any privileged encapsulation in imagery or appeal to common experience.
(Wilkinson 2007: 20–21)
Wilkinson’s argument boils down to the acknowledgement that com-

prehension in Prynne’s poetry—and, by implication, in authors shar-
ing a comparable poetics—is a function of the inferences prompted
by structure and sound-patterning rather than access to the world por-
trayed in the poem. In our terms, this means that the situation model is
viewed as ancillary compared to formal symbolism. That lexical knowl-
edge is not necessarily key to poetry comprehension can be shown even
more forcefully by considering an extract of Stein’s Patriarchal Poetry
that will be analysed in Part II (see Sect. 8.1.2). This non-lineated
poem uses extremely common, high-frequency words—who-pronouns,
the time adverb ‘never’, the verb ‘to send’—however, their asyntactic
arrangement and the total avoidance of nouns led Neel (1999: 90) to
state its literal senselessness while still venturing into inferences that go
far beyond the elementary semantics of the text.
While the motivations behind downplaying the role of vocabulary
knowledge in poetry comprehension are legitimate, I want to empha-
sise that specialised vocabulary greatly enhances the sense of resistance
associated with difficulty. It does so by slowing down or impeding
decoding (lexical recognition and semantic access), which results in a
more fragmentary or roughly sketched out situation model. What depth
and breadth of vocabulary cannot ensure is the disclosure of the poem’s
significance, hence the overcoming of its obscurity.
Having established specialised vocabulary as a LID, some criteria are
needed to make the core vs. specialised vocabulary distinction objective,
117
that is, impervious to the variable size and gaps of each reader’s lex
icon. Core vocabulary is known by all native speakers of a language
and is ‘neutral stylistically, neither markedly casual nor formal’ (Stubbs
2001: 43). Its size is determined by the generally agreed upon cut-off
point for high frequency, corresponding to 2000 word families forms
(Schmitt and Schmitt 2014: 486), that is the lexemes irrespective of
inflection (i.e. ‘went’, ‘gone’ and ‘goes’ are all forms of the lexeme GO).
These 2000 word forms contribute to over 86% of vocabulary coverage
according to corpus data, and the figure slightly increases to about 89%
for the 3000 most frequent words (2014: 488).
Low-frequency words, on the other hand, are those found ‘beyond
the 9,000 frequency band’ (2014: 494). At this band level, one comes
across words such as ‘etch’, ‘barracks’ and ‘inflate’ (Davies and Garner
2010: 123).3 Intuitively, these look anything but unfamiliar when com-
pared to ‘marl’, ‘drag’, ‘solidus’ or ‘crepitant’ found in Hill’s poetry and
‘barely domesticated as English’ (McHale 2004: 108). To get a similar
impression of unfamiliarity, one has to scroll down the list till she gets
at the 14,000-word band frequency or below, featuring words such as
‘quarantine’, ‘reverie’ or ‘charred’ (Davies and Garner 2010: 198). And
yet, alongside the words just mentioned one can also find relatively
familiar words like ‘innocent’ or ‘enigma’. So, while specialised words
are likely found at low-frequency bands (9000+), not all low-frequency
words belong to specialised vocabulary. As Anderson and Davison
already pointed out long ago (1988: 28), there is no two-way relation-
ship between frequency of occurrence and processing effort.
4.2.5.2 Abstract vs. Concrete Vocabulary, Imageability
The concreteness–abstractedness cline is a semantic dimension associ-

ated with nouns. Nouns with referents accessible to senses (e.g. ‘bottle’,
‘wall’ and ‘tree’) are concrete; nouns with immaterial referents (e.g. ‘jus-
tice’, ‘democracy’ and ‘dedication’) are abstract. Typically associated with
intellectual formal types of language (Wales 2011 [1990]: 1), abstract
nouns are recalled less easily than concrete nouns (Rodgers 1971: 113).
118
D. Castiglione
Their difficulty is a consolidated finding in psycholinguistics: ‘people

are particularly slow and make more errors when reading low-frequency
exception words with abstract meanings’ (Harley 2008: 217). Harley’s
specification that abstract nouns need also to be ‘low-frequency excep-
tion word’ (see previous section) is crucial, as abstract nouns belonging
to core vocabulary (e.g. ‘love’ and ‘freedom’) are very unlikely to pose
any extra processing burden on readers.
Furthermore, this distinction is to a degree negotiable and con-
text-sensitive, in that metaphorical usage (see Sect. 4.2.6.3) often blurs
the boundaries between concrete and abstract by mutually contam-
inating each domain through its interactive dynamics (Goodblatt
and Glickson 1993: 87): in Dylan Thomas’s ‘mouth of time’ (see also
Sect. 7.2), for instance, the abstract target domain TIME gains some
concreteness and the concrete source domain MOUTH gains some
abstractedness. Not only is the distinction between concrete and
abstract context-sensitive, it is also unduly schematic, in spite of its heu-
ristic usefulness and popularity in linguistics. This can make the stylistic
analysis of difficulty coarser than it could be, with the risk that poten-
tially interesting effects will be missed: the explanatory power of an
analysis is indeed only as strong as the sophistication of its theoretical
tools allows. This is why sub-distinctions that enable us to reconceptual-
ise this semantic dimension as a whole may be useful.
Halliday and Matthiessen (1999: 61) provide such refinement:
theirs is an account of SFL-derived experiential semantics that I have
already relied upon when introducing the notions of element, figure
and sequence (see Sect. 4.2). First, Halliday and Matthiessen divide
nouns into Material and Semiotic. Within the Material category, they
establish the subcategories of Animal (e.g. dog ), Object (e.g. chair ),
Substance (e.g. glue, wood ) and Abstraction (e.g. breakdown ). Within
the Semiotic category, one finds the subcategories of Institution (e.g.
parliament ), Object (e.g. novel, letter ) and Abstraction (e.g. vanity and
theory ). Without delving into the specifics of each category, I wish to
expand on the two kinds of abstract nouns they identify: those whose
existence is independent of the material world and brought to life by
semiotic systems (Semiotic–Abstraction); and those denoting a process
119
or event originating in the physical world (Material–Abstraction).

This latter category is particularly useful as it accommodates nouns sit-
ting uneasily in the schematic concrete–abstract distinction: the afore-
mentioned ‘breakdown’, for instance, feels less abstract than ‘justice’ or
‘vanity’, but still not quite as concrete as ‘chair’ or ‘tree’.
A semantic dimension closely related to the concreteness–abstraction
cline is that of imageability, that is the cognitive potential of words to
elicit sensory mental images in the reader (Paivio et al. 1968). Its rel-
evance to the present work lies in its offering a principled means to
quantify the vividness of the evoked situation model, a key construct for
assessing the difficulty of a poem or lack thereof (see Sects. 3.4 and 3.5).
Crucially, this will also allow to address the representational problem
(see Sect. 2.2.5) by setting it on firmer grounds than before.
Imageability is a popular dimension in psycholinguistics, and differ-
ently from the concrete–abstract cline, it is not constrained by word
class: not just nouns, but also verbs, adjectives and other word classes
can be assigned imageability. Another key difference between these
two scales is that, while concreteness and abstractedness (and their
sub-distinctions in Halliday and Matthiessen 1999: 61) are attrib-
uted based on the intrinsic properties of the referent, imageability is
attributed based on behavioural data from respondents. The data in
the freely available MRC Psycholinguistic Database (Coltheart 1981:
497–505) were elicited by asking respondents to rate individual words
on various aspects, including imageability, on a scale from 1 to 7 (high-
imageability = 7; low-imageability = 1). A sample of the data is shown
in Table 4.7.
High-imageability words (band 5.00–7.00) are visually salient, tend
to be concrete nouns (e.g. ‘bullet’ and ‘shell’) or descriptive adjectives
(e.g. ‘sharp’ and ‘chubby’). Low-imageability words (band 1.00–2.99),
by contrast, include nouns of semiotic abstraction (e.g. ‘dogma’ and
‘expense’), function words (e.g. ‘whether’), verbs related to the seman-
tic domain of logic (e.g. ‘entail’) or obligation (e.g. ‘coerce’). Finally,
mid-imageability words (band 3.00–4.99) appear closer to everyday
experience than low-imageability words but at the same time are more
opaque to sensory experience than high-imageability words. Despite
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D. Castiglione
Table 4.7 Sample behavioural data on imageability from the MRC

Psycholinguistic Database
Imageability Sample words
rate band
6.00–7.00 Bullet, river, shell, shoe, flame, smile,
nurse, dress, rainbow, sausage
5.00–5.99 Toxic, yoga, sharp, grenade, tourist,
screen, chubby, liquor, harvest, chest
4.00–4.99 Soak, vaccine, craft, joke, reward, seed,
yeast, rural, filth, slab, dream
3.00–3.99 Network, moral, nickel, peer, survive,
nimble, county, payroll, vowel
2.00–2.99 Murmur, recent, symptom, legion, sector,
option, brink, hopeful, oppose
1.00–1.99 Dogma, entail, ever, whether, quantum,
innate, absurd, coerce, expense
its merits, a limitation of the database with respect to our aims is that,
providing response data for less than 3000 word forms, it covers core
vocabulary only. As a consequence, the imageability level of many
low-frequency words in difficult poems must be subjectively assessed or
else tested in an experiment designed to that purpose. For reasons of
resource constraints, I will follow the former option.
4.2.5.3 Lexical Ambiguity (Homonymy and Polysemy)
Semantically, lexical ambiguities can result ‘in homonymy, polysemy

or a combination of the two’ (Leech 1969: 205). Although not always
clear-cut, the difference between homonymy and polysemy is that in
homonymy completely unrelated senses happen to take the same word
form (e.g. ‘bat’ as a stick or the flying mammal), while in polysemy the
same word form conveys a set of related senses, typically by means of
metaphorical or metonymic extension (e.g. ‘mouth’ as part of the face
or as the meeting point between a river and the sea). An instance of lex-
ical ambiguity out of homonymy is the French word ‘or’ in a Mallarmé
poem, which Derrida (1992: 121–122) reads as both the noun ‘gold’
121
and the conjunction ‘or’. This form-based activation of unrelated senses

leads Derrida to endorse a paradigmatic way of reading through which
meaning-in-context is promoted to semiotic significance:
Is or, here, one word or several words? The linguist – and the philoso-
pher – will perhaps say that each time, since the meaning and function
change, we should read a different word. And yet this diversity crosses
itself and goes back to an appearance of identity which has to be taken
into account. (Derrida 1992: 125)
The point Derrida makes resonates with findings in psycholinguis-

tics, where the processing of lexical ambiguity is an important area
of enquiry. Based on a body of experimental evidence, Harley indeed
points out that ‘when we encounter an ambiguous word, all meanings
are activated and context is subsequently used to very quickly select the
correct meaning’ (Harley 2008: 202; emphasis added; see also van Dijk
and Kintsch 1983: 33). In other words, lexical ambiguity slows down
decoding through the activation of alternative word meanings, and only
later does integration intervene to solve the ambiguity. However, co-text
in poetry is often built so as to make all the alternatives equally salient,
and as a result the perception of ambiguity extends to the phase of inte-
gration. So, just like low-frequency and abstractedness, polysemy and
homonymy are relevant LIDs in the light of the fact that ‘ambiguous
words take longer to process even when they are strongly biased by con-
text’ (2008: 200).
4.2.5.4 Proper Names vs. Full Proper Nouns
The semantic peculiarity of proper nouns is that of pointing to a unique

referent. So to fully process and understand them, one has to be famil-
iar with their referents, which ‘depend entirely on outside knowledge’
(Brooke-Rose 1958: 43). This outside knowledge is of two types: ency-
clopaedic or contextual, resulting in markedly divergent processing out-
comes and stylistic effects. Encyclopaedic knowledge is presupposed by
122
D. Castiglione
full proper nouns whose referent, be it real or fictional, is part of shared

knowledge within a given community: Buckingham Palace, Chrysler,
Indonesia, Thomas Jefferson, Robin Hood and so on. These proper
nouns will prompt an encyclopaedic representation in readers, with
the amount of information attached to them varying according to the
reader’s knowledge of that referent—in turn dependent on their stud-
ies, interests and culture. Contextual knowledge, on the other hand, is
presupposed by simple proper names such as Matt, Anne and Nancy.
According to Halliday, these names semantically resemble pronouns but
work within a different metafunction: ‘with pronouns, the referent is
defined interpersonally, by the speech situation. With proper names it is
defined experientially: there exists only one, at least in the relevant body
of experience’ (2004: 325).
The different effects of these two kinds of proper nouns, as well as
their relevance to difficulty, can be appreciated by comparing full proper
nouns in Pound and simple proper names in George Oppen. The for-
mer are discussed by Steiner to illustrate contingent difficulty (see
Sect. 2.1.1). These are some of the lines selected by Steiner from Canto
XXXVIII (1978: 23):
Opposite the Palace of the Schneiders

Arose the monument of Herr Henri
Chantier de la Gironde, Bank of the Paris Union,
The franco-japanese bank
Francois de Wendel, Robert Protot
All the full proper nouns here have encyclopaedic entries associated
with them, and their use is linked by Steiner to such tropes as ‘those of
inventory, private journal and almanac’ (1978: 23). Consider now the
untitled poem from Oppen’s Of Being Numerous (1968) discussed by
Perloff:
There can be a brick

In a brick wall
The eye picks
123
So quiet of a Sunday
Here is the brick, it was waiting
Here when you were born
Mary-Anne.
Perloff draws attention to ‘Mary-Anne’ and highlights the ‘odd opac-

ity’ of it, since ‘the name evokes no image, tells no story’ (1991: 83).
The ‘opacity’ of the name lies in the fact that its referent remains pri-
vate, contextually inaccessible, and so unlike Pound’s proper nouns,
it does not contribute to the situational model experientially. What is
more, ‘Mary-Anne’ is made interpersonally salient by the addressing act
preceding it (‘you were born // Mary-Anne’). It is as if intimacy and per-
sonal relevance entail ideational indeterminacy. With some caution and
simplification, one may propose that full proper nouns are a marker of
the epic genre while simple proper names embedded in addressing acts
verge on the lyrical. It is this latter function that which Fois-Kaschel
(2002) identifies in Hölderlin, Trakl and Celan, arguing that their
Hermetic poetics is naturally receptive to the status of ‘pure’ verbal signs
of these names (2002: 170). By ‘pure’, Fois-Kaschel probably means that
proper names are highly charged interpersonally while remaining idea-
tionally elusive—thus producing a lyrical effect of proximity and closure
at once.
Finally, it is also possible that the philosophical dispute of whether
proper nouns are devoid of sense because they have only reference
(Lyons 1977: 197) or by contrast are full of meaning because they have
rich encyclopaedic entries attached to them (Croft and Cruse 2004:
312) is not extraneous to this distinction. Within the scope of this
work, I will make use of this distinction to propose that (1) perceived
meaninglessness is a function of proper names deprived of their emo-
tional potential (e.g. used without the support of any addressing act),
whereas (2) perceived meaningfulness is a function of full proper nouns
whose encyclopaedic entry is only partially activated, thus making read-
ers aware that they are missing something that they could, if they wish
so, access through secondary sources. This proposal will help shedding
light on the meaningfulness–meaninglessness dilemma (see Sect. 2.2.6).
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D. Castiglione
Section 4.2.5 has been concerned with relevant dimensions of diffi-

culty at word level in terms of structure, at semantic level in terms of
stratification and at decoding level in terms of the comprehension phase
primarily involved. A bird’s eye view of the lexical LIDs introduced so
far is provided by Table 4.8, with which the section ends.
4.2.6 Semantic Dimensions
4.2.6.1 Reference and Deixis
The notion of reference underpinned my discussion of simple proper

nouns: while these evoke human presence through their interpersonal
salience, they also thwart our picturing of them due to the schematicity
of the referent alluded to. Unless integrated by contextual clues, simple
proper names only give us information about the gender and perhaps
the nationality of their bearers. With the notion of reference, we are at
the core of semantics, the study of meaning in language, so it is appro-
priate to introduce this concept more technically here. Reference is ‘a
form of situational (exophoric) presupposition’ (Halliday and Hasan
1976: 145) that is ‘concerned with designating entities in the world by
linguistic means’ (Cruse 2000: 305). Reference is thus the bond between
language and extra-linguistic reality: without it, no comprehension in
the sense of situation representation (i.e. situation model) can occur.
Non-words are denotatively meaningless because they lack reference—
the fact that they do not occur in language is a consequence of this.
As Pilkington points out, ‘in poetry, reference assignment and dis-
ambiguation are often deliberately made problematic, requiring greater
processing effort on the part of the reader’ (2000: 77). The supposedly
anti-referential stance of poetry is a common motif in critics of
structuralist and post-structuralist persuasions: Riffaterre (1973), for
instance, analyses William Wordsworth’s ‘Yew-Trees’ only to argue that its
referential verisimilitude is effective only insofar as it points beyond itself,
to the symbolic system underpinning it. Perloff too appeals to reference
as a strategy to downplay, pace Bloom (1973), Wallace Stevens’s influ-
ence on John Ashbery. She does so by arguing that ‘Ashbery turns
Table 4.8 LID 5—Difficulty of vocabulary—relevant dimensions
LID category LID linguistic reali- Comprehension Comprehension process (likely) Likely corresponding RIDs
sation (+ideational process prompted
unit affected) thwarted
Low-frequency, Decoding (words Contextual inferencing > Reading times (due to contextual
unfamiliar less likely to be (aesthetic interpretation of inferencing or aesthetic fixation of
vocabulary accessed) lexical foregrounding) or Ø (if words)
(elements) unknown words ignored) or, alternatively
< Reading times (if unknown words
skipped—less literary reading mode)
> Retention of linguistic form (due
to failed activation of meaning
and conspicuousness due to low
frequency)
< Access to situation model (due to
incomplete lexical access)
Difficulty of Abstract nouns, Ø (if word Decoding > Reading times (due to more labori-
vocabulary words with known) (richer semantic representa- ous decoding)
low-imageability tion prompts more laborious < Access to situation model (situa-
rates decoding) tional model more abstract, less
(elements) accessible to senses)
Homonymy, Ø Decoding (double access more > Reading times (due to activation
polysemy effortful than single access) of multiple senses and their later
(elements) Integration (the various senses integration into the co-text)
will fit the co-text differently, > Ambiguous situation model
demanding different integra- and > interpretive awareness (alter-
tion strategies) native scenarios available)
Contextual inferencing (aes-
thetic interpretation of pun)
125
(continued)
Table 4.8 (continued)
LID category LID linguistic reali- Comprehension Comprehension process (likely) Likely corresponding RIDs
sation (+ideational process prompted
unit affected) thwarted
126
Full proper nouns (if referent (if referent of noun known) > Reading times (fuller semantic
(elements) of noun Decoding (richer semantic rep- representation and more integra-
unknown) resentation, world knowledge tion-inferencing work—only if
Decoding interacts with text semantics) referent of noun is known)
(incomplete, Integration (recognised proper
D. Castiglione
schematic nouns activate schemas that

access) help build up coherence)
Contextual inferencing (factual
information in poetry typically
unexpected—inferencing
work to accommodate it,
also valid if referent of noun
unknown)
Simple proper Decoding Contextual inferencing (private < Access to situation model (lack of
names (incomplete, references spur inferencing information on individuals whose
(elements) schematic on their value for the poetic proper name is provided, but higher
access—e.g. persona or their role in the interpersonal involvement—closure/
often only poetic text) proximity paradox)
gender and
nationality can
be inferred
from simple
proper nouns)
127
the Stevens mode on its head by cutting off the referential dimension’
(Perloff 1981: 266). While this unmitigated statement is rather coarse
in its drive towards generalisation, it is undeniable that with Ashbery we
are often on shaky grounds when it comes to reference assignment. This
readerly impression can be traced back to Ashbery’s use of opaque deictic
reference—a phenomenon that Adamson (1999: 673) indeed illustrates
through some of Ashbery’s lines (‘This is where we are spending our vaca-
tion. A nice restful spot. Real camp life. Hope you are feeling fine’). In
this extract, deploying linguistic features typical of casual conversation,
demonstrative determiners and personal pronouns mingle with progres-
sive aspect signalling the immediate situational context. As a result, deic-
tic items (‘this’, ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘you’) cannot be assigned a definite referent.
Deixis, ‘the encoding of the spatio/temporal context and subjective
experience of the language-user’ (Green 2015: 401) is indeed a key
dimension in the attribution of reference and, therefore, in the con-
struction of a situational model. There are five main categories of deixis
as identified by Levinson’s classical 1983 work on pragmatics. Person
deixis encompasses personal pronouns and determiners (e.g. I/me; we/
us; you; they/them; my/mine; and your/yours, etc.); space deixis, compris-
ing demonstratives (e.g. this/these, proximal; that/these, distal), locative
adverbs (here, proximal; there, distal) and motion verbs whose usage
depends on the speaker’s location (e.g. come/go ); time deixis, notably
adverbs of time (e.g. now, later, today and yesterday ), calendar names
(e.g. July and Monday ) and tenses (e.g. speak vs. spoke or will speak ); dis-
course deixis (e.g. aforementioned, here below and previously discussed );
and social deixis such as forms of address (e.g. Your majesty ), honorifics
(e.g. Dr Smith ) or forms of respect encoded in pronoun variation (e.g.
the tu/vous distinction in French).
My hypothesis is that an underreliance on, or deviant use of, person,
spatial and temporal deixis will cause difficulty in readers by depriving
them of important anchorage points in the construction of a situational
model. The deictic configuration of a poem does have bearings on read-
erly involvement (Jeffries 2008). In her study, Jeffries explains her stu-
dents’ overwhelming preference for one of the two poems she gave them
128
D. Castiglione
by analysing their divergent use of deixis. In the most appreciated one,

Peter Samson’s ‘Mittens’, personal deixis is consistent, whereas temporal
deixis alternates between present time reference and past time reference.
In ‘Pain tells you what to wear’ by Mebdh McGuckian, by contrast, the
use of ‘you’ with generalised reference (i.e. the equivalent of ‘one’) leads
Jeffries to argue that ‘the deictic shift of the reader into the narratorial
position is also less than complete’ (2008: 81–82). Such felt distance
between readerly and narratorial position makes her further argue that
the McGuckian poem ‘is difficult to read for those unaccustomed to
regular reading of contemporary poetry’ (2008: 70).
A subset of determiners, definite articles, have a deictic function as
well since they act ‘as an invitation to supply an appropriate referent’
(Adamson 1999: 674). When the referent is too specific to be part of
readers’ shared knowledge, however, the effect is one of exclusion. This
is what accounts for the aesthetic difference between Wordsworth’s ‘the
vale’ and Eliot’s ‘the person in the Spanish cape’, where an indefinite
article would have been the default option (1999: 674). Using a definite
or indefinite article is hence a stylistic choice that subtly affects com-
prehension, as psycholinguists have found. Loftus and Zanni (1975,
cited in Harley 2008: 372), for instance, found that questions contain-
ing definite articles are more likely to lead to memory errors than when
indefinite articles are used. After watching a film involving a car acci-
dent, participants were asked if they remember having seen a broken
headlight. When the question featured the definite article (‘Did you see
the broken headlight?), they were more prone to answer positively even
though there was no broken headlight scene. The researchers’ explana-
tion is that ‘when we come across a definite article we make an infer-
ence that we already know something about what follows’ (2008: 372).
Of course, the non-factual nature of literature does not lend itself to
this kind of testing. Even so, when poets present referents as familiar
through the definite article, readers may be led to share the poetic per-
sona’s presupposition in spite of their exclusion from the world por-
trayed in the poem.
129
4.2.6.2 Inappropriateness, Incongruity and Paradox
Decoding, as we have seen, is the process most directly affected by indi-

vidual words that are felt to be difficult based on the criteria detailed
in Sect. 4.2.5. Decoding of deictic items and simple proper names can
be especially problematic as these classes of words lack stable reference
and depend on context for disambiguation. Inferencing, initially a
repair strategy in the face of such thwarted (or extra) decoding, becomes
a means to achieve a more aesthetically nuanced comprehension of the
poem. But when words are combined to form phrases and clauses, the
process primarily involved is integration. Nowhere this is clearer than in
unusual word combinations, a widespread phenomenon in poetry writ-
ing, the most obvious effect of which is the creation of surprise (Jeffries
1993: 70).
Following Jeffries, unusual word combinations are divided into
two types: restricted collocations and collocational contradictions.
Restricted collocations (e.g. Cooper’s ‘dislocated lawns’ or Eliot’s ‘com-
pound ghost’) lend themselves well to a paradigmatic reading whereby
the unusual collocate is measured against more common alternatives.
Toolan’s pairing of Hill’s ‘fatted marble’ with ‘fatted calf ’ (1993: 39;
see Sect. 2.1.2) through language-based inferencing is a case in point.
Restricted collocations result in inappropriateness if the collocate
is a synonym of the more usual collocate (e.g. strong smoker for heavy
smoker ), or in incongruity, if no semantically warranted replacement
can give the phrase an acceptable sense (e.g. ‘purple gestures of milk’:
Cruse 2000: 224).
Collocational contradictions (e.g. Hill’s ‘slight miracle’) are likely
to spur the same kind of paradigmatic inferencing, but as they addi-
tionally stage ‘an apparent contradiction between the two parts of the
collocation’ (Jeffries 1993: 70) they should prompt a more structured
integration process compared to restricted collocations.4 They are likely
to result in oxymoron or paradox (e.g. ‘costly bargain’), amendable by
replacing the unusual collocate with an antonym (Cruse 2000: 224).
The demands on integration elicited by these types of unusual word
combinations do not hold true for usual word combinations like those
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D. Castiglione
found in idioms (e.g. ‘hot potato’, ‘to beat about the bush’) and colloca-
tions (e.g. ‘leading role’ and ‘heavy drinker’). This is because such word
combinations, occurring frequently in discourse, are accessed holistically
from the speaker’s long-term memory and so are decoded almost as if
they were individual lexical items (Conklin and Schmitt 2012). In such
cases, processing requires little effort since decoding prevails on (local)
integration.
In poetry processing, however, ease of decoding and a reduced need
for integration may still produce text effects associated with difficulty,
such as surprise or disorientation. Take the example of usual collo-
cations in poetry as investigated by Carter (1998 [1987]). After he
prepared a prose version of Auden’s ‘Who’s Who’ by removing line-
ation, Carter deleted the same words from both versions and tested
the predictability of collocations by gap-filling. Results showed that
usual collocates—present in the original poem—were supplied for the
prose but not for the poetry version: ‘little’, for instance, was predicted
of ‘job’ by 18% informants for the prose version but by none for the
original poetry version. Precisely because unusual word combinations
are deployed extensively in poetic discourse, respondents had a strong
expectation for them to occur; consequently, the violation of such inter-
nalised norm via the deployment of usual collocations is likely to sur-
prise or even baffle readers.
4.2.6.3 Metaphors
The effects of incongruity and paradox mentioned earlier are types of

anomaly, an umbrella-term that covers ‘all kinds of semantic incom-
patibility or contradiction’ (Wales 2011 [1990]: 22) and is alternatively
referred to as semantic deviance (Levin 1977: 4) or semantic clash
(Croft and Cruse 2004: 221). Also tropes, ‘foregrounded irregularities
of content’ (Leech 1969: 74), presuppose semantic clash to some extent.
Their impact on meaning is of two main kinds: tropes such as paradox
and contradiction distort meaning, whereas metaphor and metonymy
displace meaning (Riffaterre 1984 [1978]: 2; emphasis added).
131
This section is devoted to the chief agent of meaning displacement,

metaphor. Broadly, a metaphor can be defined as a ‘cross domain map-
ping in the conceptual system’ (Lakoff 1993: 1). The mapping involves a
target domain (what the metaphor is about) and a source domain (the
imagery used to express the target domain) between which some com-
mon ground can be established. In Crag Raine’s ‘the vacuum cleaner
grazes / over the carpet’ (discussed in Simpson 2014 [1993]: 96), ‘vac-
uum cleaner’ is the target; ‘farmed animal’ (inferable via ‘grazes’) is the
source; and the set of their perceived similarities (e.g. shape and move-
ment) is the common ground. The underlying conceptual metaphor is
therefore A HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCE IS A FARMED ANIMAL.
This mapping process creates a novel image in the reader’s mind inso-
far as a metaphor is ‘different from the sum (or comparison) of its part’
(Goodblatt and Glickson 1993: 87). Semantically, metaphors of this
kind result in a figure that is perceived as unfamiliar because it conflates
attributes from normally unrelated areas of experience. But how far can
the surprise effect be pushed for the metaphor to be interpretable at all,
or at least to warrant an acceptable trade-off between processing effort
and aesthetic gain in RT terms? More simply put: What makes a met-
aphor taxing to process and interpret? This is what the following para-
graphs will attempt to give an answer to.
First of all, novel metaphors are related to, but different from, seman-
tic anomaly. Reinterpreting psycholinguistic evidence on metaphor
processing in RT terms, Romero and Soria (2013) propose that novel
metaphors imply both contextual abnormality and conceptual contrast,
while anomalies do without the latter constraint (2013: 49). This con-
ceptual difference is reflected on behavioural measures of reading. In a
neurolinguistic experiment, Faust and Mashal (2007) found that unre-
lated noun pairs such as ‘wisdom wash’ (anomaly condition) are read
more quickly than novel metaphorical noun pairs such as ‘conscience
storm’ (metaphorical condition).
The difference is not just quantitative but also qualitative, for Faust
and Mashal also draw attention to the fact that novel metaphors and
unrelated noun pairs activate different right-hemisphere patterns
in the brain. They explain these findings by arguing that novel meta-
phors ‘reflect some kind of systematic, although nonsalient, conceptual
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D. Castiglione
knowledge’ (2007: 867). This systematicity—which I regard as a fea-

ture of complexity (see Sect. 4.1)—is in line with Romero and Soria’s
emphasis on the ‘conceptual contrast’ that discriminates between novel
metaphor and semantic anomaly. It may also partly explain why ‘more
extensive problem-solving activities are presumably required for new
creative metaphors, such as those used in some forms of modern poetry’
(van Dijk and Kintsch 1983: 313).
Reinterpreting Faust and Mashal’s finding in the light of the model of
poetic difficulty, two specific hypotheses can be made. The first is that
poems featuring lists of unrelated noun pairs will be felt difficult at the
level of global integration but—by virtue of the shorter reading times
elicited—much less so in terms of the online resistance aspect of diffi-
culty. The second is that poems replete with novel metaphors will, by
contrast, oppose more initial resistance by demanding tighter local con-
ceptual integration and thus favouring deep processing. Yet in a second
stage, this resistance will facilitate the construction of a situation model
through a more structured integration process, which in turn reflects
the systematic knowledge activated by novel metaphorical mappings.
But not all metaphorical mappings are alike, and some are more tax-
ing than others depending on the configuration of the metaphor. A key
criterion in this respect is the direction of domain mappings investi-
gated by Shen (2007). Relying on quantitative evidence from poetry
corpora, he found that similes with an abstract source domain followed
by a concrete target domain (e.g. ‘education is like a ladder’) occur
much more frequently than in the reverse order (e.g. ‘a ladder is like
education’). Tests he conducted showed that the former order was easier
to make sense of than the latter. Shen concludes that poetic language,
for all its inventiveness, is still subject to cognitive constraints (2007:
172). Indeed, to understand the abstract in concrete terms is one of
the key functions of metaphor, while to recast the concrete in abstract
terms may look like an estranging or even deliberately artificial move.
Whether difficult poems too obey this cognitive constraint or not will
be investigated in Part II.
The ‘education is like a ladder’ example is easy to process not only on
account of its abstract-to-concrete domain mapping, but also owing to
the preposition ‘like’ explicitly signalling comparison. If, however, this
133
was removed alongside the main verb is, thus giving ‘education a lad-
der’ as result, we would be deprived of explicit instructions on the kind
of mapping required. This little example shows that the grammatical
realisation of metaphors matters when assessing their difficulty or lack
thereof.
This idea that structure influences the activation of metaphorical
mappings has been explored by Stockwell (1992) and Goatly (1997).
Stockwell proposes a ‘cline of processing difficulty’ (2) by speculating
on how the grammatical types of metaphors identified by Brooke-Rose
(1958) ‘are processed in reading’ (1992: 1). He pursues this aim by writ-
ing several variants of the conceptual metaphor BRAIN IS CITY so as
to cover all the types identified by Brooke-Rose. In the low-processing
effort end of the scale, he lists the most explicit types: extended meta-
phor and analogy (e.g. ‘just as a city has a communication system, so
does the brain’). At mid-point, we find more compact constructions,
such as simple replacements (e.g. ‘I live in the big brain’) and unit
metaphors (e.g. ‘the urban brain’). He finally places allegory and fic-
tion at the high-processing effort end of the scale, since both tropes are
extended but implicit in their metaphorical substitutions. While the
scope of Stockwell’s paper is ambitious, content-wise his examples are so
heterogeneous that one struggles to tease out, as far as processing is con-
cerned, the contribution of structure from that of semantics.
This potential pitfall is overcome by Goatly (1997), who convincingly
shows how the relationship between the target and the source domain
is specified differently by different structures. He identifies six of them:
copula, apposition, genitive, noun premodifier (equivalent to Brooke-
Rose’s unit metaphor), compounds and blends. The content words in
the examples he provides remain unaltered, so that the contribution of
the structure is controlled for: ‘the eye was a raindrop’ (copula), ‘the eye,
a raindrop’ (apposition), ‘the raindrop of an eye’ (genitive), ‘the raindrop
eye’ (noun premodifier), ‘the eye-raindrop’ (compound) and ‘the rey-
endrop’ (blend) (1997: 202). He importantly argues that ‘because of its
minimal syntactic bonding, [apposition] demands more work from the
reader than the other means of Topic specification’ (209).
The difficulty of a metaphor does not depend solely on its linguis-
tic realisation or on the direction of domain mapping, but more
134
D. Castiglione
extrinsically on the selection of the source and target domains them-

selves. It stands to reason that metaphors employing unusual source and
target domains will be more unfamiliar and therefore harder to make
sense of. It is relatively straightforward to assess metaphor novelty in this
regard, for much cognitive research on metaphor has focused on met-
aphors in everyday discourse (e.g. LIFE IS A JOURNEY) and so a list
of common source and target domains has been compiled by Kövecses
(2010: 28). I arrange such list in table format below (Table 4.9).
Let us briefly see how this can work in practice. Dylan Thomas’s ‘that
globe itself of hair and bone’ (see Sect. 7.2 for a full analysis) can be
easily accommodated into the list: its source domain is THE HUMAN
BODY (via the meronyms ‘hair’ and ‘bone’), while its target domain
WORLD (via the synonym ‘globe’) would not look out of place along-
side SOCIETY/NATION. In Bernstein’s ‘hoops of equations’, how-
ever, both the target MATHEMATICS and the source SHAPES are
missing from the list, which partly accounts for the unfamiliarity of the
metaphor.
In conclusion, three key aspects need to be considered when assess-
ing difficulty of metaphor processing: (1) the presence or lack thereof of
common target and source domains; (2) direction of domain mapping;
and (3) grammatical structure of the metaphor. A difficult metaphor
Table 4.9 Common source and target domains

Common source domains Common target domains
The human body Emotion
Health and illness Desire
Animals Morality
Plants Society/nation
Buildings and construction Politics
Machines and tools Economy
Games and sport Human relationships
Money and economic transactions Communication
Cooking and food Time
Heat and cold Life and death
Light and darkness Religion
Forces Events and actions
Movement and direction
135
will feature uncommon target and source domains (first requirement);

the target domain will be concrete and the source domain abstract (sec-
ond requirement); and its structure will be that of apposition, making
the relationship between target and source domain underspecified (third
requirement). Clearly, this is a theoretical ideal and most difficult meta-
phors will probably meet just one or two requirements. Finally, a fourth
and last requirement concerns the extent to which target and source
domain overlap. The longer the semantic distance between them, the
narrower the common ground. The narrower the common ground, the
fewer the chances that the metaphor is processed as a metaphor at all.
When this happens, the metaphor will be dismissed as nonsensical and
regarded as a semantic anomaly preventing any kind of mappings from
taking place.
4.2.6.4 Negation
Negation typically affects comprehension at clausal level, for negation is

an ‘essentially foregrounding process, whereby some background prop-
osition (asserted, assumed, expected, claimed, presupposed) is focused
on and challenged’ (Werth 1999: 250; quoted in Nahajec 2009: 111).
Linguistically, negation takes a variety of forms, including opera-
tors (e.g. not ), prefixes (e.g. unin ‘unqualified’), suffixes (e.g. -less, in
‘worthless’), pronouns (e.g. ‘nothing’), quantifiers (e.g. ‘no’, ‘any’) or
prepositions (e.g. ‘without’).
Psycholinguists have reached a solid consensus that negative clauses
pose higher processing demands than their positive counterparts (Dillon
1978: 145; Chafe 1991: 17; Hassan and Glucksberg 2006: 1027, cited
in Nahajec 2009: 115; Du et al. 2014). This is because readers need
to extrapolate a positive state of affairs from the negative proposition
before they can construct its originally intended negative counter-
part. Assume I say ‘there are no elephants here’: rather than thinking
directly of a space unpeopled by elephants, you will first be thinking
of elephants and only successively visualise their absence. So it appears
that, as a logical function of language, negation is processed as an added
layer to the referential (i.e. experiential and denotative) content of the
136
D. Castiglione
proposition. This makes the processing somehow circuitous and over-

loaded, for two alternative sequences are entertained in quick succes-
sion. Problems of processing overload are of course magnified in the
case of double negatives (Frazier 1988: 213; Chafe 1991: 17).
Given this brief theoretical overview, it is no surprise that negation
is exploited in poetry as a means to create implicit meaning (Nahajec
2009) and thus engender a feeling of difficulty via obscurity: ‘since
the intended meaning of a negative is not immediately available, it is
more obscure than it need be’ (2009: 113). One way to empirically
test this assumption might be to probe inference generation in readers
through two versions of the same poem—one stripped off all negating
devices and the other retaining them. My own hypotheses concern-
ing the contribution of negation to poetic difficulty is this: in online
terms, negation will slightly lengthen the reading times RID; in offline
terms, negation will increase obscurity by prompting inference genera-
tion resulting in ambiguous, more abstract situation models likely to be
experienced as evocative and aesthetic. As the reader will have guessed,
I regard negation as a less disruptive LID than deviant use of deixis or
unusual word combinations: while this argument may be legitimately
challenged for double negation, I suspect that the contribution of nega-
tion to difficulty in poetry as defined here is theoretically marginal.
Overall, considering that difficulty is related—via obscurity—to a
decreased access to the linguistic meaning of the poem, semantics plays
a pivotal role in the model. The respective contribution of such diverse
LIDs as unusual word combinations, novel metaphors (which may arise
out of them), deixis and negation is summarised in Table 4.10, with
which the section concludes.
4.2.7 Syntax
When looking at a painting, our gaze has no preordained direction: we

may start from the centre and then proceed to the edges or the other
way round; or even start from any point, one representing a captivating
detail perhaps, to then meander about the rest of the surface. This is
also the case of visual poetry as a hybrid between verbal art and visual
Table 4.10 LID 6—Semantic dimensions
LID category LID linguistic realisation Comprehension process Comprehension process Likely corresponding RIDs
(+ semantic unit affected) thwarted (likely) prompted
Deixis (opaque, Integrating (referent not Contextual inferencing > Reading times (due to challenged
decontextualised) recoverable from the (aesthetic interpreta- integration)
(elements, figures) text) tion of elusiveness of < Access to situation model (due to
referent; probably only on referents not identified)
re-reading) or
> Estranging situation model (refer-
ents vividly presented through det.
articles but decontextualised)
Deixis (shifting) Integrating (coherence Contextual inferencing < Coherent situation model (due to
(figures, sequences) threatened, mismatch (aesthetic interpretation of challenged integration; focused
between given and new deictic shift, e.g. polyph- information shifts and no central
information) ony, chaos…) anchorage point found)
> Reading times (due to challenged
integration and problems of ana-
Semantic phoric pronoun resolution, e.g. ‘are
deviance these instances of ‘he’ coreferential
or not’?)
Deixis (lack of) Pragmatic inferencing (no Contextual inferencing < Access to situation model (minor
(figures, sequences) scope for guessing the (aesthetic interpretation immersion in text world, feeling
identity of referents) of lack of deixis, e.g. akin of reading expository texts
distanced stance, objective rather than fiction)
commitment) < Involvement, appreciation (due to
reduced immersion)
Restricted collocations Integrating (unusual Contextual inferencing > Reading times (due to demands
(inappropriateness) combination requires (word choice foreground- on integration and prompting of
(elements, figures) bottom-up construction ing spurs inferencing on contextual inferencing)
of meaning) connotative meaning, > Retention of linguistic form (due to
enacts paradigmatic surprise factor)
reading)
137
(continued)
Table 4.10 (continued)
Collocation contradictions Integrating (unusual Integrating (effortful inte- > Reading times (due to demands
138
(paradox, oxymoron) combination requires gration leads to ponder on integration and prompting of
(elements, figures) bottom-up construction the meaning relations of contextual inferencing)
of meaning) the two collocates) > Retention of linguistic form (due to
Contextual inferencing (sig- surprise factor and tight meaning
nificance of contradiction integration of collocates)
within the text)
D. Castiglione
Incongruous collocations Integrating (semantic Contextual inferencing < Access to situation model (hard
(incongruity) distance between the (search for aesthetic to build a semantic representation
(elements, figures) collocates cannot be motivation of nonsensical- of incongruities—this affects the
bridged) ity) or Ø (if nonsensicality overall situational model)
rejected) > Retention of linguistic form (due to
surprise factor)
Novel metaphors (reversed Integrating (due to Conceptual inferencing > Reading times (due to demands
directionality of domain demands on mapping (derived from mappings— on integration and aesthetic
mappings, unusual target process) conceptual restructuring appreciation)
and source domains, of source and target, links > Unfamiliar situation model (novel
semantic distance between to everyday language) domain mapping leads to new con-
target and source and lack of Contextual inferencing ceptualisation of reality)
explicit signalling in syntactic (significance of metaphor > Retention of linguistic form (due
form) in the text) to surprise factor and enhanced
(elements, figures) attention)
Negation (incl. double Ø Decoding (extra decod- > Reading times (due to extra
negation) ing due to access of decoding)
(elements, figures) alternative semantic > Rich/ambiguous situation model
representation) (presence and absence simultane-
Contextual inferencing (esp. ously entertained)
for double negation—
search for motivation of
foreground)
139
art; and to an extent of verbal poetry in re-reading, when we may linger

on words from different parts of the text to build up coherence, and
delinearisation thereby occurs (Yaron 2002). But on first reading poetry
unfolds linearly, so it is the order of its constituents that which guides
comprehension at above-decoding level. The arrangement of words in
larger units (phrases, clauses and sentences) is dealt with by syntax.
In this section, I consider some syntactic uses that have been con-
sistently argued to impact on difficulty. One first main distinction can
be made between ill-formed syntax (e.g. *‘run boy the who’) and well-
formed (i.e. grammatically acceptable) but cognitively taxing syntax. In
the former case, parsing is impeded and integration does not take place
unless the ungrammatical structure is amended by mapping it onto the
closest grammatical structure available. Comprehension will thus be
severely compromised, either by receding at decoding level or by attain-
ing integration at the expense of the original structure. With cognitively
taxing syntax, by contrast, parsing and integration are merely deau-
tomatised by structures that deviate from simple declarative sentences
in SVO word order—known in generativism as kernel sentences (e.g.
‘the boy hits the ball’). These structures can exhibit marked word orders,
as in cleft sentences, fronting or inversions; or become too long and
complex for their content to be effortlessly processed in short-term
memory, as with heavy premodification by adjuncts, extended subor-
dination and embedding; or replace the clause with the phrase as the
norm of discourse construction, a widespread phenomenon in modern-
ist poetry (Adamson 1999: 641). Differently from ill-formed structures,
integration will be eventually attained but at a higher processing cost
than if the poet had used kernel sentences arranged paratactically.
4.2.7.1 Ill-Formed Syntax
Ungrammatical strings occur frequently in the poetry of Cummings,

and Fowler (1971) interprets such instances as ‘he danced his did’
and ‘with up so floating many bells down’ by tracing them back to
well-formed counterparts through a chain of transformational rules.
140
D. Castiglione
The scrambled word order of the latter example hinders a structural

parsing of the line, severely affecting integration and its outcome—
the reader’s representation of the words at the semantic level of figure.
This amounts to what Levin (1977: 14) describes as syntactic deviance
in nature. The former example, by contrast, only displays a mismatch
between syntactic form and syntactic function, with the pro-verb ‘did’
behaving as a noun by means of conversion. Integration is not an issue
here, but rather it is decoding that is challenged: we need to reconcep-
tualise ‘did’ as a noun, which almost amounts to creating a new, one-off
lexical entry. We might do so by aligning ‘did’ it to the etymologically
related ‘deed’, with which it also forms a minimal pair. But even then,
we would be facing a semantic anomaly caused by a violation of selec-
tional restrictions (i.e. ‘he dance his deed’). Asyntactic lines with even
more severe violations can be found in Howe (Quartermain 1992: 183)
and in the Language poets in general (Perloff 1991: 41). Some of the
poems introduced in the next chapter and analysed in Part II come
from this tradition and so will afford scope for investigating the impact
of ill-formed syntax on the perception and experience of difficulty.
4.2.7.2 Syntactic Ambiguity
In syntactic ambiguity, a structure enables two distinct parsing routes

and results in two different ideational representations. Demands are
thus imposed both on parsing and on the construction of meaning, and
as psycholinguistic research has repeatedly confirmed, ‘syntactic ambi-
guity poses a difficult problem for the processor’ (Frazier 1988: 199).
Frazier makes a further distinction between temporary ambiguity
(which can be disambiguated later on) and full ambiguity (which can-
not be disambiguated). Perhaps contrary to expectations, he argues that
later disambiguation does not lessen the processing effort (1988: 199).
In Mallarmé’s ‘la seule continue’, the word continue ‘operates in the
same utterance both as a verb and as an adjective’ (Derrida 1992: 114).
Another glaring example (discussed in Stockwell 2002b: 77) is Milton’s
‘and that one talent which is death to hide’. Here, ‘death’ can be read as
a noun, in which case it is the subject of the relative clause: ‘death hides
141
the talent’, but it can also function as an adjective in predicative posi-

tion, in which case the subject is the infinitive clause ‘to hide that tal-
ent’: ‘it is death (= serious, unforgivable) to hide that talent’. Syntactic
ambiguity does not necessarily involve word-class ambiguity, for it
suffices that certain constituents are assigned two syntactic functions
simultaneously. This is the case of Shelley’s ‘the grey ruin shook’ where
‘ruin’ can be either subject or object and ‘shook’ can be either transi-
tive or intransitive (Austin 1986: 23). Incidentally, all the examples
provided belong to Frazier’s category of full ambiguity in that both pars-
ing options are equally legitimate; from an aesthetic perspective, they
instantiate Derrida’s notion of undecidability (1992: 114, 115, 120).
4.2.7.3 Syntactic Complexity
During the comprehension process, incoming information is integrated

with previous information cumulatively. Since the clause is ‘the func-
tional psychological unit for perception as well as memory’ (van Dijk
and Kintsch 1983: 28), easy integration will be ensured by monoclausal
sentences encoding only one figure or propositional unit at a time. But
with complex sentences built out of subordination (e.g. ‘they said they
had seen a figure who was wearing a ridiculous hat’), there can be sev-
eral figures per sentence. This is bound to increase the processing load,
for subordination tends to disadvantage the information under its
scope, diminishing attention and leading to lacunary, shallow processing
(Sanford and Emmott 2012: 90, 114).
Complex sentences with two or three propositional units like the one
just reported are still easy to process. But now consider the beginning
of Milton’s Paradise Lost: default word order is eschewed by fronting
the adverbial of circumstance ‘Of Mans First Disobedience’, in turn
suspended for five lines (and three clauses) until the predicate and sub-
ject ‘Sing Heav’nly Muse’ occur. These clauses, two of which subordi-
nate (i.e. the relative clause ‘whose mortal tast / Brought Death into the
World’ and the adverbial temporal clause ‘till one greater Man / Restore
us’) are in turn internally expanded by the insertion of adjuncts. At that
point, there are still ten lines to go until the formal end of the sentence
142
D. Castiglione
marked by a full stop. The reader is required to hold several proposi-

tional units or figures in their short-term memory, thus experiencing
processing overload. Analysing verb phrase delay across various poetic
extracts, San likewise argues that ‘a sentence characterized by multiple
and lengthy grammatical hiatuses may well be termed “difficult”’ (137);
Chafe (1991; see Sect. 2.1.2) also singles out subordination as one of
the determinants that make an extract from Henry James more difficult
than one from Edith Wharton.
These theoretical arguments and empirical evidence show that infor-
mation distribution, less linear in subordination than in coordination,
is ‘one of the most important factors that determines comprehensibil-
ity and coherence’ (Harley 2008: 378). Besides subordination, other
syntactic means worth mentioning are parenthetical and anticipatory
structures. A style marker in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry
and one initially associated with conversation (Adamson 1999: 594–
596), parentheticals have been associated with difficulty in the cases of
Cummings (Kidder 1979, cited in Tartakovsky 2009: 242) and Olson
(Adamson 1999: 596). As summed up by Short, whose words I find a
fitting conclusion to the current subsection:
these sorts of structures [parenthetical and anticipatory structures], which

are sometimes called periodic sentences, tend to be more difficult to pro-
cess because to understand them properly we need to hold the anticipa-
tory or parenthetical information in our heads until we get to the end of
the main clause. As a consequence, these sorts of sentences are associated
with style complexity and reading difficulty (Short 1996: 341; emphasis
added)
4.2.7.4 Phrase-Based Syntax
At first sight, phrase-based syntax is the opposite of complex syntax.

Complex syntax demotes the clause, seen as too claustrophobic a norm
of discourse construction, to a building block of structural complex-
ity. Phrase-based syntax, by contrast, halts before the clause rather than
overstepping it: the clause, seen as too wide, too self-enclosed a unit, is
143
undermined in the pursuit of fragmentation. Yet, by avoiding the clause

(i.e. the functional unit of processing) as the golden rule of communi-
cation, both modes of discourse construction engender difficulty: by
processing overload (complex syntax) or by information deficit (phrase-
based syntax). Semantically, while in complex syntax readers have to
keep track of several figures in a convoluted sequence, in phrase-based
syntax they face a fragmentation of meaning whereby figures give way
to weakly related elements. Integration is challenged in both scenarios,
but syntactically complex texts provide all the relevant semantic cues,
whereas in texts with a phrase-based syntax norm such cues need to be
supplied ‘from outside’, through pragmatic inferencing.
In twentieth-century poetry, phrase-based syntax is expected to
play a decidedly more pervasive role in the creation of difficulty com-
pared to complex syntax. This is because syntax in literature has shown
a consistent tendency towards simplification over the last centuries
(Adamson 1999: 640). Due to the excessive simplification it enacts,
phrase-based syntax ‘seems designed to foreground its [of Modernist
poetry] potential difficulties, baffling the reader’s ability to reconstruct
either syntax or message or the train of thought that might hold the
parts together’ (1999: 641).
Phrase-based syntax is likely to be a cross-national phenomenon, for
Testa reaches similar conclusions as Adamson by examining key rep-
resentatives of twentieth-century Italian poetry. Importantly, he also
points out that nominal style, a type of phrase-based syntax, is often
deployed to represent disjointed entities (1999: 150). From a processing
perspective, such disjointed entities would impair the construction of a
coherent situation model and textbase, thus adding to the post-reading
experience of difficulty. The degree of perceived disjointedness depends
on the logical relations that can be established between the entities
(i.e. the elements in systemic functional terms). As Tate argues, ‘noun
phrases which are paratactically juxtaposed can be taken as appositional,
and thus coreferential, or alternatively as discrete items, as in a list’
(2008 [1994]: 140).
Making a parsing decision between list and apposition rests on
whether the elements involved are semantically related, as in apposition,
144
D. Castiglione
or only contingently related, as in lists (Adamson 1999: 641). Since the

perception of semantic or situational relatedness is partly subjective, the
boundaries between list and apposition can be fuzzy: Stockwell (2002a:
63), for instance, comments on the indeterminate relations between
juxtaposed noun phrases in a Ted Hughes poem, and similar structural
ambiguities have been noticed in Mallarmé (Bowie 1978: 7) and Pound
(Tate 2008 [1994]: 140). In any case, both compositional strategies are
often aesthetically exploited for juxtaposition purposes; their diverging
difficulty effects will be explored in Part II (esp. Sect. 7.1.2).
Juxtaposition is also achieved through free modifiers, an ubiquitous
construction in modernist writing and one grammatically realised by
participial clauses, adverbs, prepositional phrases and absolute construc-
tions (Adamson 1999: 635). The difficulty in parsing free modifiers lies
in the fact that ‘the modifier-head relationship is unspecified and often
unspecific’ (635). No less important, a progressive loss of information
can be observed when moving away from free finite clauses towards
non-finite clauses and prepositional phrases (Halliday and Matthiessen
2004: 425): non-finite clauses (e.g. ‘walking the street’) have no time
reference specification as they lack tense; prepositional phrases, having
no verb altogether, lack aspect too, that is, grammatical information on
how the process is conceptualised. With less and less information avail-
able, readers are called to play an increasingly active role, remedying
the textual indeterminacy through extra inferencing. It could even be
provisionally proposed that ill-formed syntax (see Sect. 4.2.7.1) is the
endpoint of such structural atomisation: through this LID, experimen-
tal poets undermine not just the clause, but even the phrase as a funda-
mental syntactic constituent.
To sum up, this section on syntax has addressed four dimensions:
syntactic ill-formedness, ambiguity, complexity and phrase-based
syntax. While the latter two are mutually exclusive, a poem can of
course intertwine two or more compatible dimensions: a complex sen-
tence may also be ambiguous to parse; an underlying phrasal norm be
retraced beneath a syntactically ill-formed poem. Table 4.11 summarises
the impact of such dimensions on difficulty.
Table 4.11 LID 7—Syntactic dimensions
LID LID linguistic realisa- Comprehension process Comprehension process Likely corresponding RIDs
category tion (+ semantic unit thwarted (likely) prompted
affected)
Ill-formed syntax Parsing Contextual inferencing > Reading times (due to challenged
(figures) (due to mismatch between (aesthetic interpretation of integration)
syntactic form and syntactic ill-formed syntax) < Access to situation model (due to
function) hindered integration; situation model
Integration (hindered by scram- atomised, reduced to elements, not
bled word order and/or lack figures or sequences)
of main constituents)
Syntactic ambiguity Ø Parsing (ambivalence of > Reading times (due to extra parsing
(typically full) syntactic forms and/or and integration)
(figures) functions) > Ambiguous situation model (due to
Integration (made more alternative representations)
effortful by presence of > Interpretive awareness
alternative representations)
Syntax
Syntactic complexity Integration (processing over- Ø > Reading times (due to extra
(subordination, paren- load caused by amount of integration)
theticals, anticipatory incoming information) < Access to situation model (due to
structures, phrase minor saliency of information in
expansion) subordination and reduced focused on
(sequences) propositional units)
Phrase-based syntax Integrating (due to informa- Integrating (if phrases in > Reading times (due to extra integration
(list, apposition, free tion deficit, lack of signalling apposition) in apposition)
modifiers, nominal devices—more severe in list < Coherent situation model (due to
style) than in apposition) weaker links across information units
(elements) and information deficit—processes
cued by verbs either backgrounded or
made atemporal)
145
146
D. Castiglione
4.2.8 Aspects of Discourse
Suppose a poem lacks all the indicators discussed so far: it features no

orthographic, graphological or morphological deviation; its words are
part of core vocabulary; has no semantic anomalies; and each of its
clauses is a well-formed, simple and unambiguous declarative. A poem
like this may still be difficult due to discourse factors affecting its mean-
ing globally. In Kintsch’s words: ‘local comprehension problems may
be a nuisance, but problems at the macro level tend to be a disaster’
(Kintsch 1998: 180). One only has to think of poems consisting of
unrelated sentences such as those written in the 70s–80s by the New
Sentence avant-garde poetry movement (Lopez 2006: 1–19).
This last section addresses integration at global level and tries to assess
how and why this is hindered by various aspects of discourse. Contrary
to local indicators, global indicators are negative: it is not their pres-
ence but their partial or total lack that which usually elicits the diffi-
culty. These indicators are: (a) informativity as a measure of decoding
and integration effort cued by the degree of repetition (i.e. type/token
ratio) and by lexical density, ‘the proportion of lexical words expressed
as a percentage’ (Stubbs 2001: 41); (b) cohesion/coherence, affecting
integration by signalling the extent to which a poem holds its pieces
together by drawing on certain semantic fields or by evoking proto-
typical situations such as scripts or schemas; (c) narrativity, a peculiar
dimension of coherence that is best treated separately; and (d) sub-
jectivity, concerned with the explicitness of the speaker’s stance—the
poetic persona’s presence—and with the empathetic recognisability of
the ideational world represented.
4.2.8.1 Informativity: Repetitions and Lexical Density
All the words that occur in a text, irrespective of whether they are
repeated or not, are called tokens. So in the previous sentence, there are
19 tokens. Types, on the other hand, are different words or word forms,
thus excluding repetitions. So in the same sentence, there are only 18
types, for the auxiliary ‘are’ occurs twice. As a result, the type/token
147
ratio of my first sentence is 18/19 = 0.95. This trivial example shows

that type/token ratio cues the informativity of a text, that is the extent
to which it packs information by eschewing redundancy. Statements
of identity such as Stein’s famously tautology ‘Rose is a rose is a rose
is a rose’ are therefore much less informative than my sentence. This
decrease in informativity, that is in ideational (denotative) meaning, can
be compensated for by an increase in interpersonal (connotative) mean-
ing, given that an uneconomical use of repetitions (with a correspond-
ingly lower type/token ratio) must be accounted for.
Pilkington’s discussion of epizeuxis (2000: 124), that is, the imme-
diate repetition of a word or phrase, aptly illustrates the point. The
scholar argues that while the Biblical invocation ‘Absalom, my son, my
son’ (Samuel 18:33) is propositionally identical to the variant ‘Absalom,
my son’, it conveys an added stylistic effect. He explains the difference
within the framework of RT, arguing that the repetition prompts the
reader to activate contextual assumptions richer than those which would
be activated had the word not been repeated. In our model, this use of
epizeuxis would boost the vividness of the situation model while also
prompting a conventional kind of formal symbolism: the cumbersome
repetition (duplication) of a word is an iconic equivalent of the speaker’s
increased emotional involvement. This should decrease the difficulty of
the text by watering down its informativity while enhancing its affective
resonance in the reader.
Repetition can take many other forms and functions, from proximal
repetitions as deployed in free indirect style (Sotirova 2005) to more
distant ones affecting the processing of extended narrative (Caink 2014;
Toolan 2016)—let alone its generically cohesive function (Halliday and
Hasan 1976). What matters is that, either by increasing the affective
import of a statement or by building up cohesion in an extended piece
of writing, repetition is likely to diminish difficulty—insofar as more
powerful LIDs (e.g. lack of coherence and asyntacticity) are missing.
This is because the affective/expressive import of proximal repetitions
invites the reader into the poem’s situation model, while the cohesive or
story-building function of distal repetitions eases processing (especially
the integration phase of comprehension) by providing relevant signpost-
ing and balancing the amount of new and given information.
148
D. Castiglione
Lexical density can also be taken as a measure of informativity since

it indicates the proportion of content words (i.e. nouns, lexical verbs,
adjectives and adverbs) as opposed to function words (i.e. determin-
ers, prepositions, conjunctions and auxiliary verbs; Stubbs 2001: 41).
Grammatical meanings conveyed by function words as well as by inflec-
tional morphemes are schematic and form a closed set (e.g. plurality,
determinacy, spatial and logical relations, tense and aspect). Lexical
meanings, by contrast, are fine-grained and form an open set. This
means that the proportion of lexical and grammatical words should
have some bearings in terms of how the constructed situation model
looks like. There is some evidence that reading patterns and times are
different for function and for lexical words (Schmauder et al. 2000):
lexical words are perceived as more communicatively salient, so they
are less likely to be skipped. This does not imply a qualitative differ-
ence in their processing, the evidence for which is inconclusive (Harley
2008: 318). Nevertheless, it does seem reasonable to assume that high
lexical density demands deeper processing and results in longer read-
ing times—a RID that in turn justifies the inclusion of lexical density
among the LIDs.
In terms of register distribution, lexical density has been found
to be conspicuously higher in informative-expository registers (e.g.
academic texts and newspaper articles) than in conversational regis-
ters (Biber et al. 2002). The fact that poetry is read slower than an
expository sub-register as encyclopaedic items (Hanauer 1998; see
Sect. 4.1) should not, however, make us assume that lexical density
is necessarily higher in poetry. First, to my knowledge there are no
data on lexical density in poetry—and even if there were, drawing
generalisations would be much more problematic than for conven-
tionalised registers. This is because in poetry, as in literary writing
in general, creativity and the pressure for novelty have been playing
a pivotal role over the centuries, giving rise to different traditions
(Martindale 1991). Second, and perhaps more importantly, while
high lexical density places a significant demand on decoding, the
longer reading times found for poetry are probably best accounted
for by its multifarious demands on inferencing (e.g. apprecia-
tion of literary form, attribution of sub-genre, theme formulation
149
and so on). Still, Part II of the book will show that the decoding
demands imposed by poems with a high lexical density do contribute
to their difficulty.
4.2.8.2 Coherence (Lack of )
Despite the thin line existing between cohesion and coherence (Wales
2011 [1990]: 66), the two dimensions are treated as distinct in the
present work5: cohesion ‘concerns the ways in which the components
of the surface text are mutually connected within a sequence’; coher-
ence, on the other hand, is ‘the configuration of concepts and relations
which underlie the surface text’ (Carter 1998 [1987]: 103). Empirical
evidence by Walker (1995) supports Carter’s theoretical distinction:
during a reading test, informants ‘showed an instinctive appreciation
that cohesion and coherence are different and that one does not pre-
sume the other’ (1995: 116). Coherence is more readerly a dimension
than cohesion, being ‘the outcome of cognitive processes among texts
users’ rather than ‘a mere feature of texts’ (de Beaugrande and Dressler
1981: 6). While all the above-mentioned papers deal with non-literary
texts, search for coherence has been empirically shown to be a foremost
reading strategy when facing complex literary texts, including poems by
Cummings (Alonso 2014).
Confronted with Ashbery’s ‘The Skaters’, McHale appears to endorse
the cohesion/coherence distinction as a descriptive tool:
“Disjunction,” in the context of verbal art, involves either (1) the break-
down of textual cohesion (in the sense of Halliday and Hasan 1976)
within or between sentences, as in the poems of The Tennis Court Oath, or
(2) abrupt, unmotivated shifts of frame of reference between sentences or
passages, whether or not textual cohesion is preserved. The latter type of
disjunction characterizes “The Skaters”. (McHale 2000: 563)
Later on, McHale refers to an ‘ebb and flow of intelligibility’ in the

poem (2000: 587), thus evidencing the connection between lack of
coherence and difficulty.
150
D. Castiglione
The shifting of deictic reference already mentioned in the section

on semantics (Sect. 4.2.6.1) is a key strategy to jeopardise coherence.
With regard to Eliot’s The Waste Land, for instance, Jeffries writes that
‘perhaps the most difficult thread to work out in the poem is the ref-
erent of I’ (1993: 122). Eliot’s is by no means an isolated case, for
problems of speaker differentiation are recurrent in modernist and post-
modernist poetry (see also Tartakovsky 2009: 234 on the confusion this
brings in Cummings). Shifts in time reference likewise cause ‘a momen-
tary increase in processing load’ (Zwaan 1996: 1198), and the same is
true for shifts in place reference (Zwaan 2004: 49). The experimental
evidence by Zwaan matches the intuitions of critics like Bowie and
Adamson: the former singles out Mallarmé’s ‘rapid oscillations between
notions and images, or between past, present and future time levels’
(Bowie 1978: 12), while the latter notices how the shifting of tenses in
a passage by Ashbery hinders the construction of ‘a coherent narrative
sequence for events or a coherent location for their narrator’ (Adamson
1999: 674).
Reference shifting impacts on coherence ideationally; register mixing
impacts on it interpersonally. In register mixing, linguistic choices asso-
ciated with different speech situations and formality levels are bluntly
juxtaposed or seamlessly merged. While this phenomenon is well-
documented in modernist and postmodernist poetry (e.g. Semino 2002;
McHale 2004), its difficulty only becomes compelling when each regis-
ter variety resists being traced back to an identifiable speaker. A case in
point is Hill’s Mercian Hymns: analysing one stanza of this long poem,
McHale wonders how ‘to make situational sense of a patchwork of
registers such as we find in hymn X?’ (2004: 125). Register mixing of
this kind blurs the boundaries of the poetic persona and the fictional
context in which this is embedded. Abrupt variation in register along a
formality–informality cline is also instrumental to the creation of irony,
humour and sarcasm (Carter 1998 [1987]: 254). Presumably, the indi-
rection of these tropes has a further share in the perception of difficulty.
Absence or misuse of titles is another key strategy to dimin-
ish coherence. In discourse comprehension studies, titles are among
the ‘macro-relevant’ text elements facilitating global understanding
151
(van Dijk and Kintsch 1983: 54); in literary discourse studies, they are
seen as that part of the paratext (Genette 1980) functioning to sign-
post the topic. For this reason, titles are important starting points to
construct coherence in challenging poems, as revealed by Toolan’s
(1993) analysis reviewed in Sect. 2.1.2. Prynne’s renunciation of poem
titles has thus been pointed out as one of the factors contributing to his
difficulty (Wilkinson 2007: 7).
Lack of connectives, a syntactic/cohesive phenomenon linked to
the technique of juxtaposition (see Sect. 4.2.7.4), is yet another strategy
widely deployed to diminish cohesion and coherence. Adamson notices
that removal of connectives ‘creates potentially serious problems of
intelligibility’ (1999: 640) and convincingly explains how this is the case
by comparing paratactic writing to hypotactic writing and paratactic
speech. Modernist writing renounces the information carried by explicit
connectives in hypotactic writing; however, its written medium also
means that it cannot rely on intonation and on a disambiguating con-
text ‘to tell us where the links are’. Adamson’s arguments resonate with
those of psycholinguists, for whom lack of connectives makes it hard for
readers ‘to make the correct inference, especially if it is not clear from
the context which inferences (if any) should be made’ (Anderson and
Davison 1988: 32–33). This last claim could be adapted to poetry with
the proviso that in this genre inferences are to be judged along a contin-
uum of plausibility rather than according to a wrong/right dichotomy.
So coherence and cohesion can be undermined by lack (or misuse)
of connectives and titles, by register mixing and shift of person, time,
place reference; to counter these disruptive authorial moves, readers
and critics can still hope to retrace cohesive patterns nonlinearly scat-
tered in the text—which is what Toolan (1993) does in his analysis of
Hill’s ‘Of Commerce and Society’. Word relations such as synonymy,
antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy or looser semantic association (e.g.
‘doctor’ → ‘health’) weave a sort of ideational web around the poem,
restoring some coherence in it. Words with related meaning belong to
the same semantic field (alternatively called semantic domain, lexi-
cal field or lexical set). While the number of semantic fields in a lan-
guage is necessarily variable, depending as it does on linguists’ aims
152
D. Castiglione
and judgements, the Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English identi-

fies fourteen of them (e.g. people, food, transports…) alongside further
subdivisions.
A related notion is that of schema, a cognitive construct that allows
to build up coherence by inferring common situations in the world por
trayed by the poem. Poetry is typically less explicit than narrative in sig-
nalling schemas (Hühn 2005: 150), and much of its literary value lies in
disrupting or refreshing existing schemas (Semino 1995). This happens
for instance with Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘The Applicant’, where a marriage
schema is disturbingly filtered through the lenses of welfare job inter-
views (Semino 1995: 16). Since the idea of schema disruption still
implies that the reader recognises the original schema, it is my conten-
tion that difficult poems hinder schema activation in the first place.
As a result, they demote experiential schemas to conceptual semantic
fields—assuming that these too can be retraced at all.
4.2.8.3 Narrativity (Lack of )
There is empirical evidence that ‘narrative passages […] are easier to

read than passages in the descriptive and expository genres’ (Graesser
et al. 1980: 138), and as a consequence ‘the superstructure that people
are most familiar with and handle most easily is the narrative schema’
(van Dijk and Kintsch 1983: 252). That is why the degree of narrativity
of a text has an appreciable impact on comprehension. Shen and Giora
(1994) indeed found that texts low in narrativity (i.e. with little or no
temporal sequencing, causality and action structure) led respondents to
write summary statements, a strategy termed generalisation. Highly
narrative texts that lack these qualities, by contrast, prompted respond-
ents to delete some of the clauses, a strategy termed deletion (1994:
453). To generalise is more taxing than to retain some of the original
input, and thus texts low in narrativity pose more processing demands
on readers. Even within fairly narrative texts, some added difficulty is
experienced if linear temporal sequencing is altered through prolep-
sis or analepsis. This is because readers have been found to reconstruct
153
events chronologically regardless of their textual order of appearance

(Claus and Kelter 2006: 1041). This puts a strain on integration, for
readers are asked to make an extra step to bridge the gap between text
structure and situation model. Besides this, the disruption of linear tem-
poral sequence prompts additional inferencing as ‘a search for special
causes’ (2006: 1042).
In the light of these findings, it is reasonable to assume that (1) there
is a difference in genre processing between fiction and poetry, which is
usually not thought of in narrative terms6; (2) ranking the narrativity
of poems in a verifiable way is key to assessing the contribution of this
LID; and (3), other things being equal, the more narrative a poem (i.e.
the more it can be mapped onto a narrative schema), the more easily it
will be read and understood by readers. Let’s address each point in turn.
As for (1), the narrativity of twentieth-century poetry tends to appear
in weakened forms when compared to most fictional writing. Pound’s
poetry, for example, has been characterised as a ‘fractured narrative’
(Nadel 2007: 61) or as displacing ‘linear narrative of cause and effect’
(Moen 2010: 296). Similarly, McHale describes Ashbery’s ‘The skaters’
as ‘fragmented narrative’, while Howe’s The Europe of Trusts he consid-
ers as ‘antinarrative’ (McHale 2004: 6). These examples do not imply
that narrative modes are irrelevant in poetry, for the opposite is force-
fully true (McHale 2004, 2009; Carney 2008; Hühn et al. 2016), but
they do betray the fact that narrativity surfaces in poetry in elliptical
and indirect forms.
The second point is worth a slightly longer treatment, for I need to
introduce criteria to assess the degree of narrativity in poems. There are
two complementary procedures to do this: top-down and bottom-up.
Top-down is when the analyst assesses an instantiation of narrativity
against a golden rule, that is a standard definition. Bottom-up is when
narrativity is attributed on intrinsic linguistic features, based on how
habitually these recur in narrative fiction. As for the former procedure, I
find Toolan’s clear and workable definition to suit my scope:
A narrative is a perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events,

typically involving, as the experiencing agonist, humans or quasi-humans,
154
D. Castiglione
or other sentient beings, from whose experience we humans can ‘learn’.

(Toolan 2001 [1988]: 8)
Toolan proceeds to extrapolate and discuss three defining aspects from

his definition: (1) sequenced and interrelated events; (2) foregrounded
individuals; and (3) crisis to resolution progression. Texts displaying
only one or two of these features can be called ‘semi-narrative’ (2001
[1988]: 8). As for the latter procedure, one can profitably draw on Biber
and Conrad’s list of linguistic features typical of nineteenth- and twen-
tieth-century fiction. The features, identified via quantitative corpus
work, are past tense verbs, third-person pronouns, proper nouns, adver-
bials of time and place, reporting verb, and direct and indirect reported
speech (Biber and Conrad 2009: 150). Bringing the two procedures
together, one can argue that the more fully a poem meets Toolan’s
higher order criteria, and the more pervasively it displays Biber and
Conrad’s features, the more confidently it can be described as narrative.
This brings me to the third and last point, concerning the grounds
for establishing lack of narrativity as a LID. Based on empirical evi-
dence, I have argued (Castiglione 2017) that differences in reading
times for poems can be fully accounted for only when narrativity is
viewed as a leading factor. Among discourse-level LIDs, lack of narra-
tivity affects online processing—thus the ‘resistance’ facet of difficulty—
much more decisively than disruption of generic coherence does, which
came quite as a surprise. The analyses in Part II will demonstrate just
how important a LID lack of narrativity is.
4.2.8.4 Subjectivity (Lack of )
When Chafe (1991) tried to linguistically capture the difficulty of

James’s The Ambassadors, he drew attention to the derivational pro-
cess of nominalisation, building nouns out of verbs or adjectives (e.g.
‘polite’ → ‘politeness’). Now, nominalisation typically results in abstract
nouns, a LID previously addressed, but its contribution to difficulty
extends beyond the intrinsically complex meaning and low imageability
of the derived nouns it builds. Chafe’s argument is that nominalisations
155
lead to a sense of detachment and therefore of difficulty, which makes

perfect sense given that abstractions come lowest of all in terms of
empathetic recognisability (Stockwell 2009: 25). This becomes appar-
ent if we compare (1) ‘He arrived yesterday’ and (2) ‘His arrival was yes-
terday’. While the two sentences are propositionally identical, the latter
is more formal and, as it were, more distanced, for the grammatical sub-
ject has shifted from a human referent (he ) to a noun that ‘freezes’ the
action verb ‘arrive’. An abundant use of nominalisations, then, would
endow a text with an aura of objectivity acting as a barrier to immer-
sion. Given that emotional involvement will most likely soothe the per-
ceived difficulty (see Sect. 4.1), the undermining of such involvement
should conversely enhance difficulty.
Beside nominalisation, grammar has other important resources
to shun subjectivity in language. Consider the following lines by
Bernstein: ‘Blinded by avenue and filled with / adjacency. Arch or arched
at’ (Bernstein 2004 [1987]: 37; see also Perloff 1991: 32 for a discus-
sion of these lines). Leaving aside the contribution of other LIDs such
as abstract nouns and semantic incongruities, let us focus on Bernstein’s
avoidance of person deixis. This is achieved through an ellipted pas-
sive construction whereby no endophoric (i.e. textually explicit) refer-
ents can be attached to the participial adjective ‘blinded’. The lack of
an explicit speaker in the text deprives readers of a crucial anchor point
for comprehension, since the communicative content of a statement is
related to the speaker’s intention (Schmidt and Groeben 1989: 16–46).
Reduction of subjectivity can also be achieved through neutral shad-
ing (Simpson 2014 [1993]), that is, through categorical assertions
deprived of modality markers such as stance adverbs (e.g. ‘hopefully’
and ‘perhaps’), modal verbs (e.g. ‘must’, ‘ought’ and ‘might’) or hedges
(e.g. ‘sort of ’ and ‘I think’). Lexically, a comparable effect is brought by
the foregrounding of denotation over connotation through a vocabulary
devoid of evaluative or attitudinal words (e.g. ‘terrific’ and ‘fool’) and
of verbs of emotion (e.g. ‘to regret’ and ‘to laugh’), and syntactically, by
eschewing interrogative and imperative clauses alongside emphatic rep-
etitions and marked sentence constructions expressing the subjectivity
of the speaker. All these strategies are enacted in Bernstein’s aforemen-
tioned lines, as they are in Eliot’s opening lines of The Fire Sermon (third
section of The Waste Land )7:
156
D. Castiglione
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
This reduction of subjectivity embodies the well-known modernist tenet

of impersonality. While in her monograph on the subject Rives argues
that impersonality does not preclude affect and personal experience, she
still concedes that it ‘supports distanced and strange intimacies’ (2012:
14; emphasis added). Thus, the reader is required to assume a more
mediated, self-conscious attitude to warrant her engagement in the
face of impersonality. A branching of impersonality, objectivism repre-
sented a further attempt to free modernist poetry from the individual
istic residuum it inherited from symbolism. The symbolist/objectivist
divide is aptly outlined by Altieri as follows: symbolist poets ‘stress in
various ways the mind’s powers to interpret concrete events or to use
the event to inquire into the nature or grounds of interpretive energies’
(Altieri 1999 [1978]: 26). Objectivist poets, on the other hand, ‘seek
an artifact presenting the modality of things seen or felt as immediate
structures of relations’ (1999 [1978]: 26). What discriminates between
the two attitudes is then the extent to which the speaker reminds the
reader of herself through a subjectively coloured language (symbolism)
or is conversely effaced by foregrounding the materiality of the external
world (objectivism).
All in all, even though the empirical evidence for the influence of
subjectivity (or lack thereof ) on comprehension appears scant, there are
solid theoretical grounds to include this last global LID in the model.
Table 4.12 summarises the processing impact of the discourse-level
LIDs discussed in this section.

This chapter has offered a detailed, theory-informed introduction
of each RID and LID. I have recruited psycholinguistic evidence and
observations by critics on all the indicators so as to give them a solid
theoretical basis and to make the case for their inclusion as compelling
Table 4.12 LID 8—Aspects of discourse
Informativity Integration (fewer cues for Decoding (content words > Reading times (due to demands
(type/token ratio and lexical integrating new with given have richer semantic on integration and to the fact
density) information due to low representation and are that content words are fixated for
(figures, sequences, whole redundancy; information more communicatively longer than function words)
texts) overload) salient than function < Access to situation model
words) (lack of expressive repetitions
and increase in informativity
reduce the readerly feeling of
immersion)
Coherence (lack of) Integration (discrepancy Contextual inferencing > Reading times (due to challenged
(shifting of deictic reference, between given and new (aesthetic interpreta- integration, unless the mismatch
register mixing, absence information; bridging infer- tion of disjunction) is too severe to be worth any
or misuse of titles, lack of ences thwarted) extra effort)
connectives, lack of consistent < Coherent situation model (failure
Aspects of semantic fields) to activate global schemas
discourse (sequences, whole texts) impedes the construction of a
coherent situation model)
Narrativity (lack of) Integration (impossibility to Ø > Reading times (due to elicitation
(distance between poem and rely on narrative schema of bottom-up processing or else
high-level components of nar- as a coherence-building of top-down schemas less familiar
ration and low-level features strategy) than the narrative one)
of narrative fiction, alteration
of temporal sequencing)
(sequences, whole text)
Subjectivity (lack of) Exegetic inferencing (hard Contextual inferencing < Access to situation model (feeling
(nominalisation, avoidance of to attribute intentions as (aesthetic interpre- of distance, lack of empathy,
deixis and modality, neutral the speaker is concealed or tation of impersonal minor immersion in the situation
shading, passive construc- cancelled) stance) model)
tions, denotative vocabulary)
(whole text)
157
158
D. Castiglione
as possible. I have also endeavoured to map each LID onto one or more
RIDs, in turn associated with text effects such as confusion, puzzle-
ment, closure, distance or resistance. Relating text effects to configu-
rations of LIDs through empirically measurable RIDs is an important
step to salvage and revamp a much criticised tendency of early stylis-
tics—the establishment of one-to-one links between linguistic feature
and aesthetic effect. While this attempt is admittedly speculative and in
need of future validation, it will allow for an integrated explanation of
the stylistic, processing and psychological fabric of poetic difficulty in
Part II. There the poetic text will be treated as a force field in which
different LIDs intermingle, sometimes working in synergy and some-
times competing with each other, so that the resultant effect can be pre-
dicted only by examining configurations of LIDs that are poem-specific.
Think of LIDs as of difficulty genes: endlessly variable though they may
be, the difficulty traits that manifest in the world can be traced back
to a handful of linguistic genes. The textual organisms—the corpus of
poems—used to prove that this is the case will be introduced in the
next chapter, which opens Part II of the book.
Notes
1. Of course, a different reading population (e.g. more literarily trained
readers) may have very different expectations concerning aesthetic pleas-
ure and enjoyment, perhaps replacing accessibility with elusiveness and
readability with disruption. Even so, it is my contention that the general
reader will tend to search, more or less unconsciously, for these dimen-
sions when trying to enjoy a poem.
2. This process closely resembles metaphor interpretation, and in fact novel
compounds is one of the forms metaphors can take (see Sect. 4.2.6.3).
3. A wealth of data on word frequency and rank for Contemporary
American English is available at Mark Davie’s www.wordfrequency.info.
4. All the examples provided come from Jeffries (1993).
5. The distinction is dismissed by Halliday and Hasan (1976), who sub-
sume coherence under cohesion and define the latter in terms that
are nearly identical to Carter’s definition of coherence: cohesion
‘refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and define
159
it as text’ (1976: 4). Such dismissal of coherence is motivated by the-

oretical assumptions, since functional linguistics sees no sharp distinc-
tion between the lexicogrammar and the semantic strata (Halliday and
Matthiessen 1999). Despite the theoretical interest of this proposal, and
my overall adherence to SFG (see Sect. 3.3), what matters here is the
analytical advantage allowed for by a distinction between cohesion and
coherence.
6. This is not to deny McHale’s compelling argument that poetic works
such as Homeric epic and Pushkin’s Onegin ‘have continuously served as
touchstones of narrative theory’ (2009: 11).
7. After these lines, Eliot breaks the impersonality thus conveyed by insert-
ing an imperative clause functioning as an invocation (‘Sweet Thames,
run softly, till I end my song’). In this instance, impersonality is super-
seded by a search for tonal and attitudinal variation within the text.
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Part II
Analysing Poetic Difficulty
5
Organisms of Difficulty: The Data
No matter how plausible or sophisticated, a model has no reason to

exist unless it accounts for real data more compellingly than previous
ones. The data considered here are of two kinds: primary data, that is,
the corpus of the poems themselves, introduced in Sect. 5.1; and sec-
ondary data, that is, common readers’ responses to such poems elicited
by the empirical tests introduced in Sect. 5.2.
Selection (and elicitation) of data must be handled cautiously, for
the researcher may fall prey to confirmation bias whereby the data are
forced into the model rather than acting as a test bed for the model
itself, as Popper’s principle of falsification would have it. This all too
often happens when literary extracts are chosen to illustrate a theory
but disconfirming evidence is tellingly omitted. Bäckström (2010),
for instance, points out that Riffaterre’s semiotic model is unable to
deal with syntactically ill-formed poems à la Cummings or with con-
crete poetry drawing on visual asemantic elements, on the grounds that
‘his method of analysis demands a semantic content and a syntax that
can be decoded’ (2010: 929). A way to minimise this bias is to aim at

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1_5
170
D. Castiglione
intersubjectivity, relying on other critics’ intuitions to select relevant

authors and poems. On the readerly side, a similar confirmation bias
manifests in Yaron’s experiments in their attempt to elicit from partici-
pants the sort of response anticipated by the researcher (see Sect. 2.1.3).
One solution here is to make the test formats more open-ended, accept-
ing the risk of getting unwieldy data that might be inconsistent with
one’s initial hypotheses.
5.1 Selecting Primary Data: The Corpus

of Poems
5.1.1 Temporal Boundaries
Difficulty as defined in Chapter 3 is regarded as a typically

twentieth-century phenomenon and is thus primarily associated with
modernist, late modernist and postmodernist poetry. Indeed, Bernstein
locates in the year 1912 ‘one of the best-known epidemics of difficult
poetry’ (2011: 3). Previous poetic modes ranging from seventeenth-
century Metaphysical poetry to nineteenth-century symbolism seem
to better befit obscurity instead (see Sect. 2.2.8). This does not imply
that pre-modernist poems should show no sign of difficulty, or that
obscurity should not occur in modernist and postmodernist poems.
But the fact remains that the rise of difficulty as a modern critical con-
cept has mainly developed out of the analysis of modernist texts. Also
extrinsically, the very notion of difficulty has been argued to undergo
an unprecedented social and aesthetic shift from the birth of modern-
ism onwards (Eliot 1999; Adams 1991; Diepeveen 2003). Adams’
words cogently illustrate the point: ‘in modernism and postmodern-
ism difficulty has been perceived in new ways that challenge earlier
assumptions of, among other things, the linguistic stability upon which
earlier notions of difficulty had been based’ (Adams 1991: 23). As a
consequence of this, as well as for reasons of critical focus and consist-
ency, the poems to which I apply my model span the last century only
(1914–2003).
5 Organisms of Difficulty: The Data
171
5.1.2 The Poems and the Hypotheses:

An Inductive Approach
Having established the temporal boundaries of the poems under analysis

and outlined the rationale for excluding those written in earlier periods,
one is inevitably confronted by the question of how to make a selection
out of a still immense reservoir of potentially suitable poems. More pre-
cisely, how should the analyst go about identifying a corpus of poems
that is heterogeneous enough as to illustrate difficulty in its various facets
but also small enough to allow for a systematic application of the model?
To answer this question implies, first of all, choosing between a
deductive and an inductive approach. To follow a deductive approach
would imply to select only those poems that fulfil the requirements of
a model beforehand: practically speaking, it would involve using the
given definition of difficulty and the LIDs associated with it as filters
working in a top-down fashion. To follow an inductive approach, by
contrast, would involve choosing poems that have been described as
difficult by other critics or felt such by one’s intuitive, pre-theoretical
understanding of difficulty.
The latter approach will be followed not to shy away from the orig-
inal complexity of the phenomenon. So, my definition of difficulty is
meant to clarify post hoc the multifarious instantiations of difficulty as
inherited from several critical traditions, not certainly to force the phe-
nomenon into the cast of the model. The model, then, has to explain
the raw phenomenon rather than generate a tamed version of it. As is
customary in stylistics, the selection is supported by qualitative evidence
and critical arguments rather than being the outcome of a step-by-step
deterministic procedure.
The authors thus identified are introduced below in chronological
order alongside the poems to be analysed. The poems will be referred to
either by their full title or by identifying phrases such as ‘Stevens’s poem’
or ‘the Howe poem’. The texts of the poems are reported at the start of
each analysis in the next chapters and reproduced in full whenever pos-
sible. The chronological presentation follows the year of birth of each
poet, and it is infringed only in the cases of Betjeman and Strand—the
172
D. Castiglione
last authors to be introduced for reasons that will be revealed later.

While all the poems have been carefully read prior to analysis, many
other equally suitable poems by different authors could have been cho-
sen. Table 5.1 gives an eye-bird view of the corpus.
Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) ‘assaults clarity’ (Quarter
main 1992: 21), so my first Stein example (‘A Box’) comes from this
collection. An extract from the long poem Patriarchal Poetry (1927) is
also analysed for being twice described as ‘difficult’ (Neel 1999: 90, 95).
What is more, its textuality starkly differs from that of ‘A Box’, which
should afford some insights regarding the difficulty strategies enacted
in different phases of Stein’s career. My hypothesis is that by disrupt-
ing basic comprehension processes (integration at phrase to intersenten-
tial level, in ‘A Box’; parsing, and more precisely the construction of full
clauses, in the extract from Patriarchal Poetry ) Stein’s writing runs coun-
ter higher-level operations like theme formulation or the construction
of coherence. As a consequence, her difficulty is a way of resisting the
symbolist tradition of conceptual obscurity warranted by hermeneutic
practices.
Wallace Stevens ‘is hard to understand’ and ‘many find his work
intimidating and “too difficult” to understand’ according to Serio
(2007: 1–2). And Steiner (1978), the reader will remember, illustrated
his tactical difficulty type through one of Stevens’s most celebrated
poems, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’. Following Leggett (2007: 62), who argues
that Stevens’s late collection The Auroras of Autumn (1950) is one of
the apices of the poet’s difficulty, I analyse a poem from this collec-
tion, ‘What We See Is What We Think’. I propose that the convention
of significance, prompted by the generic sentence in the title and the
last line of the poem, is temporarily suspended in the central body of
the poem where a series of apposed phrases depict, via unusual word
combinations, weakly related micro-situation models or figures. The dif-
ficulty of Stevens’s poem thus rests on the disruption or mutability of
representation, making it impossible to derive a unified situation model.
Its obscurity rests instead on the hermeneutic labour it prompts in read-
ers, warranted by the aforementioned generic sentences and by the con-
junctions that—belonging to the logical component of the ideational
metafunction—lead to the construction of a highly structured textbase.
Table 5.1 The corpus of poems: an overview
Author Poem title Hosting collection Year of publica-
tion (1st edition)
G. Stein(1874–1946) A Box Tender Buttons 1914
from Patriarchal Poetry Patriarchal Poetry 1927
W. Stevens (1879–1955) What We See Is What We Think The Auroras of Autumn 1950
E. Pound(1885–1972) from Canto LXXXI The Cantos 1948
E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) What a Proud Dreamhorse No Thanks 1935
H. Crane(1899–1932) At Melville’s Tomb White Buildings 1926
J. Betjeman (1906–1984) Loneliness A Nip in the Air 1974
D. Thomas (1914–1953) When Once the Twilight Locks No Collected Poems 1934–1953 1934
Longer
G. Hill(1932–2016) Stanza 33 Speech! Speech! 2000
M. Strand (1934–2014) The Late Hour The Late Hour 1978
S. Howe(1937–) A Small Swatch Bluish-Green The Midnight 2003
C. Bernstein (1951–) from Safe Methods of Business The Sophist 1987
173
174
D. Castiglione
Ezra Pound is associated with ‘difficulty and experimentalism’ by

Tuma (1998: 47), and an extract from his Cantos exemplifies Steiner’s
contingent difficulty (1978). The Cantos themselves are described as
‘obscure’ and ‘impenetrable’ by Mellors (2005: 8, 33) and as ‘erratic,
difficult, and certainly complex’ by Nadel (2007: 63). As the termino-
logical oscillation shows, Pound is an ideal test case to probe the dif-
ference between, and uneasy cohabitation of, difficulty and obscurity.
Carne-Ross’s seemingly paradoxical but far from gratuitous claim that
‘what is difficult about Pound’s poetry is its “simplicity”’ (Carne-Ross
1979; cited in Perloff 1985: 9) makes the picture even more muddled or
interesting—depending on one’s attitude.
To explore these conflicting claims, I have decided not to choose
the passage already examined by Steiner, as it merely illustrates prob-
lems of lexical access (decoding) cued by full proper nouns. Instead,
I have chosen an extract from Canto LXXXI as a more holistic instantia-
tion of the critical tensions outlined above. This extract combines lexical
and syntactic simplicity with low coherence resulting from the juxta-
position of different voices—more precisely, a dialogue-like succession
of incongruous statements by various speakers. My proposal, backed
up by empirically elicited reader-response data, is that Pound’s extract
is not obscure as it does not elicit a theme but is still difficult because
it undermines the construction of a situation model of a verbal rather
than visual nature. Its difficulty lies in integration (inferencing) and not
in construction (parsing–decoding) as its individual clauses are linguisti-
cally simple. This explanation, in turn, accounts for the apparently con-
flicting views expressed by critics.
E. E. Cummings’s pervasive foregrounding of external deviations
have made him a favourite of stylisticians. For instance, Fowler analy-
ses his ‘nonsense strings’ (Fowler and Bateson 1971: 239–246), Cureton
(1979) his deviant morphology, Gómez-Jiménez (2015) his spelling
foregrounding, while Leech (1969: 48) and Burke (2007: 149–150)
his semantic deviations. I analyse ‘What a Proud Dreamhorse’ as this
poem has been tested by Yaron (2003) and has thus contributed to
her definition of the difficult poem. Among other reading disrup-
tions, Cummings’s poem confronts the reader with parsing problems
that, however, compared to those posed by Stein’s Patriarchal Poetry,
175
never threaten the underlying clausal template of the lines, which is

still retraceable. Decoding is consequently delayed by parsing but not
impeded by it. Based on this and additional arguments derived from
the model, I downsize Yaron’s overstating of Cummings’s difficulty and,
indirectly, the relevance and coverage of her definition.
Hart Crane is discussed in relation to difficulty by Grossman
(2007) and Diepeveen, who reports an opinion of a critic of the time,
Mark van Doren, on his difficulty (2003: 108). I analyse ‘At Melville’s
Tomb’, singled out by Perloff (1991: 186) as a precursor of Ashbery’s
and Bernstein’s postmodernist innovations. The interest of this poem
also lies in the fact that Crane wrote a letter to poetry editor Harriet
Monroe to illustrate her his choices and general conception of poetry,
while conceding that his own poem ‘may well be elliptical and actually
obscure’ (Crane 1997). This letter offers then valuable insights on the
relationship between difficulty and intentionality (see also Sect. 2.2.3).
In Crane’s poem, it is not basic processes that are thwarted but, some-
how like in Stevens, the integration of experiential elements whose weak
linkages (e.g. through deviant noun–verb collocation) depend on bridg-
ing inferences of a hermeneutic kind—an account which befits obscu-
rity better than difficulty.
As Diepeveen attests (2003: 192), Dylan Thomas was ‘chastised for
his obscurity’ by his reviewers. One of his poems featuring ‘extreme
obscurity’ according to Yaron (2010) is ‘When Once the Twilight Locks
No Longer’. Analysing this poem, I show that what is countered to a
degree is the making of bridging inferences at the integration level of
comprehension, not the more fundamental processes of parsing and
decoding. Thomas’s poem does not qualify as entirely obscure either, it
is argued, as it can be assigned a theme through its reliance on cultural
schemas (e.g. Biblical and folk mythology) that most people are (or bet-
ter, used to be) acquainted with.
Geoffrey Hill’s difficulty is such a deeply rooted critical assumption
that the Norton Anthology of English Literature (2000: 2717) features
the word in the preface to his work. A reviewer of his 2000 collection
Speech! Speech! likewise conveys the experience of reading Hill through
the metaphorical phrase ‘the spectre of Difficulty’ (Baker 2002: 34).
My chosen text, Stanza 33, comes from this collection. Stanza 33 is
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D. Castiglione
characterised by register mixing and a critical reuse of everyday lan-

guage, whereby the heteroglossia of contemporary society embeds the
poetic persona’s unstable self. Although I could have chosen the earlier
‘Of Commerce and Society’ analysed by Toolan (1993), I wanted to
see whether similar LIDs underpin Hill’s more recent production, also
considering the poet’s shift ‘from conservatism to Modernism’ over ‘the
course of a career’ (Adamson 1999: 678).
My main argument is that Hill’s stanza indexes significance—thereby
prompting theme formulation—by formally imitating a dramatic
monologue template and by using a high number of abstract words. At
the same time, the hermeneutic labour of theme formulation is made
tentative by the fact that the dramatic monologue is bereft of its core
function of representing an individual’s consciousness: it stages, as it
were, the rehearsal of a debased social reality rather than a putatively
authentic expression of the self. This undermining of the monologue
form rests on disruptive features such as register mixing and echoic
irony. But Stanza 33 is also difficult in that it impairs the construction
of a unified diegetic situation model (very much like Pound’s extract
in this regard), and in that it forces to effortful bottom-up processing
through its Latinate vocabulary and marked word order structure (very
much unlike Pound’s extract in this regard).
Susan Howe is the subject of an essay by Quartermain where the
challenge posed by her texts is evident (1992: 182–194). Examining the
1990 collection The Europe of Trusts, McHale (2004: 204–249) stresses
Howe’s ‘fixation on orthography’ (231), her erasure of textual bound-
aries and misquotations of canonical authors like Shakespeare and
Spenser. Since Quartermain and McHale have already made percep-
tive comments on Howe’s style, I focus on a poem from a more recent
collection to explore the evolution of her writing under the angle of
difficulty.1 The poem, ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’ poses exceptional
parsing hurdles due to its blurring of constituency boundaries: not
only are phrases nested in each other and the punctuation renounced
throughout, but the internal structure of each phrase is itself undeter-
mined, as lexical words can be assigned to two adjacent phrases or else
to none of them.
177
By radically deautomatising parsing, Howe’s poem qualifies well

for difficulty as defined in Sect. 3.1. Reader-response data support this
hypothesis in showing that the loosening of syntactic structures slows
down readers more than for all the other poems tested. By frustrating
all attempts to assign stable syntagmatic structure and thus hierarchi-
cal order onto the poem, Howe’s poem is also likely to spontaneously
prompt a delinearised reading that Yaron describes instead as a con-
scious strategy to come to terms with difficult poems (2002: 138). The
reader is then left with a diffuse sense of ‘aboutness’ that hinges on the
aggregation of semantically associated but syntactically standalone words.
My overview of difficult poets and poems ends with Charles
Bernstein, whose wordplay is often brought ‘almost to the point of
unintelligibility’ (Perloff 1991: 216). The object of my analysis will be
the first stanza of ‘Safe Methods of Business’, already discussed at some
length by Perloff. The aim is not only that of expanding the critic’s read-
ing but also of accommodating her insights into my stylistic model.
My key argument is that the blatantly exposed semantic incongruity
between the stanza’s statements creates an overall effect of comic non-
sensicality rather than of obscurity, the perception of which is instead
confined to specific textual locations at clausal level.
In obscurity, the semantic content of each clause or clause fragment
is felt to be weakly, even mysteriously related to that of the co-text, so as
to warrant hermeneutic labour. Psychologically and literarily, this labour
is embodied in bridging and elaborative inferences that obey the con-
vention of significance. Importantly, when hermeneutic labour takes the
direction of exegesis, a poetic persona is projected in the poem, which is
thereby read as if it were an (oblique, oracular) utterance by a speaker.
By contrast, nonsense combines the lack of cohesion typical of obscure
poems with certain stylistic devices (e.g. hyperbole, register mixing)
that warn the reader against the projection of a poetic persona and,
therefore, against exegesis and significance. Bernstein’s stanza repeat-
edly crosses such tenuous boundary between obscurity and nonsense,
which sheds light on the meaningfulness–meaninglessness dilemma (see
Sect. 2.2.6). Its difficulty, or expenditure of reading energy at syntag-
matic level, depends not only on its linguistic choices at clausal level,
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D. Castiglione
but also on the readerly investment put in it: the more obscure the
poem is deemed, the more difficult it will be felt; the more nonsensical
it is deemed, the less difficult it will be felt, given that shallow process-
ing is counterintuitively encouraged at the expense of deep processing.
All the poems introduced so far can be assigned some level of diffi-
culty or obscurity at pre-theoretical level, which in most cases the pro-
posed model confirms and refines. This means that these concepts have
been characterised positively, looking at the textually embodied presence
of the phenomena they designate. But since difficulty is a pole along
a continuum, it becomes instructive to look at the opposite pole and
so take into account poems that respond negatively to the definition.
These are poems that cannot be reasonably ascribed difficulty, obscurity
or nonsense and instead tend to be positively characterised as accessible,
simple, easy or relatable. They will serve as a baseline or control texts
against which to measure difficulty—just like the idea of cold is insepa-
rable from the idea of heat.
Mark Strand’s ‘The Late Hour’ has been used by Yaron (2002) as a
typical example of accessible poem. During a recalling task, she found
that this poem consistently elicited much less fragmentary protocols
than Cummings’s ‘What a Proud Dreamhorse’. She takes this as a sign
that readers comprehended Strand’s poem more fully than Cummings’s.
However, either for want of space or due to her one-sidedly reception-
oriented agenda, Yaron overlooks the textual factors that arguably
produced the observed readerly behaviour (see Sect. 2.1.3). I remedy this
gap by showing that Yaron’s reader-response data depend on an aggregate
of features that are literally a negative of those found in difficult poems.
Contrary to Pound’s extract, for instance, Strand’s poem is relatable
in that its high level of empathetic recognisability (Stockwell 2009:
25) is a function of centrally archetypal topics (e.g. love, loss, alluded
death) enacted by generic characters (a man and a woman) who are
constantly the focus of a third-person narrator. Furthermore, segmen-
tation obeys the syntax of the poem, which is mainly paratactic, thus
never threatening parsing and integration; likewise, its core vocab-
ulary poses no problems for decoding. Strand’s poem is not obscure
either, because the convention of significance is clearly encoded in the
‘suffering lover’ schema promptly leading to theme formulation.
179
Finally, John Betjeman was a popular British poet and the textual-
ity of his poems is at least partly responsible for this. ‘Loneliness’, from
Betjeman’s last collection A Nip in the Air (1974), makes its topic univo-
cally explicit already from the title. The poem’s reliance on frequent end-
stopped lines allows to evenly spread information distribution across
the text; its end-rhymes and traditional verse structure flag its literari-
ness from the start, thus activating Zwaan’s control system for literary
reading and Hanauer’s text categorisation component (see Sect. 3.5). In
addition, its prototypically lyric elements (e.g. ‘leaves’, ‘twigs’, ‘finches’,
‘song’) depict a unified and relatable situation model, while the feel-
ings the poem revolves around (e.g. ‘loneliness’, ‘joy’, ‘grief ’) comply, at
least nominally, with the convention of significance. All these elements
ensure that none of the cognitive processes of construction and inte-
gration and none of the higher inferential processes expected of poetry,
such as theme formulation, are left unfulfilled.
The corpus thus overviewed consists of eleven authors and twelve
poems, ten of which illustrate difficulty. The corpus is admittedly small,
but one has to bear in mind the qualitative nature of the analyses that
do not easily lend themselves to software-processed corpus analysis.
Indeed, many of LIDS introduced in the previous chapter are highly
context-sensitive, need to be assessed on a case-by-case basis and there-
fore resist quantification. On somewhat similar grounds, Adamson
argues that quantitative methods tend to obscure ‘the contribution of
any individual feature’ (1999: 592). Albeit small, the corpus can still be
regarded as a representative sample due to the intersubjective nature of
the selection and the stylistic variety of the poems. The end point of the
analyses will be a taxonomy of difficulty that is generalisable and testa-
ble beyond the temporal and geographical boundaries imposed here.
5.1.3 Notes on Intersubjectivity, Systematic

vs. Selective Analyses
The intersubjectivity of the corpus is worth some more clarification, as

this methodological aspect sets this work apart from all those reviewed
in Chapter 2. Except for Diepeveen—who however does not turn
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D. Castiglione
intersubjectivity into a method—scholars so far have selected difficult

poems by relying on their subjective judgment only. No matter how
shrewd or well-read the individual critic, her commentary is inevitably
exposed to personal idiosyncrasies or aesthetic inclinations that will turn
a public phenomenon into a subjective experience. One may even argue
that a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for a phenomenon
to exist as such precisely lies in its having an intersubjective basis. That
boiling water scalds us is a fact independently verifiable by all of us; the
commonality of our response is similar to the one that the model tries
to account for when the stimulus is difficult poems. That is why, in line
with Hanauer’s production component (see Sect. 3.5), I have treated
critical remarks as verbalisations of responses grounded in common
cognitive mechanisms. Intersubjectivity is then a bulwark both against
the celebrated individualism of literary studies and against the much-
misunderstood notion of objectivity borrowed from the hard sciences.
So far, I have emphasised the representativeness of the corpus despite
its small size. But even twelve poems are still too many to present the
reader with twelve corresponding fully-fledged analyses, each of which
could easily span an entire chapter if the requirement of systematicity
was fully met. As a consequence, only five of them are subjected to such
an exhaustive analysis complemented by original reader-response data
(see Sect. 5.2). The remaining seven are analysed more selectively, focus-
ing on the most prominent dimensions of difficulty only.
The five poems analysed in full are Stevens’s, Pound’s, Hill’s, Howe’s
and Strand’s. This selection rests on a variety of considerations rather
than on clear-cut criteria. The first requirement is that one of the poems
functions, by virtue of its accessibility, as a baseline against which to
assess the difficulty of the other poems. This function is performed
by Strand’s ‘The Late Hour’, which is less obviously traditional than
Betjeman’s ‘Loneliness’ and has the advantage of intersubjective testing
thanks to Yaron’s 2002 study. The second requirement is that preference
for these in-depth analyses should be given to those authors who have
not as yet extensively dealt with by stylisticians. T. S. Eliot (Sell 1993;
Jeffries 1993), E. E. Cummings (Leech 1969; Fowler 1971; Cureton
1979; Burke 2007; Tartakovsky 2009; Gómez-Jiménez 2015) and
Dylan Thomas (Nowottny 1962; Leech 1969; Päivärinta 2014) have
been excluded on these grounds.2
181
The third and last requirement is that authors from both the mod-
ernist (writing from 1910 to 1950) and the postmodernist wave (writ-
ing from 1960 to present) are represented. Stevens and Pound represent
the modernist wave; Hill and Howe the postmodernist wave; while
Strand a reaction both against a dawning postmodernism and a recently
declined ‘long’ modernism extending until the 50s (see Mellors 2005).
My decision to represent high modernism through Stevens and Pound
lies in the fact that these two authors have been argued to embody two
opposite trends of modernism—the expressionist and the constructivist,
respectively (Perloff 1985: 22). As the critic writes, ‘Stevens’s rage for
order, his need to make analogies […] is at odds with Pound’s deploy-
ment of metonymic linkages, his creation of Cubist surfaces or aerial
maps where images jostle one another’ (Perloff 1985: 17). This differ-
ence in techniques was therefore expected to result in important stylistic
and processing consequences. Such a difference is anxiously voiced by
Stevens himself in a dismissive remark on Pound and Eliot: ‘[I] have
purposely held off from reading highly mannered people like Eliot and
Pound so that I should not absorb anything, even unconsciously’ (let-
ter to the poet Richard Eberhart, cited in Altieri 1984: 7). In different
ways, Hill and Howe are distinguished representatives of the postmod-
ernist wave. First, they both feature in McHale’s 2004 monograph on
postmodernist long poems. Second, these poets represent both sides of
the Atlantic, they were born in the 30s and are undergoing a process of
canonisation which in the case of Hill seems already accomplished.
Having introduced the poets and their texts, established the criteria
for their selection and outlined text-specific reading hypotheses, I now
proceed to consider the elicitation of secondary data, that is, the read-
erly responses through which poetic difficulty manifest in the world.
5.2 Eliciting Secondary Data the Empirical

Tests and Readers’ Background
The main assumption behind the empirical tests is that response data,
however dependent on readers’ cultural environment, attitude, literary
competence and so on, will always bear the mark of the poems being
182
D. Castiglione
tested. Each textual configuration, describable in terms of different

aggregates of LIDs, will give rise to a range of more and less probable
RIDs. These can be elicited through specifically designed tests in the
tradition of the studies reviewed in Sect. 4.1 and in accordance with
the scientific spirit of the work (see Sect. 3.2). The question, in short,
is to find out ‘how readers feel when confronted with particular stylistic
devices’ (Hakemulder and van Peer 2015: 190). This section gives an
overview of such tests; the data elicited from them will complement the
stylistic analyses in the chapters that will follow.
Of the six RIDs introduced in the previous chapter, I was interested
to explore the following: diminished access to the world of the poem
(1); diminished appreciation (2); increase of reading time (3); degree of
intersubjective agreement regarding the perception of difficulty (4). (1)
is of great importance both theoretically and intuitively. Theoretically,
it is related with the reader’s inability to construct a situation model
(i.e. Yaron’s definition of difficulty); intuitively, it may explain several
key effects associated with difficulty (and obscurity), for instance con-
fusion and closure. (3) is a consistent finding across three studies, not
to mention its pedagogical implications (e.g. one may want to learn to
gain aesthetic pleasure from difficulty without undermining one’s self-
worth). (4) is also central to the definition of difficulty as it emphasises
the process of reading and the feeling of resistance thus experienced.
Moreover, although Hanauer (1998) has shown that poetry is read
more slowly than encyclopaedic items, he did not comment on the
much greater within-genre processing variability found for poetic
extracts (1.84–3.58s/word versus 1.31–1.58s/word). Such variability, I
propose, is a function of the creativity-driven, less codified texture of
literary texts as opposed to expository ones. It poses some fine-grained
questions in the area of literary processing that only very recently have
started to be addressed (see Castiglione 2017, from which the data
shedding light on this RID are taken). Finally, the importance of (4)
is epistemological: if a literary phenomenon can be shown to be inter-
subjective in its perception, the science-friendly approach taken in the
current work will be bolstered in retrospect. The first study (Study 1
henceforth) explores RIDs (1), (2) and (4); the second (Study 2 hence-
forth) explores RID (3) and a different facet of RID (4).
183
5.2.1 Study 1: Comprehension (Accessibility

and Interpretability)
This study explores the comprehension of the five poems subjected to

an extended analysis (Stevens’s, Pound’s, Hill’s, Howe’s and Strand’s; see
Sect. 5.1.2). The poems were printed in a stapled booklet, each on a sep-
arate A4 sheet. The names of the authors and years of composition were
omitted to prevent possible preconceptions from affecting the responses.
Ten participants (second-year undergraduate students, all native speakers
of English, nine females, one male; mean age = 19.6 years; standard devi-
ation (SD) = 0.7 years) read the poems and then answered the questions
reported below (Fig. 5.1).
The questionnaire is minimal so as to leave the participants as much
freedom as possible in approaching the poems. This strategy follows
that of Zyngier et al. (2007), who also rely on comparably simple ques-
tions to explore the perception and evaluation of complexity in litera-
ture (e.g. ‘Is it an example of good literature?’ or ‘Did you enjoy it?’; see
Sect. 4.1). The questions are phrased as to indirectly probe RIDs (1) and
(2) without featuring the word ‘difficult’ or related ones. There are two
reasons for this choice. The first is that such a direct line of questioning
would have disclosed the researcher’s aims to the participants, thus bias-
ing their responses. The second reason concerns the unease caused by
such term as evidenced in a production task conducted previously and
with different participants. Asked to describe a few poems then excluded
Fig. 5.1 The pencil-and-paper questionnaire for the comprehension task

184
D. Castiglione
from the corpus analysed, readers avoided this adjective preferring less
negatively connoted alternatives (e.g. ‘confusing’, ‘cryptic’, ‘mysterious’).
Compared to think-aloud protocols in which participants are asked
‘to verbalize only the thoughts that enter their attention while still in
the respondent’s short-term memory’ (Dörnyei 2007: 148), the written
reports elicited by the pencil-and-paper questionnaire are likely to spur a
more mediated reading experience. A potential limitation of this format
is that it is sensitive to the participants’ verbal ability to articulate their
understanding in writing, thus providing only an indirect measure of
their comprehension (Hansson 1991: 111). Still, behavioural responses of
some sort are still needed to measure comprehension—be it verbal articu-
lation (spoken or written) or other tasks (e.g. ranking or assigning scores).
More cogently, it is not the variability of individual comprehension skills
which is explored, but the extent to which each poem is understood on
average. This ensures that individual differences are levelled out. As a con-
sequence, this study has a within-subject component (different items are
read by the same participant) but focuses on between-subject data (the
average or typical response to each item).
In terms of procedure, the study was conducted on a one-to-one
basis in a quiet room, with the researcher sitting in a corner as unobtru-
sively as possible. Before starting the comprehension task, participants
were generically told that their responses would contribute to a research
focusing on poetry and comprehension. ‘Understanding a poem’ was
broadly defined as sense-making, implying claims about the content,
theme, situation or message of the poem. Just as ‘difficult’ and related
terms did not appear in the questionnaire, they were also avoided dur-
ing the instructions. The participants were also reassured that their
answers would have had no influence on their academic assessment. At
this point, they were given the booklet and were instructed to read all
the poems once. Next, they engaged in the comprehension task elicited
by the questionnaire reproduced in the previous section. Based on the
performance of a pilot subject, they were allocated one hour to com-
plete the task. The answers were written in the blank space below each
poem, and the participants were allowed to return to the poems as
frequently as needed. Once they had finished, they handed the ques-
tionnaire back and completed a personal questionnaire concerning
185
their reading habits (see Sect. 5.2.3). Finally, if they wished, they could
inquire about the authorship of the poems.
5.2.2 Study 2: Online Processing (Readability)
A key psycholinguistics assumption is that ‘linguistic complex-

ity increases processing time and perhaps processing difficulty’
(Smith 1988: 248). Building on this, Study 2 explores the temporal,
online dimension of difficulty through a self-paced reading task (see
Castiglione 2017 for a full presentation of the study). In doing so, it
addresses Yaron’s main criticism towards reading time studies, that is,
their neglect of full texts (2002: 134). As with Study 1, the analysis of
the reading times was done per item (i.e. poems) rather than per par-
ticipant, as the interest was in the average response to each poem rather
than in the variability of readerly skills. A study partly comparable to
this is Miall and Kuiken (1994), who investigating the processing of
some literary narrative excerpts found that ‘slightly different compo-
nents of foregrounding were predictive of reading times’ (1994: 403).
Regrettably, only once and fleetingly do they comment on the relation-
ship between processing times and stylistic differences (1994: 403).
Twelve participants (first-year undergraduates, all native speakers of
English, all female; mean age = 18.2 years; SD = 0.4 years) took part
in this study. Their reading habits and literary competence have been
assessed through a personal questionnaire (see Sect. 5.2.3).
The poems used are the same as in Study 1 except for the addition
of a narrative extract from the opening of J. G. Ballard’s sci-fi novel The
Drowned World (1962). This extract has been chosen as a better con-
trol text for difficulty compared to Strand’s poem, on the grounds that
‘narrative passages […] are easier to read than passages in the descrip-
tive and expository genres’ (Graesser et al. 1980: 138). As poetry is read
slower than an expository genre such as encyclopaedic items (Hanauer
1998), it must follow that difficult poems are read much more slowly
than narrative literary texts. In this study, I am interested in the
bottom-up processing of literary language rather than in top-down pro-
cessing strategies, so I controlled for the effects of genre classifications
on reading times (Zwaan 1993; Carminati et al. 2006) by presenting
186
D. Castiglione
Ballard’s extract as a poem through added lineation. In this way,

I tried to predispose participants to mistake it for a narrative poem.
Such induced genre misclassification is aided by Ballard’s style, which
here draws on poetic devices such as similes, lexical foregrounding and
on a rather elaborate use of attributive adjectives (the extract is reported
in the next chapter, Sect. 6.1.3).
The test was carried out using E-prime software. The test type is a
self-paced reading task: participants control the reading speed by press-
ing the space bar button on the keyboard to move from one line to the
next one. In the meanwhile, the programme records in milliseconds the
time elapsed between each pressing of the button. The technical name
of the test (‘window-moving accumulating test task’) implies that pre-
viously read lines remain on the screen after pressing the button. This
choice suits difficult poems, which intuitively encourage readers to
return to passages they found problematic in order to retrace coherence.
The text presentation order was randomised to eschew order effects like
fatigue or improved performance through exposure to the task (van Peer
et al. 2012: 130). Each poem appeared once only, and readers could
not return to it once they proceeded to the next one. This ensured that
reading times were recorded for first readings only, as the focus is on
the impact of difficulty rather than on its overcoming. Sessions took
place on a one-to-one basis in the psycholinguistics laboratory at the
University of Nottingham. Each participant was asked to sit in front of
a computer screen and to open the file of the experiment. At this point,
they read the instructions on the screen, reported in Fig. 5.2.
•
•
•
Fig. 5.2 On-screen instructions for the reading task

187
Bearing in mind the influence of reading modes on reading times

(Zwaan 1993), the penultimate point encouraged a leisure mode of
reading. Although it may sound odd that an instruction should ask
readers to behave naturally, the omission of such instruction would have
resulted in non-comparable response data (e.g. some participants trying
to analyse a poem and others skimming through it). There is no prob-
lem-free approach in empirical studies, especially with complex literary
texts rather than constructed examples. The general rule is therefore to
do ‘the next best thing’ (van Peer et al. 2012: 135). The task was com-
pleted in five to ten minutes. Before leaving, the participant received the
personal questionnaire reproduced in Fig. 5.4 in the next section. Once
this was completed too, it was handed back and the participant could
leave the room (Fig. 5.2).
5.2.3 The Readers’ Background
The response data elicited by the poetry comprehension questionnaire

(Fig. 5.1) and the self-paced reading task (Fig. 5.2) can be interpreted
accurately only after the participants’ cultural background has been
taken into account. This has been done through two personal question-
naires, one for each study. I will introduce them in chronological order,
only then to highlight what is shared across the two samples. The ques-
tionnaire used in Study 1 is reported in Fig. 5.3.
Data relative to Q1–3 have already been given in the general intro-
duction to each study, so will not be repeated. The questionnaire
Fig. 5.3 The personal questionnaire (Study 1)

188
D. Castiglione
revealed that none of the participants knew any of the five poems in
advance (Q4); that on average they read three poetry collections per
year (Q5); and that in six out of ten cases these included twentieth-
century collections (Q6), always written in English and therefore broadly
within the Anglo-American tradition considered here (Q7). When
asked about their reading preferences (Q8), however, no one mentioned
poetry. By contrast, novels were mentioned as many as seven times.
Q9 will not be discussed as answers to this request were scant and not
particularly illuminating.
The inclusion of Q6 warrants some theoretical justification, based as
it is on the well-known argument that poetry underwent major changes
in the twentieth century. These changes presuppose that the reader, in
order to appreciate much of the poetry written in the twentieth century,
needs to have some awareness of, and familiarity with, a new set of prac-
tices and their theoretical underpinnings—from free verse to register
mixing, from the undermining of the lyric I to the use of pastiche and
parody (e.g. Perloff 1991; Semino 2002; McHale 2004).
The personal questionnaire for the second study is reported in
Fig. 5.4 and introduces some improvements to be discussed shortly.
Most questions from the previous questionnaire have been retained
(i.e. Q1–3, 5, 8 and 10); a few have been replaced. In particular, the
dimension of reading for one’s own pleasure has been emphasised in
Q5–7 as answers to the first questionnaire evidenced that poetry was
more often than not read as part of a module’s requirement.
In stressing leisure reading, it was assumed that if readers typically
engaged with poetry on their own initiative, then longer reading times
might more likely indicate genuine investment rather than struggle. The
interpretive ambivalence of this behavioural measure is well expressed
by Wallot and colleagues: ‘a certain level of reading speed can be reflec-
tive of both a time investment (careful reading, rereading, etc.) and
severely compromised reading activity (problems with decoding, pro-
longed but unresolved uncertainty, etc.)’ (2014: 1751). The other main
addition is the Author Recognition Test (Q4), featuring a list of poets,
189
Fig. 5.4 The personal questionnaire (Study 2)

190
D. Castiglione
other intellectuals and made up names. Useful to measure print expo-

sure (van Peer et al. 2012: 221), its purpose was to check whether the
participants had heard of some of the authors of the texts they were
about to read. While print exposure does not provide a direct measure
of literary competence, it still is one of its preconditions.
Like for the first questionnaire, Q1–2 will not be discussed as basic
information on the participants was given in the overview of both
studies. From the responses to the other questions, it emerged that
none of the participants knew any of the texts used in the study (Q3).
On average, participants identified four out of the twelve poets in the
Author Recognition Test (Q4). The top scorers were canonical authors
included in the syllabus (e.g. Donne, Keats, Eliot, Pound) or popular
poets writing in the second half of the twentieth century (e.g. Larkin
and Heaney). Except for Pound, identified by twelve participants,
the authors whose poems are used in the study were little if not com-
pletely unknown: Stevens and Strand were identified twice in total,
Hill only once, Howe never. In terms of time devoted to leisure reading
(Q5), the majority (88%) reports reading between 30 mins. and two
hours per day.
A comparison between poetry and novels (Q6 and Q7) puts in evi-
dence the much greater popularity of the latter genre. The emphasis on
leisure reading makes the gap between the two genres even more per-
spicuous than it was for the questionnaire in Study 1: almost half the
participants (42%) read more than ten novels per year, which was never
the case for poetry (0%); all the participants read at least one to three
novels per year, but only one-third (33%) read the same amount of
poetry collections over the same time span; finally, half the participants
did not read poetry collections at all. The near totality of those who
read some poetry (93%) read at least some twentieth-century poetry
collections (Q8); poetry from this time period is the favourite choice
for half of them (50%), a result more or less in line with that from the
questionnaire in Study 1. Finally, answers to Q10—just like for Q9 in
the previous questionnaire—are so scant and short that it would make
little sense to discuss them.
191
What these answers overall highlight is that even fairly well-read par-
ticipants by and large favour fiction over poetry. This piece of evidence
chimes well with the claim that ‘the superstructure that people are most
familiar with and handle most easily is the narrative schema’ (van Dijk
and Kintsch 1983: 252). The data also indicate that when they do
engage in poetry, participants tend to favour poetry that is (1) written
in English, possibly due to a widespread monolingualism among native
speakers of English; and (2) published recently, arguably on account
of the high readability and wide press distribution of authors such as
Larkin and Heaney.

This chapter has presented the corpus of poems and the empirical tests
eliciting the reader-response data to be weaved into the analyses in the
following chapters. In terms of test design, open formats leaving the
reader some degree of freedom have been favoured over closed ones.
This decision stems from my dissatisfaction with previous experimental
attempts (i.e., Yaron 2002, 2003) as well as from the consideration that
exploratory studies are the best option for phenomena that have received
little empirical attention (van Peer et al. 2012: 53). In terms of corpus
construction, intersubjectivity has been advocated to minimise confir-
mation bias while conciliating representativeness and size limitations
for in-depth qualitative analysis. Importantly, model-derived proposals
have been made for each poem concerning its text effects (e.g. obscurity,
nonsense, resistance) and the processing operations underlying them
(e.g., parsing problems, kind of inferences impaired or elicited, theme
formulation and so on). These will guide each of the stylistic analyses,
partitioned according to three overarching cognitive dimensions: acces-
sibility, related to ideational and interpersonal understanding (e.g. the
ability to recall, summarise, empathise with or picture the content of a
text); readability, related to processing ease along the syntagmatic axis
(the textual metafunction); and interpretability, related to the scope the
poem affords for the construction of theme and/or formal symbolism.
192
D. Castiglione
Notes
1. ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’ was first published in Bed Hangings
(2001), where it is accompanied by an illustration by Susan Bee. Howe
herself however deems the standalone version in The Midnight (2003)
the official one (personal communication), which is why I refer to this
later collection.
2. Wallace Stevens is the exception to this general orientation, having been
granted attention in stylistics by Keyser (1980 [1976]), Dillon (1978),
and Butt (2007). In this case, Perloff’s argument on the polarity between
Pound and Stevens (Perloff 1985), reviewed in this section, persuaded
me to include Stevens in my corpus.
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6
Processing Baseline: The Easy Poem
The shared quality of difficult poems is, by definition, their being

neither easy (i.e. enjoying high readability) nor accessible in basic,
non-interpretive terms (i.e. allowing a top-down construction of the
situation model via schema activation). So before charting the variety
of the population of difficult poems, it is necessary to consider some
specimens of poetic easiness. Accordingly, the current chapter pro-
poses a baseline of comprehensibility and readability for the poetic
genre by applying the model to poems that are easy by empirical evi-
dence (Strand’s ‘The Late Hour’) or personal judgment (Betjeman’s
‘Loneliness’). Strand’s poem will be also compared to a narrative fic-
tional extract by Ballard to see whether easy poems, however accessi-
ble, still require more cognitive effort than the incipit of a popular sci-fi
novel. New empirical data complement the analysis of Strand’s poem,
offering an in-depth qualitative understanding of how lay readers deal
with these kinds of poem.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1_6
198
D. Castiglione
6.1 Establishing the Category: Mark Strand’s

‘The Late Hour’
Strand must have thought highly of ‘The Late Hour’, for the 1978 col-
lection hosting this poem takes the same title. And indeed Yaron’s 2002
study indirectly proved its resonance in common readers by putting into
relation their assimilation of the poem with their tendency to paraphrase
its content in a recall task. Yaron remains however silent on why such
level of assimilation occurs in the first place and how it is anchored tex-
tually. Few would indeed deny the readability and accessibility of ‘The
Late Hour’, and the six opening lines will suffice to prove the point:
The Late Hour
1 A man walks towards town,

2 a slack breeze smelling of earth
3 and the raw green of trees blows at his back.
4 He drags the weight of his passion as if nothing were over,
5 as if the woman, now curled in bed beside her lover,
6 still cared for him.
On the face of it, the poem explores the psychological and existential
aftermath of losing a loved person in circumstances that are left implicit
throughout. The suffering of the male character, clearly inferable from
l. 4 (‘he drags the weight of his passion’), finds no comfort in the nat-
ural and cosmic elements of the poem (‘Again the late hour, the moon
and stars’, ll. 17–18, or ‘the luminous wind of morning that comes
before the sun’, l. 19). This is a motif echoing several other Strand
poems, where nature is characterised ‘as wholly apart from human expe-
rience’ (Brennan 2012: 210). Strand’s rejection of ‘Wordsworth’s faith
in the reciprocity between the human mind and nature’ (2012: 210)
still betrays the Romantic roots of his work, an aspect which may give
rise to a feeling of familiarity on a first reading. But how are we to tech-
nically explain the perceivable ‘flow’ of this poem’s language, the immer-
sive experience it affords?
6 Processing Baseline: The Easy Poem
199
Let us first cursorily apply the model. Mapping the whole of

‘The Late Hour’ against the LIDs, one realises that there are no
instances of orthographic, graphological or morphological deviation.
There is no phonological foregrounding either: adjacent stresses are
found occasionally and in pairs (e.g. a man walks, l. 1; a slack breeze, l.
2; still cared, l. 6) rather than frequently and in longer sequences; punc-
tuation is neither dense nor misplaced and alliteration never feels intru-
sive (with the possible exception of towards town, l.1); core vocabulary
is employed throughout (with the possible exception of feckless, l. 21)
with a neat prevalence of concrete over abstract nouns; proper nouns are
avoided while person and spatial deixis are used consistently; there are
no incongruous or contradictory collocations; however novel, the gen-
itive metaphors employed (i.e. scars of light, l. 7, and wounds of night,
l. 18) do not fulfil the requirements for metaphor difficulty outlined in
Sect. 4.2.6.3; the syntax is neither ambiguous nor complex, neither ill-
formed nor phrase-based, and seldom at odds with segmentation; the
amount of repetition is functional to coherence and waters down the
informativity of the text; last but not least, there is an explicit narra-
tive thread unfolding prototypically central human relationships. The
only LID in ‘The Late Hour’ is negation (nothing, l. 4; no difference,
l. 10; without sound, l. 18, without warning, l. 20, feckless, l. 21). This
has however been deemed a weak LID (unless reinforced by double
negation), conducive to ideational indeterminacy rather than to ide-
ational disruption. It is now time to qualitatively show how the high
accessibility, interpretability and readability of ‘The Late Hour’ are sty-
listically constructed and how they manifest in readers.
6.1.1 Accessibility: Narrativity, Sympathy, Imageability
Response data on ‘The Late Hour’ support the intuition that the poem
is easy to grasp. Respondents gave it very low comprehension scores
(0.8 out of 5, where 0=very easy to understand) and, when asked to
state its topic by answering the question ‘What is the poem about?’,
they largely agreed that it stages the loss of one’s love—a prototypi-
cal motif in lyrical poetry (Hühn 2016: 63–138). Just how univocally
200
D. Castiglione
readers activate this script is shown by the fact that their statements are
mere reformulations of each other:
‘I interpret the poem to be about a man who has lost his wife’
(Participant 5)
‘I think the poem is about a man who has lost his love to another man’
(Participant 6)
‘It seems to be about a man pining for a lost love who wishes for’
(Participant 8)
A quantitative analysis of the keywords1 emerging from the answers to

this question allows to infer the script of the forlorn lover (Table 6.1).
Almost all respondents explicitly mentioned the man, the main char-
acter and focaliser of the poem. He is also frequently referred to through
the subject and object forms of the personal pronoun he and him and
the possessive determiner his. Next comes love, mentioned by as many
as eight participants out of ten if different word classes are taken into
account (the noun love and the verb loves ), let alone the semantic asso-
ciates relationship and passion. Notice that the word ‘love’ itself never
Table 6.1 Wordlist for Word Freq. across participants

responses to Q3—‘The
Man 9.00
Late Hour’
Love 6.00
Her 6.00
He 5.00
His 5.00
Woman 4.00
She 3.00
Cannot 3.00
Lost 3.00
Goes 2.00
Him 2.00
Hope 2.00
Loves 2.00
Night 2.00
Passion 2.00
Relationship 2.00
Weight 2.00
201
occurs in the poem, but is inferred from the aforementioned script, in

turn built up by means of semantically related words and a word with
the same root (i.e. lover, l. 5). Although slightly less salient, the woman
is also frequently referred to pronominally (9/10: her + she ) and lexi-
cally (4/10). These results prove that the two protagonists and the bond
between them are vividly retained in the readers’ memory.
The feeling of accessibility evidenced by these findings is stylistically
accounted for by two discourse indicators (narrativity and sympathy, the
latter being a subcategory of subjectivity) and two interrelated seman-
tic ones (concreteness and imageability). In terms of narrativity, ‘The
Late Hour’ fits Toolan’s definition (2001 [1988]: 8): on the one hand, it
foregrounds individuals by making them the protagonists of the script;
on the other, their actions and the events they are immersed in gravi-
tate around the script, and so are interrelated—not in terms of tempo-
ral sequencing but following a principle of recurrence made manifest by
the use of repetition analysed further ahead. Incidentally, both aspects
have been sensed by two respondents who observed that narrativity
made Strand’s poem accessible: ‘being a clear story, this was much easier
than some other poems’ (Participant 9) and ‘referring to specific people
makes it easier to understand’ (Participant 10). Despite its functional
resemblance with narratives, some basic linguistic features Biber and
Conrad (2009: 150) identify as key to narrative fiction are missing: in
the poem, there are no past tense verbs, proper names, reporting verbs
or reported speech. This makes the status of ‘The Late Hour’ somewhat
hybrid with respect to its narrativity.
The two characters are presented from different perspectives: the man
is introduced as unidentified (a man, l. 1) by the narrator who then, for
most of the poem, shares his viewpoint; the woman is introduced as spe-
cific (the woman, l. 5) and from that moment onwards is constantly seen
through the man’s viewpoint (e.g. ‘He drags the weight of his passion
as if nothing were over, / as if the woman, now curled in bed beside her
lover, / still cared for him’, ll. 4–6). Once introduced through a simple
noun phrase (determiner + Noun), each character is referred to pronom-
inally. From a processing perspective, anaphora resolution is straight-
forward because there is no other viable human candidate in the poem.2
The spatiotemporal adverbial ‘now curled in bed beside her lover’ (l. 5)
202
D. Castiglione
sheds light on the restlessness of the male protagonist, determining his

behaviour more or less as a complicating action would. This unfavour-
able state of affair is syntactically (and psychologically) demoted to a
participial clause confined to an aside; conversely, the man’s residuum
of hope is encoded in a hypothetical clause that is the main focus of
information (‘as if the woman, now curled in bed beside her lover, / still
cared for him’, ll. 6–7). A feeling of sympathy for the protagonist is thus
encouraged, aided by the temporal deictic items now and still (the former
anchored to the physical setting, the latter to the man’s consciousness).
Strand’s poem call for sympathy, and more generally for the align-
ment between readers and characters, is achieved through two con-
verging textual strategies: the foregrounding of the characters’ actions
as psychological cues of emotional states, and the alternating focus on
each character in a sort of juxtaposition that at times seems to imply
reciprocal proximity. Halliday’s transitivity system, with its categorisa-
tion of process and related participant types, is apt to broach the issue
here. SFG categorises such processes along a continuum from material
(creating, doing) to behavioural (behaving), mental (feeling, thinking),
verbal (saying), relational (having identity/attribute) and existential
(existing) (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 170).
Processes of doing and saying dominate in ‘The Late Hour’ and are
frequently associated with the man: walks (l. 1), stands and is calling (l.
9), calls (l. 10), will come back (l. 11) and will stand (l. 12). Although the
thematic role he often performs is that of Actor, the intransitive use of
most of these verbs betrays a feeling of powerlessness associated with the
absence of a goal. The man is also construed as Senser and Behaver: the
former role is filled by will imagine (l. 12) and [will] see (l. 14); the latter
by drags (l. 4), which is borderline between material and behavioural: on
the one hand, it provides a detail on the man’s gait that was unspecified
in walks; on the other, its direct object the weight of his passion colours it
psychologically. The ritual rather than contingent nature of these actions
is grammatically highlighted by a conspicuous use of the lyric present
(Wright 1974: 563–579) and rhetorically by the repetitions: one has the
impression that the man is coerced to behave as he does in obeyance to
the script of the forlorn lover to which individual volition is subjugated.
203
The woman is construed as less dynamic: she is curled (l. 5), where
the material verb is in participial form; her opening her eyes, her rising
and peering down are part of the man’s perception and desire, which
project a non-factual reality (‘he will stand outside and imagine / her
eyes opening in the dark / and see her rise and peer down’, ll. 12–14).
Most of the processes she enacts, either presented as factual by the
narrator or filtered through the man’s imagination, are behavioural
(is awake, l. 7; stares, l. 7; hear, l. 16; peer down, l. 14; will lie awake,
l. 15). The woman’s reduced agentivity does not shade into total pas-
siveness though, for she is still shown responsive to the man’s pining.
Crucial to this effect is the ‘alternating editing’ technique mentioned
earlier. For instance, the man thinking of the woman in the hypothet-
ical clause (ll. 5–6) is followed by a potentially responsive action on her
part: she is awake and stares at ‘scars of light’, a genitive metaphor where
the source domain scars hint at the man’s inferable pain. The charac-
ters’ actions and states look often simultaneous, further inviting a par-
allel reading: while the man ‘drags the weight of his passion’ (l. 4), the
woman is ‘curled in bed’ (l. 5); while she stares (l. 7), he stands while
calling. Overall, then, these processes carry considerable weight in the
portrayal of unrequited love and of the existential condition associated
with it. The stylistic choices thus examined (the elocutio, in rhetoric
terms) fulfil the promise of sympathy already encapsulated in the basic
script (the inventio).
However fundamental, sympathy does not fully account for the feel-
ing of immersion prompted by ‘The Late Hour’. World-builders—
to borrow a concept from Text World Theory (Werth 1999; Gavins
2007)—play a key role in this regard by securing unity of space and
outlining a recognisable if schematic setting: this is the function of the
house meronyms bed, panes, window (ll. 5, 8–9, 14) or semantic asso
ciates of nature such as breeze, earth, trees at the beginning (ll. 2–3).
These are all concrete words with high imageability that make the
immersive experience more vivid. A search on the MRC database (see
Sect. 4.2.5.2) indeed reveals that most nouns in ‘The Late Hour’ are in
the upper band of imageability (min. value 100, max. value 700): in the
range between light (542) and sun (639) we find—in increasing order
204
D. Castiglione
of imageability—town, breeze, scar, man, moon, glass, dark, window, eye,

night, tree, star, woman and bed.
By virtue of these combined factors (i.e. conventional script, narra-
tive thread, psychological salience, spatiotemporal anchoring), the text-
base and situation model prompted by ‘The Late Hour’ are likely to be
felt relatable and familiar, familiarity being an aesthetic effect arising
in the early stage of processing (Fabb 2014). If this was the whole story,
Strand’s poem might have been dabbed as dull for its excessive clarity
and literalness. Yet there is no trace of this in the protocols, and this is
probably due to the fact that the poem also carries an aura of mystery
and indeterminacy fulfilling generic literary expectations. This in turn
may lead readers to find ‘The Late Hour’ aesthetically satisfying in rel-
evance-theoretic terms. How this is stylistically achieved is explored in
the next section, addressing the poem’s interpretability.
6.1.2 Interpretability: Polyvalence, Indeterminacy,

Schematicity
In spite of readers’ strong consensus on the accessibility of Strand’s

poem, a few of them pointed out that some passages felt ‘ambiguous’
(in Empson’s sense, that is, interpretatively richer or more indetermi-
nate than the rest: see Sect. 2.1.1). Participant 1 wrote that ‘the ending
is ambiguous’, an impression echoed by Participant 10 (‘the poem ends
ambiguously’). In order to explain these comments, it is useful to con-
sider again the issue of narrativity. In his definition, Toolan also empha-
sised the gains narratives bring about (‘[…] from whose experience we
humans can “learn”’, 2001 [1988]: 8). Narratives are indeed expected to
have a point (Labov 1972) that makes this tellability explicit. ‘The Late
Hour’ does have something along the lines of a point or resolution, but
this feels vague (‘And, finally, without warning or desire, / The lonely
and feckless end’, ll. 20–21). Its vagueness is achieved by means of a
nominal style which makes no reference to either individual but instead
foregrounds abstract nouns with low imageability (warning, desire, end )
that were tellingly absent before, with the exception of passion (l. 4).
Vague resolutions of this sort are not uncommon in markedly literary
narratives, inviting the reader to do more inferential work to uncover
205
the significance of the text. This is what happens in ‘The Late Hour’.
The polysemy of end (which, being the last word in the poem is also
an obvious case of iconicity) might have prompted Participant 10 to
prospect two alternative scenarios: ‘the poem ends ambiguously. Is this
the end of their heartbreak or their lives’. The overall ‘loss of love’ script
may thus have spawned a secondary ‘death for love’ script based on
illustrious models (e.g. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet ) without exclud-
ing the possibility that the love pain has been positively overcome.
Textual warranty for the latter scenario is found a few lines earlier,
where the healing of wounds and a likely symbol of renewal (‘the lumi-
nous wind of morning’, l. 19) are mentioned.
The polyvalence of the ending is not, however, the only aspect that
reminds readers of the literariness (hence interpretability) of the other-
wise accessible poem. Another respondent identified line 18 as a source
of indeterminacy, which is probably due to a relatively conspicuous
semantic deviation (i.e. the genitive metaphor ‘wounds of night’ and
the apparently pleonastic adverbial post-modification ‘heal without
sound’). While it is undeniable that these tropes run counter to idea-
tional transparency, I will argue that they pose only minimal process-
ing demands on readers. First, the source domains of both metaphor
(scars and wounds ) are common, drawn as they are from the human
body, while the symbolic potential of the target domains light and night
makes it legitimate to put these in parallel with the target domains of
life and death (Kövecses 2010: 28; see Sect. 4.2.6.3). Second, both
metaphors conform to the usual (concrete–abstract) directionality of
domain mapping, which aids metaphor comprehension. Finally, both
metaphors are well integrated in the co-text and cohere between them-
selves. Their target domains light and night are loosely antonymic and
cohere with, respectively, the title of the poem and the phrase luminous
wind of morning. Likewise, their source domains scars and wounds are
synonymic, although the sequencing of the metaphors shifts the motif
of pain from the level of surface manifestation to a deeper presence.
Scars of light is arguably the easier of the two since its source domain
calls to mind ‘blade’ (via visual affinity and cause–effect relation), itself
the source domain of a more conventional metaphor: ‘blade of light’
(13 occurrences in COCA) is indeed commonly used in fiction to
206
D. Castiglione
describe the light filtering from a narrow source (e.g. the threshold of
a door).
Mild indeterminacy is also created by negation, as evidenced by the
aforementioned ‘heal without sound’ (l. 18). Not only does the heal-
ing process affect a metaphorical patient (‘the wounds of night’), but
given that negation is used when ‘nonevents or nonstates are consid-
ered to be more informative than events or states’ (Hidalgo-Downing
2000: 126; emphasis added), the preposition without should elicit more
inferences regarding the circumstances accompanying the event (con-
sider the duller effect of the variant ‘the wounds of night that heal in
silence’). From a pragmatic perspective, the circumstance appears unin-
formative since it conforms to general encyclopaedic knowledge: healing
does not generate noise. But in the context of literary communication,
such violation of the maxim of relation (Grice 1975) becomes highly
informative as it elaborates on the ‘how’ of the event. The dramatic and
paradoxical effect of ‘visible absence’ enabled by negation is carried on
two lines ahead (‘without warning or desire’), where nouns of emotion
are ideationally negated but made textually salient. The resulting nega-
tive subworld (Hidalgo-Downing 2000: 147) extends until the nega-
tively connoted lonely and feckless that conclude the poem.
Linked to the indeterminacy brought by metaphors and negation
is the ideational schematicity of the characters, referred to via noun
phrases followed by no qualifications. Descriptive adjectives premod-
ify natural (slack breeze, raw green, luminous wind ) or abstract refer-
ents (lonely and feckless end ), but never the two characters. This stylistic
choice makes them closer to universal types than to specific individu-
als—an impression reinforced by the fact that some spatial indications
symbolically reflect a power imbalance between the two characters,
with the man in a lower position (‘under her window’ vs. ‘see her
rise and peer down’ [at the man]). A comparison between Strand’s ‘a
man’ and ‘the person in the Spanish cape’ from Eliot’s poem ‘Sweeney
among the Nightingales’ (cited in Adamson 1999: 674) is instructive
in this respect. In Eliot, the definite article works against the specific-
ity of the referent achieved through adverbial post-modification. On the
one hand, it adds ‘the implication that the reader ought to be able to
identify the intended referent’ (1999: 674). On the other, as Adamson
207
remarks, the intended referent falls outside the general experience of

readers because of its very specificity. Yaron’s claim that ‘exactness goes
hand in hand with difficulty’ (2002: 164) can thus be grounded in the
observation that the search for mimetic precision, if not adequately
contextualised, can paradoxically lead to the ‘opacity of deictic refer-
ence’ (Adamson 1999: 673). Writing in the late 70s, when modern-
ism had long lost its momentum and postmodernism was not yet at its
height, Strand opted for guiding his readers into a relatable situation.
Schematicity responds to the widespread expectation that literature
should embrace the universal over the particular, focusing on essen-
tials abstracted from contingent (e.g. social, historical, geographical)
determinations. Working alongside localised instances of polyvalence
and indeterminacy, it fosters an impression of interpretive flexibility by
leaving small gaps in an otherwise univocal situation model. Two oppo-
site expectations appear thus fulfilled: that of being accessible without
becoming trivial; and that of being enigmatic without alienating the
common reader.
The issue of aesthetic relevance is worth some further clarifica-
tion, for ‘The Late Hour’ fulfils Culler’s rule of significance not by
spurring readers to venture onto thematic inferences, but by present-
ing them with a relatable script and core, recognisable poetic features
such as metaphors and repetitions. As the protocols revealed, readers
inhabit the poem’s situation model without proceeding to theme for-
mulation, that is, without extrapolating a more general and abstract
point. It would be ungenerous to assume that Strand’s poem lacks such
dimension, for there is an underlying conventional association pairing
the cycle of the day primed by the title with the cycle of life: indeed,
some readers sensed ominous implications of death in the poem (e.g.
one of them wrote ‘he is so distraught & overcome by emotion that
he commits suicide’, another that ‘he goes to her grave everyday’). Yet
these comments merely elaborate on the focaliser: they are confined
to the storyworld and do not tap into the discourse level, that is, the
level at which issues of authorial design and intention become central.
As the same readers ventured into thematic inferences for other poems
(see Chapter 7), the most plausible explanation is that satisfaction
208
D. Castiglione
(or relevance, in RT terms) at a more basic level is a strong inhibitor of

further inferential processing.
6.1.3 Readability: Low Informativity

and the Syntax-Line Matching
So far I have focused on the easiness of ‘The Late Hour’ in terms of

basic understanding (accessibility) and satisfaction of genre expecta-
tions (interpretability). In terms of readability, the virtually null sense
of resistance opposed by the poem arguably stems from (1) its low
type/token ratio (61.9 out of 100) due to the amount of lexical rep-
etitions, and (2) its reliance on coordination and a one-to-one match
between syntactic and line units. Each aspect will be addressed in turn.
The fourfold repetition via anaphora of again (ll. 12, 15, 17, 19)
accompanies the shift from present to future tense occurring midway
through the text (‘it will happen again’, l. 11). The repetition of a time
adverb semantically implying recurrence is a straightforward case of
iconicity whereby textual form mirrors lexical content; functionally, it
highlights the lover’s compulsion to visit her former partner’s wherea-
bouts over and over again. The effect is one of emotional intensification,
not least because again is always fronted in clause-initial position (its
default position in everyday language is at the end of the clause). More
extended repetitions underscore the doomed immutability of a pre-
dicted situation akin to a stalemate (‘curled in bed beside her lover’, l. 5;
‘awake beside her lover’, l. 15; ‘she is awake’, l. 7 vs. ‘she will lie awake’,
l. 15; ‘he stands under her window’, l. 9 vs. ‘he will stand outside’,
l. 12). Besides the aesthetic function just proposed, these repetitions
enhance the readability of ‘The Late Hour’, as words and structures
encountered before acquire new resonance while requiring less effort to
be decoded and parsed.
Equally crucial for readability are Strand’s segmentation choices
respectful of both syntax and information distribution. Lines frequently
end on major syntactic boundaries, realising a close match between sen-
tence and line (ll. 9, 10, 11) or smoothly separating clauses of a sen-
tence (ll. 1, 4, 15) and phrases of a clause (ll. 2, 7, 17, 20); and over
209
one-third of the lines ends on a full stop (ll. 3, 6, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18).
This is significant, for enjambed lines have been experimentally shown
to be read more slowly than end-stopped lines (Jagt et al. 2014). These
segmentation choices are reproduced at the level of stanza division,
for in roughly the first half of the poem (ll. 1–9) each major syntac-
tic boundary is marked off by a tercet. Given that division into stanzas
can be thought of as the poetry homologue of paragraph formatting,
and that paragraph formatting improves the retention of information
(Emmott et al. 2006), the layout of Strand’s poem maximises processing
ease by working in synergy with the frequently end-stopped lines. The
enjambment occurring between lines 12 and 13 (‘imagine // her eyes’)
is thus foregrounded by means of internal deviation—not only because
it breaks the clause by separating a verb from its direct object, but also
because it does so across tercets. The ensuing visual leap is iconic of the
man’s tense, unsettled desire, thereby also satisfying the requirements of
aesthetic relevance addressed in the previous section.
The syntax itself is simple, avoiding both extremes of ordered com-
plexity and order-threatening fragmentation (see Sect. 4.2.7). Most
clauses are conjoined paratactically by means of the conjunction and
(polysyndeton) or the comma (asyndeton). Proposing a cline of explic-
itness for connectives, Leech and Short rank ‘and’ as ‘the vaguest of con-
nectives—it might be called a “general purpose link”, in that it merely
says that two ideas have a positive connection, and leaves the reader to
work out what it is’ (2007 [1981]: 250). In the case of ‘The Late Hour’,
however, the vagueness of ‘and’ is less inferentially demanding on read-
ers than Leech and Short’s definition seems to imply. This is due to
the predictable pattern of alternation between the characters and their
interrelation, favoured by the unity of space and the repetitions exam-
ined before. The kind of relation that coordination enacts on a logico-
semantic level is that of expansion (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004:
377) relating ‘phenomena as being of the same order of experience’;
more specifically, the poem develops by a subcategory of expansion,
extension (A + B; i.e. adding new elements). As the reading unfolds,
each figure congruently adds to the previous, thus resulting in coherent
sequences and set of sequences.
210
D. Castiglione
Type-token ratio, segmentation choices and coordination contrib-

ute to the high readability of the poem, which in turn is a key compo-
nent of its easiness. This has been proved in the second empirical test
(see Sect. 5.2.2) by measuring reading times for the poem. ‘The Late
Hour’ was read at an average speed of 63.51 ms/char, far below most
other poems (even leaving aside Howe’s poem, read at the incredibly
slow pace of 90.41 ms/char, Hill’s and Stevens’s were read at 72.45 and
73.39 ms/char, respectively; see Castiglione 2017). Its reading speed
matches that of the much less accessible extract by Pound (62.76 ms/
char; see Chapter 7 for an interpretation of such apparently conflict-
ing result) and is overtaken by Ballard’s extract only, read at a mere
59.01 ms/char. But Ballard’s is a genuinely fictional extract which I have
disguised as a poem:
1 Soon it would be too hot. Looking out

2 from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o’ clock,
3 Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense groves
4 of giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs
5 of the abandoned department stores for a hundred yards
6 away on the east side of the lagoon.
7 Even through the massive olive-green fronds
8 the relentless power of the sub was plainly tangible.
9 The blunt refracted rays drummed
10 against his bare chest and shoulders, drawing out the first sweat,
11 and he put on a pair of heavy sunglasses
12 to protect his eyes. The solar disc was
13 no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse
14 that fanned out across the eastern horizon
15 like a colossal fire-ball, its reflection
16 turning the dead leaden surface of the lagoon
17 into a brilliant copper shield. By noon,
18 less than four hours away, the water would seem to burn.
The reader may wonder at this point why Ballard’s extract was read
slightly quicker than Strand’s poem in spite of lacking the indica-
tors discussed in this section. After all, Ballard’s extract has fewer
211
end-stopped lines than ‘The Late Hour’ and no lexical repetitions; its
syntax, while centred on kernel sentences like in ‘The Late Hour’, is
made more phrasally complex by means of several circumstance adver-
bials. Not even the technical term gymnosperm, which increased the
reading time of line 4 to a staggering 85.97 ms/char, sufficed to make
the average reading speed of Ballard’s extract slower than that of Strand’s
poem. It may be that the reader’s spatial viewpoint immediately aligns
to Keran’s, aided by the ‘natural’ sequencing of highly concrete refer-
ents building up descriptive coherence. It may also be that Ballard’s
extract, belonging to the genre of fiction, opposes the in-built indeter-
minacy of ‘The Late Hour’ (see Sect. 6.1.2) thus giving an impression of
greater referential accuracy and literalness. This might discourage inter-
pretive inferencing and thus decrease reading times. Or, as proposed in
Castiglione 2017, the narrative schema activated by Ballard’s extract is
more prototypical than the one activated by Strand’s poem, and is there-
fore retrieved earlier. These hypotheses can only be answered through
specifically set experiments in which each variable is manipulated. What
matters most at the current stage of research is that the readability of
easy poems, while undeniable, is still likely to be equal or slightly infe-
rior to that of (popular) literary fictional extracts—further support for
this claim comes from the 61.85 ms/char figure reported in Mahlberg
et al. (2014: 12) for a passage from Dickens.
6.1.4 Summary
The analysis has demonstrated that ‘The Late Hour’ is experientially

accessible, literarily relevant and structurally readable: three dimensions
expected to inhere in any easy poem and to retrospectively define it as
such—a prediction tested on Betjeman’s ‘Loneliness’ in the next section.
Each dimension has its own stylistic correlates, generally converging on
a lack of LIDs or on a minimised presence of a handful of them. These
hierarchical relations between overall text effect (easiness), intermediate
cognitive dimensions (e.g. accessibility) and stylistic choices (e.g. narra-
tivity, coordination—these may belong to different dimensions at once)
are diagrammed in Fig. 6.1.
212
D. Castiglione
Fig. 6.1 ‘The Late Hour’: breakdown of easiness (text effects and lack of LIDs)
The fulfilment of all three dimensions (accessibility, interpretabil-

ity, readability) also accounts for the high level of enjoyment elicited
by ‘The Late Hour’ in Study 1, where eight out of ten respondents
claimed they enjoyed the poem. This profile is opposite to that of
Pound’s extract and Howe’s poem, poorly understood and not enjoyed
by the majority of respondents (see Chapters 8 and 9). The accessibil-
ity of Strand’s poem, which ideationally stems from Strand’s use of an
archetypal script and interpersonally from the enactment of sympathy,
accounts for an immersive (if confirmatory, or scheme-reinforcing)
reading experience. The aesthetic relevance of ‘The Late Hour’ makes
readers realise that they are still facing a poem rather than an enter-
taining story or a piece of informative writing: the pleasure of compre-
hensibility through accessibility thus combines with that of aesthetic
fulfilment. Finally, the readability of ‘The Late Hour’ minimises online
effort, conforming to the proposal that processing fluency boosts aes-
thetic pleasure (Reber et al. 2004; see Sect. 4.1 for some criticism of this
proposal, though).
213
6.2 Testing the Category: John Betjeman’s

‘Loneliness’
Betjeman’s poetry ‘endures the dubious distinction of being enjoyed by
millions of readers, many of whom would never read poetry’ (Gardner
2004: 361). Although many factors must have fuelled Betjeman’s popu-
larity, including extra-literary ones (he worked for the BBC), the accessi-
bility of his work has doubtless been determining. This section selectively
applies the model to his poem ‘Loneliness’ to see whether accessibility,
interpretability and readability apply to the same extent as ‘The Late
Hour’, and through what stylistic correlates. Is the profile derived from
Strand’s poem generalisable to other easy poems? What refinements
would an additional analysis enable? The first four (out of twenty) lines
of ‘Loneliness’ exemplify well the style and form of the poem:
1 The last year’s leaves are on the beech:

2 The twigs are black; the cold is dry;
3 To deeps beyond the deepest reach
4 The Easter bells enlarge the sky.
The stylistic differences between Betjeman’s and Strand’s poems are

striking: ‘Loneliness’ feels much more traditionally literary owing
to its two ten-line stanzas composed in pentameters and following a
ABABCCDDEE rhyme scheme; there are two adjacent instances of
syntactic inversion (‘indifferent the finches sing’, l. 11, ‘unheeding
roll the lorries past’, l. 12); there is no external narrator but a lyric I
that coincides with the speaker (‘though you tell me I shall die / you
say not how or when or why’, ll. 9–10). Betjeman’s anti-modernist
and old-fashioned style stems from his aesthetic preference for ‘molds
successfully employed by Victorian poets and hymnodists’ (Gardner
2004: 361). In spite of these stark differences, however, the point is to
find out if the two poems enact comparable strategies in attempting to
avoid difficulty. After all, the model should be equipped to explain why
‘Loneliness’ feels at least as easy as ‘The Late Hour’.
214
D. Castiglione
In terms of ideational accessibility, ‘Loneliness’ sketches out from the

start an autumnal setting through familiar and highly imageable refer-
ents (leaves, beech, twig ) just like ‘The Late Hour’ does: through their
anchoring function, these world-builders invite the reader into a sche-
matic textworld. Furthermore, the title anticipates the poem’s topic
univocally, prompting us to interpret the landscape as reflecting the
speaker’s mood. Even the localised indeterminacy of Strand’s poem—
whose title is more generically evocative—is renounced from the out-
set. Coherence rests on semantic associates of nature (leaves, beech, twigs,
finches, blackthorn ), sound (clatter-clang, song, sang, sing, bells ), vehicles
and buildings (lorries, crematorium room, furnace ), feelings and emo-
tions (loneliness, joy, grief, belief, unbelief, die ).
Interpersonally, sympathy permeates Betjeman’s poem more melo-
dramatically than Strand’s: the sympathetic yet external narrator of ‘The
Late Hour’ gives way to a lyrical speaker who invokes an auditory ele-
ment (the bell’s clang) in ll. 5–8:
5 O ordered metal clatter-clang!

6 Is yours the song the angels sang?
7 You fill my heart with joy and grief –
8 Belief! Belief! And unbelief…
Markers of explicit subjectivity in these lines, such as the exclamatives,

are another aspect covered by the model (see Sect. 4.2.8.4). Although
the use of first (singular and plural: see ll. 14 and 19) and second per-
son deixis appears more obviously immersive than the third person,
non-participant (Green 2015) deixis of ‘The Late Hour’, both the het-
erodiegetic narrator of Strand’s poem and the homodiegetic speaker of
Betjeman’s poem result in similarly immersive effects—a reminder that
formally different stylistic choices can be functionally akin at some level
of generality. All in all, sympathy and imageability are the subcategories
of accessibility shared by both poems, narrativity in ‘Loneliness’ being
confined to the anchoring function of the opening and the use of free
direct thought in ll. 13–14 (‘what misery will this year bring / now
spring is in the air at last?’).
215
In terms of interpretability, ‘Loneliness’ fulfils typical expectations for

poetry even more compellingly than ‘The Late Hour’: regular stanzaic
structure, motifs borrowed from the repertoire of Romanticism (e.g. the
bird’s song) and a gesture towards collective relevance (e.g. ‘our lone-
liness, so long and vast’, l. 20) are the most conspicuous elements in
this regard. While Strand’s poem draws from a pre-modernist poet-
ics but retains an aspect of modernity in the deployment of free verse
and localised indeterminacy, Betjeman’s is fully pre-modernist. That is
arguably why ‘Loneliness’ is in no need of highlighting its literariness by
means of polyvalence and indeterminacy the way ‘The Late Hour’ does:
the only novel metaphor of Betjeman’s poem, the noun premodifier fur-
nace roar (l. 18), feels less indeterminate than wounds of night as there is
more common ground between source and target domain.
And it is indeed a markedly literary aspect of Betjeman’s poem—its
masculine rhyme patterning—that which is instrumental in boosting
the poem’s readability. In rhyme the final syllables of two or more words
share the same rime (the stressed part of the syllable as opposed to the
onset), which creates an effect of recurrence and phonetic p riming.
Because rhyming words in ‘Loneliness’ are almost always placed at the
end of a major clause boundary, the reader is required to pause after
each word, with a foregrounding effect. This highlights literary form,
the impact of which on readability is clearly stated by Fabb thus:
‘because literary form enables prediction, it thereby eases the processing
of the text’ (2014: 25). Viewed in this light, rhyme is a form of rep-
etition and is reinforced—on a fully lexical level—by the polyptota
deeps-deepest (l. 3), song-sang (l. 6) and belief-unbelief (l. 8). So, albeit
realised in different textual forms, the principle of repetition is at work
in ‘Loneliness’ just as it is in ‘The Late Hour’, and in both cases, it is
part of their readability.
The dominance of end-stopped lines in ‘Loneliness’ that foreground
its rhymed words means that the line-syntax match is realised even
more forcefully than in ‘The Late Hour’. The ensuing need to constrain
main syntactic constituents within the ten syllables space of a pentam-
eter has obvious repercussions on syntax, which like ‘The Late Hour’
eschews fragmentation and complexity alike. Subordination is confined
216
D. Castiglione
to ll. 9–10, 13–14 and 15–16: in the two former cases, there is just one
dependent clause (a concessive and a temporal clause, respectively: ‘And,
though you tell me I shall die, / you say not how or when or why’ and
‘What misery will this year bring / now spring is in the air at last?’) that
can be easily accommodated in working memory; in the third case, the
syntax is slightly more complex, as a reason clause is briefly interrupted
by a parenthetical (‘for, sure as blackthorn bursts to snow, / cancer in
some of us will grow’) and the main clause delayed to ll. 17–18 (‘The
tasteful crematorium door / shuts out for some the furnace roar’). But
even in this case, the logical relations between clauses are clearly sig-
nalled and their integration in the comprehension process is not likely
to pose any particular problem.
In summary, despite and beyond obvious stylistic differences, there is
considerable affinity in the textual strategies enacted by Betjeman and
Strand to minimise difficulty—and such strategies, it is worth stressing,
were all already accounted for by the model beforehand. A comparison
between Fig. 6.1 and Fig. 6.2 makes this even clearer.
Fig. 6.2 ‘Loneliness’: breakdown of easiness (text effects and lack of LIDs)

217
The diagrams of Strand’s and Betjeman’s poems substantially overlap:

the main differences concern narrativity (nearly absent in Betjeman)
and the divergent strategies in the construction of sympathy and in the
fulfilment of the relevance requirements (which is the level at which
the main stylistic divergences are found). The affinities between ‘The
Late Hour’ and ‘Loneliness’ that are revealed by the model are encour-
aging and make it legitimate to proceed towards some preliminary
generalisations.
6.3 Conclusion
At its most general, easiness is determined by a scantiness or total avoid-
ance of LIDs. Three intermediate dimensions can be identified between
the holistic effect of easiness and the local linguistic features: accessibil-
ity, interpretability and readability (see Sect. 5.3 for a more compact
introduction of these concepts). Accessibility is to do with comprehen-
sion and considers the outcome of reading. Readability is to do with
the event of reading whose outcome is comprehension. Interpretability
is mediated by relevance, the variable that measures the prototypical-
ity of poems and the subsequent activation (or lack thereof ) of com-
prehension strategies that are typical of poetry, notably the derivation
of theme and formal symbolism. Relevance becomes crucial to explain
the bafflement caused, say, by a poem written as an imitation of a clear
(i.e. accessible and readable) business letter or touristic brochure. In this
hypothetical case, the suppression of conventional literariness is likely
to favour metaliterary inferences, making readers question the bound-
aries of poetry itself. Additionally, relevance is not constrained in terms
of stratification: it may hinge on effects created by the semantics of the
text, as in ‘The Late Hour’ (indeterminacy, polyvalence and schematic-
ity) or by levels of a more formal kind, as in ‘Loneliness’ (metre, rhyme,
syntactic inversions).
The dimension of accessibility is the most complex of the three since
it can be divided into three LIDs (narrativity, sympathy and imagea-
bility), in turn underpinned by specific stylistic choices. Based on the
analysis of Strand’s and Betjeman’s poems, it appears that sympathy
218
D. Castiglione
and imageability are more central to accessibility than narrativity,

which may have a more appreciable effect on readability. Sympathy—
itself a burgeoning research area in the study of literary fiction (see
Sklar 2013)—presupposes subjectivity (see Sect. 4.2.8.4), alongside
some of the stylistic choices associated with it (e.g. I–you deixis, view-
point alignment, emotion nouns, behavioural verbs). Its inclusion
in the model is a reminder that comprehension is not purely cogni-
tive but has an emotional aspect to it, which accounts for the high
enjoyment spurred by ‘The Late Hour’ and attested in the protocols.
Imageability is to do with the extent to which a poem enables us to
vividly and holistically picture its textworld: concrete nouns, circum-
stance adverbials and the iconic sequencing of familiar referents are its
foremost stylistic correlates. Whenever imageability is jeopardised, the
representation problem comes to the fore with its pairing of abstract
art and difficult poetry (see Sect. 2.2.5). The interpersonal (sympathy)
and ideational (imageability) components of accessibility are textually
enacted by a homogeneous, plain poetic style that calls to mind Enrico
Testa’s characterisation of simple style. Originally developed out of the
analysis of narrative fiction, simple style refers to a manner of writing
that foregrounds the referential function of language and enhances a
sense of ‘communicative “naturalness”’ (1997: 6; transl. from the
Italian mine).
As for comprehension processes (see Sect. 3.4), the high accessibility
and readability of easy poems presuppose that decoding (the activation
of word meanings), parsing (the assignment of syntactic structure) and
integration (the inter-phrasal and inter-sentential construction of a sit-
uation model guided by textual coherence) all take place smoothly. In
addition, character-related inferences prevail over thematic inferences:
readers add details to the situation model, but have little incentive to
venture onto a more abstract level of significance. As the protocols have
shown, these cognitive operations result in a speedy reading, in read-
ing pleasure and in a wide intersubjective agreement concerning topic
identification.
219
Notes
1. The keyword analysis was carried out using WordSmith Tools 6.0, the
popular software for corpus analysis. It has to be noted that absolute fre-
quency per se is not an indication of intersubjective agreement, since a
word can be repeated in the same comment to build up cohesion. That
is why the right column of Table 6.1 (and the corresponding tables on
the remaining poems in the next chapters) gauges intersubjective agree-
ment by assessing how widespread a word (hence the topic it cues) is
across the responses. All words need to occur independently in at
least two responses, since this is, by definition, the minimal threshold
for intersubjective agreement. Lexical words such as I and poem were
excluded from the list as they refer to the discourse situation rather than
to the content of the poem. Function words were occasionally included
whenever they seem contextually meaningful.
2. The only other individual, the lover (l. 5), is simply a circumstantial ele-
ment, as reflected by his grammatically dependent status (indirect object
within a prepositional phrase).
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7
Transient Difficulty:
Utterances Towards Obscurity
In difficult poems, at least one of the dimensions characterising easy

poems—accessibility, interpretability and readability—is missing or
significantly backgrounded. Depending on the dimension affected,
different LIDs are involved and different cognitive processes primarily
challenged. As the ‘gold standard’ of comprehensibility can be avoided
by taking different routes, the population of difficult poems is not a
uniform land but a composite continent—a view aligned with the plu-
ralism of difficulty (see Sect. 2.2.1). Yet this variety is not as unwieldy
as to prevent identifying plausible subgroups. The information overload
vs. information-deficit dichotomy used to characterise the opposite cog-
nitive impact of complex versus incomplete syntax (see Sect. 4.2.7) is a
helpful heuristics to describe the two main directions that the flouting
of poetic comprehensibility can take: in line with the meaningfulness–
meaninglessness dilemma outlined in 2.2.6, poems may appear difficult
by excess or by defect, through the addition or the subtraction of mean-
ing. Now, the problem with this formulation lies in its having been used
as a critical cliché fraught with impressionism and undermined by an
intrinsic lack of verifiability. But as I will demonstrate in this and in the
next chapter, the model is capable of determining how the impression

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D. Castiglione
of meaning excess or lack thereof is stylistically enacted and how it cog-

nitively unfolds.
In this chapter, I analyse poems that appear difficult by excess: ‘What
We See Is What We Think’, by Stevens; ‘At Melville’s Tomb’, by Crane;
‘Once the Twilight Locks No Longer’, by Thomas; and ‘Stanza 33’, by
Hill. Their common denominator is their being constructed as elaborate
and dense utterances that impose themselves as worthy of our atten-
tion. ‘Elaborate’ here refers to a high level of internal cohesion and pat-
tern organisation linked to hierarchical complexity (on complexity, see
Sect. 4.1). ‘Dense’ can be paraphrased as conceptually laden or figura-
tively rich style stemming from the use of certain LIDs (e.g. metaphors,
lexical ambiguity) that highlight individual creativity at the expense of
popular scripts (e.g. the suffering lover in Strand’s poem, loneliness as a
common condition in Betjeman’s poem). Finally, ‘utterance’—which
in pragmatics indicates a unit of speech with communicative import—
implies a speaker, but one who has something unique to say (density)
and so frames it accordingly (elaboration1).
As a consequence, these poems require to be read as lyrical poems
even though they may occasionally appear at the periphery of the genre.
Interpretability in them lies not in archetypal scripts or in recognisable
literary motifs, but in the speaker’s verbal event that must be constructed
bottom-up rather than retrieved top-down: if easy poems are the literary
counterpart of a relaxed conversation, difficult poems of this kind are the
literary counterpart of an advanced lecture. The avoidance of popular
scripts means that the construction of a situation model is more labori-
ous and, once attained, turns out to be only preliminary to the attain-
ment of significance. The represented reality (and the ensuing situation
model) is constructed in such a way so as not to be totally autonomous
or satisfactory. This prompts the assumption that ‘there must be more
to it’—hence, the impression of an extra layer of meaning, of a deferred
significance.
In processing terms, interpretability hinges on thematic or author’s
intent inferences: in the former case, the response takes the form of a
summary statement that generalises from the peculiarities of the text
(see Sect. 3.5); in the latter, it takes the form of a hypothesis on inten-
tion (see Sect. 2.2.3) that defers significance to a moment pre-existing
the text. Either way, derived meaning feels less anchored to the situation
7 Transient Difficulty: Utterances Towards Obscurity
225
model (e.g. the character-related inferences prompted by Strand’s poem)

as it hovers ‘above’ it (former scenario) or lingers ‘behind’ it (latter sce-
nario). Of course, it is possible for the same poem to prompt a mixture
of these inference types, as shown by the response data.
Finally, one key argument of this chapter is that these poems are at
once difficult and obscure: difficult, because by renouncing recognisable
scripts and deploying certain LIDs they force readers to a bottom-up
construction-integration of meaning that is time-consuming, leading
to low readability and to a less immediate accessibility; and obscure,
because by gesturing towards significance they encourage hermeneutic
labour in a way that easy poems and other kinds of difficult poems do
not: the former owing to earlier fulfilment at a more basic level, the lat-
ter owing to the undermining of pointers to significance (e.g. lyric I,
generic sentences, complexity; see Chapter 8).
7.1 Establishing the Category: Wallace

Stevens’s ‘What We See Is
What We Think’
As the reader will recall, several critics concurred in deeming Wallace Stevens
a difficult author (e.g. Steiner 1978; Dillon 1978; Serio 2007; and Leggett
2007; see Sect. 5.1.2). Written in the final phase of Stevens’s career, at the
end of the first half of the century, ‘What We See Is What We Think’ has
indeed been characterised as ‘neglected and difficult’ by Robinson (1981: 8).
It looks like a prototypical example of the difficult poems subgroup just out-
lined—an elaborate lyrical utterance that feels both meaningful and elusive:
What We See Is What We Think
1 At twelve, the disintegration of afternoon

2 Began, the return to phantomerei, if not
3 To phantoms. Till then, it had been the other way:
4 One imagined the violet trees but the trees stood green,
5 At twelve, as green as ever they would be.
6 The sky was blue beyond the vaultiest phrase.
226
D. Castiglione
7 Twelve meant as much as: the end of normal time,

8 Straight up, an élan without harrowing,
9 The imprescriptible zenith, free of harangue,
10 Twelve and the first gray second after, a kind

11 Of violet gray, a green violet, a thread
12 To weave a shadow’s leg or sleeve, a scrawl
13 On the pedestal, an ambitious page dog-eared

14 At the upper right, a pyramid with one side
15 Like a spectral cut in its perception, a tilt
16 And its tawny caricature and tawny life,

17 Another thought, the paramount ado…
18 Since what we think is never what we see.
Despite the acknowledged influence of Stevens on Strand (see Bloom

2007: ix), there are three overarching differences between this poem and
Strand’s ‘The Late Hour’: (1) Stevens’s poem cannot be mapped onto a
recognisable script due to the displacing effect of semantic and discour-
sal LIDs (e.g. incongruities, metaphors, impersonality); (2) it features
a long suspension of the clause-based norm (ll. 7–17) that character-
ised Strand’s poem—a syntactic choice instrumental to a strategy of
phrasal apposition; and (3) there is a systematic line–syntax mismatch
that spares only a few lines (ll. 3, 5 and 6). The first factor is responsible
for the lower accessibility of Stevens’s poem, the second and third for its
lower readability. Combined, these factors account for the difficulty of
‘What We See Is What We Think’; the issue of interpretability and the
poem’s ensuing obscurity will be addressed thereafter.
7.1.1 Reduced Accessibility: Metaphors,

Incongruities and Impersonality
‘What We See Is What We Think’ received an average comprehension

score three times higher than ‘The Late Hour’ (2.4 vs. 0.8 out of 5,
where 0=very easy to understand). Although answers to the question
227
‘what is the poem about?’ generally converged on a thematic nucleus—

the mismatch between imagination and reality—the statements are not
close reformulations of each other as they were in Strand’s poem:
‘I think the poem is about people imaging the world around them,
but it in fact being very different to the way we think it is’ (Partic-
ipant 2)
‘The poet describes what he thinks/hopes to see but he never actu-
ally does’ (Participant 3)
‘People expect change in a second but change occurs over time’
(Participant 7)
These answers are clearly textually driven, for they take inspiration from
two textual loci where topicality is concentrated: the title (repeated
with variation in the last line) and line 4 (‘One imagined the violet
trees but the trees stood green’). Yet, they also indicate that personal
elaboration of derived meaning is higher than in Strand’s poem, which
cues the construction of a less-monolithic situation model (Table 7.1).
Further support for this claim comes from the wordlist key for Stevens’s
poem, which the reader can compare to that relative to Strand’s poem
(Table 6.1, Sect. 6.1.1).
Contrary to the wordlist elicited by Strand’s poem, there is no abso-
lute consensus regarding topic identification in Stevens’s poem: the
most frequent words appear in half the participants’ answers only. The
three words most often retrieved (we, what and see ) come from the
Table 7.1 Wordlist for Word Freq. across participants

responses to Q3—‘What
WE 5.00
We See Is What We
WHAT 4.00
Think’
SEE 4.00
BUT 3.00
DIFFERENT 2.00
INTERPRET 2.00
PEOPLE 2.00
SHADOWS 2.00
THINKS 2.00
WORLD 2.00
228
D. Castiglione
title and the last line, which perform a framing function in encap-
sulating the aboutness of the poem. Surprisingly, the semantic fields
of colours and time were weakly elicited despite their easily traceable
presence. A possible explanation is that what makes them less sali-
ent in the construction of theme is (1) their being situated outside
the aforementioned frame, and (2) the ideational unfamiliarity—and
ensuing impression of opacity—of the textual segments where they
occur.
Ideational unfamiliarity is enacted by several LIDs whose function
is that of bending and warping represented reality so as to make it
non-mimetic. This technique aesthetically embodies Stevens’s adhesion
to a Romantic view of imagination that, countering Plato’s mimetic
model of representation, conceives of reality not as an external set of
referents to be copied but as a sensory source moulded by the sub-
ject’s imaginative projection.2 This technique is already deployed at the
start of the poem, where a defamiliarised event is construed through
the metaphor the disintegration of afternoon (l. 1). Compared to the
syntactically analogous the wounds of night from ‘The Late Hour’, the
deverbal noun disintegration makes the source of Stevens’s metaphor
more abstract by ‘freezing up’ a material process and turning it into
a noun of Material Abstraction (see Sect. 4.2.5.2). Paradigmatically,
the deviance of Stevens’s metaphor lies in the distance between source
and target domain: in everyday language, disintegration applies to social
entities such as countries and families, not to parts of the day (source:
COCA). Individual creativity thus suspends linguistic (and referential)
norms.
The start of this unheard-of event is then loosely paired (via either
apposition or list, with a structural ambiguity that also characterises ll.
7–17: see Sect. 7.1.2) to ‘the return to phantomerei’ (l. 2). This coinage,
formed by the root ‘phantom’ and the German suffix ‘-erei’, is glossed
by Eleanor Cook as ‘things concerning or brought about by phantoms’
(2007: 256). Most readers, however, will not possess such knowledge of
German morphology, so they will likely process the word as a pseudow-
ord (see Sect. 4.2.1). They might even create a sound-based association
with the Greek maxim ‘Panta Rhei’ (‘everything flows’) famously attrib-
uted to Heraclitus.
229
Warranted by the unfolding analysis, the density and unfamiliar-

ity of these two first lines stand opposite to the relatable setting that
opens Strand’s poem. Estrangement is followed by bafflement when,
in l. 3, the reader encounters the assertion ‘till then, it had been
the other way’: the other way anaphorically links back to the event
sketched before, but the alternative scenario it hints at is not acces-
sible. This is because the metaphorical context of ll. 1–3 has no con-
ventional opposite—that is, no opposite entrenched in language use
and therefore stored in long-term memory. The explanation that fol-
lows, cued by the colon at the end of line 3, is anything but straight-
forward: in order to maintain coherence, one has to make a bridging
inference by means of which the event ‘the disintegration of after-
noon’ and the state ‘one imagined the violet trees but the trees stood
green’ are construed as alternative to each other. To be successful, this
inference should derive opposite features from each scenario, say, the
intoxicating transformation of reality via metaphor versus its disillu-
sioned confirmation via empirically verifiable propositions. But this
inference is already at a notable remove from the text, it is already an
interpretation gesturing towards significance and engendering obscu-
rity (see Sect. 7.1.3).
Other alterations of referential norms are scattered in ‘What We See
Is What We Think’ here and there, typically in the form of restricted
collocations resulting in semantic incongruity (see Sect. 4.2.6.2): the
vaultiest phrase (l. 6), the imprescriptible zenith (l. 9) and tawny life
(l. 16). In the vaultiest phrase, a morphologically deviant adjective (i.e.
‘vaulty’ is not admitted in English, let alone its superlative form ‘vaulti-
est’) whose root activates architectonic (e.g. ‘the vault of the church’) or
astronomic domains (e.g. ‘the vault of the sky’) oddly premodifies the
noun of Semiotic Abstraction ‘phrase’. The wide range of associations
that follows is rationalised by critics as richness or multiplicity of mean-
ings: for instance, Perloff credits Stevens’s poetry with ‘complex and
ambiguous meanings’ (Perloff 1985: 21), and Fletcher likewise attrib-
utes it ‘a wealth of meaning and allusion’ (1923: 355). Semantically and
morphologically deviant, the collocation is conceptually motivated by
the TEXT IS A BUILDING metaphor exploited by linguists:
230
D. Castiglione
Describing a sentence as a construction of words is rather like describing a

house as a construction of bricks, without recognizing the walls and the
rooms as intermediate structural units. (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 310)
If a text is a building, then a meronym of the target domain (‘phrase’)

is congruently mapped onto a meronym of the source domain (‘vault’).
Syntagmatically, its appearance is warranted by the proximity of sky in
the same line, as ‘the vault of the sky’ is a common collocation. Stevens’s
techniques of shuffling words co-occurring in ‘mundane’ discourses
fit Riffaterre’s notion of scrambling, ‘where the text contains words,
phrases, or sentences also found in a hypogram, but with their order
changed’ (Riffaterre 1984 [1978]: 139).
Furthermore, the determiner the confusingly construes the ideation-
ally unfamiliar referent as interpersonally familiar (i.e. known to both
the poet and the reader). This is a technique Stevens employs frequently
(e.g. the disintegration of afternoon, the violet trees, the imprescriptible
zenith ); as Dillon aptly puts it, ‘violation of the principle that the refer-
ent of a definite noun phrase has been introduced is a source of difficulty
in Wallace Stevens’ (Dillon 1978: 65). Finally, the preposition beyond
allows for two interpretations of the phrase ‘beyond the vaultiest phrase’.
If beyond is decoded in its literal, spatial sense—an option textually
primed by sky and vaultiest—the result is an adverbial of space answer-
ing the question ‘where?’ If it is decoded figuratively—an option discur-
sively primed by the idiom ‘beyond words’ (where word is a meronym
of phrase )—the result is an adverbial of manner answering the question
‘how?’ This double option is yet another manifestation of the multiplic-
ity permeating the poem—by contrast, multiplicity in ‘The Late Hour’
was confined to a simple instance of polysemy (see Sect. 6.1.2).
The astronomic domain of vaultiest returns in the imprescriptible
zenith (l. 9), where it is conflated with the legal domain of the adjective,
whose implications must have been well known to a law graduate like
Stevens. The unfamiliarity of the phrase does not rest only on the dis-
parate contexts of use of its words, but also in their being both highly
selective in terms of collocational behaviour: zenith usually has zero pre-
modification or is premodified by ‘magnetic’ only, while the only collo-
cate of imprescriptible is ‘rights’ (source: COCA). In such a preordained
231
grid, the paradigmatic substitution of ‘rights’ by ‘zenith’ makes the

former resonate in the latter, as if to make of one word the functional
equivalent of the other in the context of the poem.
The ideational deviance of tawny life (l. 16) can be gauged by com-
paring it to tawny caricature in the same line. For tawny caricature, we
may invoke a referential inference as an interpretive basis, for instance
by envisaging a caricature drawn on a worn-out, tawny scrap of paper
(page and scrawl elsewhere in the poem warrant this inference). In tawny
life, however, the colour adjective is metaphorically combined with a
noun whose reference is less imageable and far more indeterminate than
that of caricature. The usual collocates of tawny, on the other hand,
are highly imageable (e.g. skin, hair, fur). There is then an underlying
semantic clash between the two collocates, and this challenges the con-
struction of meaning at phrasal level.
In the oddly postmodified phrase a pyramid with one side (l. 14), idea-
tional unfamiliarity is achieved through a trompe l’oeil effect that relies on
segmentation choices. Until the reader reaches the next line, the phrase is
patently false: no pyramid has one side only. This temporary visual para-
dox is not, however, irrefutably corrected by ‘like a spectral cut’ in the line
that follows. This is because this comparative phrase can modify either the
entire noun phrase ‘a pyramid with one side’ or just the embedded prepo-
sitional phrase ‘with one side’. In other words, it behaves as a free modifier
whereby ‘the modifier-head relationship is unspecified and often unspe-
cific’ (Adamson 1999: 635). While the former parsing route runs counter
to our pyramid encyclopaedic entry, the latter mimics our perceptual pro-
cesses: as attention is selective (Styles 2006), focusing on one side of the
pyramid does not make the others inexistent. Far from being an end in
itself, this technique iconically enacts the thematic nucleus of the poem,
that is the discrepancy between an objectively existent and a subjectively
experienced reality. Interestingly, the enigmaticity of this noun phrase led
one respondent to interpret it as a simple replacement metaphor (Brooke-
Rose 1958: 24), that is as a periphrasis for another referent: ‘is this a sun-
dial?’ In doing so, she unknowingly echoed Robinson’s interpretation of
the poem: ‘we are presented with a sort of geometry of the day, a day as a
shadow moving on a sundial’ (Robinson 1981: 9).
So far, the analysis has shown that ideational unfamiliarity realised
through local semantic incongruities is what makes the accessibility
232
D. Castiglione
of Stevens’s poem more mediated than that of Strand’s. At discourse

level, another factor is the interpersonal detachment or impersonality
of Stevens’s poem, which prevents sympathy—so central a dimension
to the reading experience of ‘The Late Hour’—from taking place. Now,
although ‘What We See Is What We Think’ can be understood as a lyri-
cal utterance, its speaker effaces himself from the text while enunciating
a thesis, while unfolding a philosophical reflection: there is no staging
of characters and no foregrounding of individual psychology. Human
presence peeks out twice only, subsumed in the first person plural pro-
noun with inclusive reference we (l. 18) or abstracted into the imper-
sonal pronoun one (l. 4). According to Helen Vendler, Stevens typically
employs the latter pronoun as a substitute for the lyric I, thus enabling
‘the disclosure of suffering’ (2007: 134). Yet, except for an undertone
of disillusionment in the adversative conjunction but (l. 6) and one of
resignation in the time adverb never (l. 18), the speaker in ‘What We
See Is What We Think’ gives no clues as to his emotional state. Markers
of subjectivity (see Sect. 4.2.8.4) are accordingly renounced: we find
no attitudinal nouns (e.g. ‘fool’), no evaluative or emotive adjectives
(e.g. ‘tremendous’), no interrogative, exclamative or imperative clauses,
no subjective use of verbal aspect (e.g. the progressive and the perfect:
Adamson 1999: 664) and there is just one modality marker (would,
l. 5). A stylistic embodiment of modernist impersonality, this strategy
bestows on Stevens’ poem an aura of detached austerity that calls for a
more intellectually mediated aesthetic experience. In reality, subjectivity
is not truly renounced but rather deferred to a less obvious level: as I
will argue in the next section, the cumulative phrase-based syntax of the
central part of the poem, intertwined with an increasingly acute syntax/
line mismatch, enacts a rhythmical crescendo that is the musical coun-
terpart of exuberance.
7.1.2 Thwarted Readability: Phrasal Apposition

and Line–Syntax Mismatch
The syntagmatic density of ‘What We See Is What We Think’, to which

the restricted collocations examined earlier are key contributors, behav-
iourally translates into an average reading speed remarkably lower than
233
that of ‘The Late Hour’: 73.39 ms/char vs. 63.51 ms/char. In cognitive
terms, readers experience a higher degree of online processing labour:
on the one hand, local semantic incongruities slow down the construc-
tion phase of comprehension; on the other, the loose syntactic relations
between the juxtaposed phrases spanning more than half the poem
(ll. 7–17) challenge integration, given that the adjacent elements (in the
technical sense of the term: see Sect. 4.2) appear to cohere only indirectly:
Twelve meant as much as: the end of normal time,

Straight up, an élan without harrowing,
9 The imprescriptible zenith, free of harangue,
Twelve and the first gray second after, a kind
Of violet gray, a green violet, a thread
12 To weave a shadow’s leg or sleeve, a scrawl
On the pedestal, an ambitious page dog-eared
At the upper right, a pyramid with one side
15 Like a spectral cut in its perception, a tilt
And its tawny caricature and tawny life,
Another thought, the paramount ado…
This extended phrasal series globally functions as a degree complement

of the comparative clause ‘Twelve meant as much as’. But locally, that is,
considered on its own, it is a striking example of structural ambiguity:
Is each phrase to be read as standalone, that is, as in a list? Or is it per-
haps appositional? As exposed in Sect. 4.2.7.4, a list features situation-
ally related items that stand in an addition relation (A + B + C…), while
apposition features semantically related items that stand in an elabo-
ration relation (A ~ B~C…). On a cursory reading, the items seem to
bear little relation with each other, which may prompt some readers to
demote or even disregard integration, and thus perform a more sensorial
and atomised reading at phrasal level. Yet the arguments for parsing the
series as appositional look much more substantial.
To begin with, it is the speaker himself who explicitly encourages us to
appositionally equate twelve with the content of the series through the rela-
tional verb meant and the comparative quantifier as much as. This option
suits apposition as a method which ‘defines by accumulation rather than
234
D. Castiglione
by abstraction or reduction and it permits – indeed promotes – the inclu-

sion of alternative and potentially contradictory perspectives’ (Adamson
1998: 569; emphasis added). Apposition implies co-referentiality but con-
ceives of semantic relatedness in loose terms, as Adamson’s words lay bare
(‘alternative and potentially contradictory perspectives’ are contemplated);
poetry as a genre accords a lot of leeway in this regard. For the series to be
read as a redefinition of twelve, its phrases need to be construed as loose
reformulations or elaborations of each other, which implies that some
common ground is to be found between them, usually by means of weak
bridging or elaborative inferences.
Made cotemporal with the disintegration of afternoon earlier in the
text, twelve is accordingly paired to the end of normal time (l. 7). With
élan (l. 8), which in Henri Bergson’s philosophy (1907) designates
a universal vital impetus, the semantic field shifts to a concept that—
through a bridging inference warranted by textual adjacency—arguably
permeates the end of normal time without being coreferential to it. The
upward surge figuratively encapsulated in élan (UP may be an optional
semantic feature of ‘impetus’) is passed onto zenith (l. 9), in which UP
is a defining semantic feature, and then reaches ambitious page dog-eared
/ at the upper right (l. 13–14) and pyramid (l. 14) before reverting, in
tilt (l. 15), to its complementary antonym DOWN. This UP semantic
feature is also interlaced, in ll. 10–11, with the semantic field of colours
(gray, violet gray, green violet ) and numerals (twelve, first, second—the
last, as a homonym, also coheres with time). This internally complex
conceptual network is further reinforced by the transition from the
semantic field of fabrics to that of writing (thread, l. 11, scrawl, l. 12 and
page, l. 13, linking back to phrase, l. 6) warranted by conceptual meta-
phor TEXT IS FABRIC—in turn stemming from the etymology of the
Latin ‘textus’ which conflates both fields. The two last referents of the
series, thought and ado (l. 17), subsume all the aforementioned elements
by virtue of their abstract reference. So, floating fragments of physical
reality are recalled in the speaker’s consciousness (another thought ) via an
associative logic producing the beneficial confusion of creativity (para-
mount ado ).
Overall, the series is a very fitting example of ‘metaphoric transforma-
tion’ that in the poetry of Stevens is achieved ‘through a series of linked
235
metonyms’ (Bates 2011: 165). Referents are cut-off from familiar gestalts
(e.g. a setting, a script), and their arrangement mimics the speaker’s
unfolding thought through a stream of consciousness technique. Only
partly can the associative logic underpinning the linkages be accounted
by intrinsic shared semantic features; linkages are mostly of a looser
inferential nature that challenges the integration stage of comprehension.
As Sinding puts it, when reading Stevens, we typically ‘hover above one
analysis of the meaning of segments, to descend to a thematic integra-
tion of the whole, then hover again over the same or a new analysis of
part’ (2008: 108–109). The reader’s labour lies in retracing (or rather
guessing) Stevens’s own inferences during the writing process, which
responds to an analogic motivation—analogy being ‘the discovery of
similitude in dissimilitude’ (Mutter 2011: 751).
Integration is further deautomatised by a consistent line/syntax mis-
match the implications of which can be far-reaching, as in ll. 14–15
(‘a pyramid with one side / like a spectral cut’; see Sect. 7.1.1). As con-
jectured long ago by Dillon, ‘line-ends probably do affect our perception
of phrase groupings (and clause boundaries)’ (1978: 7). And indeed, it
has been experimentally demonstrated that enjambed poems are harder
to process than end-stopped line poems (Jagt et al. 2014). In poems like
‘What We See Is What We Think’, where enjambed lines are 13 out of
18, that is the 72.2% of the total (against a mere 52.4% and 40% for
‘The Late Hour’ and ‘Loneliness’, respectively), a reading tension arises
whereby ‘versification requires discontinuity, whereas syntax demands
continuity’ (Tsur 2011: 203). A count of enjambed versus end-stopped
lines is only the starting point of the analysis though, for not all enjamb-
ments are equally disruptive of syntax. Levin’s classification of enjamb-
ments from strongest to weakest, reported in the figure below, enables us
to increase the qualitative accuracy of the analysis (Fig. 7.1).
Enjambments of type (d), if followed by punctuation marks indi-
cating a long pause (colon, semicolon), are barely distinguishable from
end-stopped lines proper as for integration demands: that is why five
lines (ll. 3, 5, 6, 17, 18) were excluded from the count of enjambed
lines. Most enjambments in Stevens’s poem are of medium strength,
interlacing type (c) (ll. 1, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16) and type (b) (ll. 2, 4,
10, 12, 13). In rhythmical terms, the resultant is a lively counterpoint
236
D. Castiglione
Fig. 7.1 Linguistic classification of enjambment types (Adapted from Levin

1971: 183)
which, by promoting a dynamic reading experience, iconically reflects

the impetus of the élan, as if in the impossibility to constrain the ‘flow’
of inspiration. Conversely, enjambment strength gradually declines in
the last three lines: there the exuberant associative chain is on the verge
of fading, taken over by the disillusioned wisdom of the concluding
maxim. I regard this and similar instances of principled form–content
pairings (formal symbolism: see Sect. 3.5) as instrumental in signalling
the interpretability of ‘What We See Is What We Think’, to which I
now turn.
7.1.3 Interpretability and Obscurity: Generic Sentences,

Parable Schema, Text-Driven Inferences
Strand’s and Betjeman’s poems fulfil the convention of significance

through a sort of aesthetic shortcut, that is, by adhering to thematic
nuclei intrinsically valuable to humans and resonant with them: the
loss of love, and the condition of loneliness. Stevens’s poem by contrast
engages with a subject that is primarily epistemological and only sec-
ondarily crossed by emotional undercurrents: the mismatch between
the experience of imagination and matter-of-fact reality. Non-specialist
readers will probably concede that this subject, owing to its scope and
aloofness, is as prototypically worthy of poetic discourse as those of love
or loneliness, and so that it likewise adheres to the convention of sig-
nificance. Yet, its reduced sensory status is also likely to preclude early
satisfaction. To put it more technically, the relevance of ‘What We See
237
Is What We Think’ lies at a remove from its situation model, for this is
both warped by unfamiliarity and distanced by impersonality, therefore
giving rise to a number of inferences that continually point beyond the
situation model itself.
At its most general, then, significance coincides with the explicit sub-
ject of the poem, manifestly signalled by the title and by its near-rep-
etition—and logic reversal—in the last line. Both are cast in the form
of proverbial generic sentences ‘claiming universal truth’ (Fowler 1986:
132), which makes them inherently meaningful: first, the relational verb
‘to be’ is used attributively and in the present tense, resulting in an iden-
tifying clause of the type A = B that establishes a sameness transcend-
ing all temporal boundaries; second, the first person plural pronoun we,
employed without any circumstantial specification and not delimited by
an oppositional ‘them’, acquires collective reference: we stands for the
whole of humankind. Theme formulation, the main gateway to signif-
icance, rests on these two textual loci, to which line 4 (‘One imagined
the violet trees but the trees stood green’) can be added as a sort of elab-
oration or exemplification.
Significance also emerges structurally through the underlying tex-
tual schema of ‘What We See Is What We Think’. This schema is that
of a fictitious tale, of a parable in which a shuttering event relayed in
the past simple (ll. 1–2) imposes itself over a pre-existent state-of-affairs
(ll. 3–6, where the verbs in the simple present imagined, stood and was
are within the past perfect frame initiated by had been ). After that, the
main verb meant on which the whole phrasal series hinges is arguably
cotemporal to began (l. 2) so that the focus shifts again to the changes
brought by the event that started it all. Temporality is suspended in the
series due to the lack of verbs but returns in the present tense of the last
line that exposes the morale of the parable. Of course, compared to the
narrativity of Strand’s poem, the parable in Stevens’s poem is a highly
elliptical one, the recounting of a ‘pure’ event without participants.
Even so, just the allusion to a parable, that is, to a narrative schema
whose purpose is that of illustrating a morale, of teaching a piece of wis-
dom, should suffice to arise expectations concerning its point or tella-
bility: a story not meant to be simply entertaining (e.g. as with jokes)
238
D. Castiglione
should have another reason d’être and so prompt the there-must-be-

more–to-it intuition. This intuition is, in turn, rationalised as elusive-
ness or hidden meaning, as in these comments: ‘seems this poem should
be saying more than just describing the start of afternoon but this is
hard to find’; ‘this wasn’t particularly easy to understand initially but
required a moments more concentration to consider meaning. Further
thought clarifies the meaning more’.
The speaker’s drive to communicate something is encapsulated in this
(non-parodic) deployment of the parable schema, which brings me to
the thorny issue of intentionality (see Sect. 2.2.3). Granted that any
schema is a system, a set of interrelated parts, the highly structured
textuality of ‘What We See Is What We Think’ responds well to
Altieri’s hypothetical intentionalist argument according to which ‘we
begin to trust intention when we see the explaining relations between
parts and whole’ (1984: 148). Independent support for Altieri’s argu-
ment comes from experimental psychology, where ‘recent studies of
young children have revealed that, from a very early age, humans asso-
ciate the appearance of order with intentional agency ’ (Bering 2011: 103;
emphasis added).
Based on this argument, Stevens’s ‘rage for order’ (Perloff 1985: 17) is
what might have been induced an early reviewer, John Gould Fletcher,
to claim that ‘his [Stevens’s] intention, when we finally do fathom it, is far
clearer and more earnestly pursued than theirs [i.e. Pound, Eliot, Valéry
and the Sitwells]’ (Fletcher 1923: 355; emphasis added). In other words,
the feeling that Stevens is trustworthy in his underlying intention results
from a text construction in which all parts, including those that appear
opaque (e.g. the incongruities examined in 7.1.1), functionally contribute
to the theme, which in return reinvests them with meaning. Common
readers’ intuitions as verbalised in some of my responses tap into this
issue: ‘a lot of contrary comments “of violet gray, a green…” to reflect this
questioning of our perspective’; ‘the confusing stanzas support this [an
interpretation given before] as they appear to be nonsense about a sub-
ject’; and ‘do we see things incorrectly – poet getting us to “look twice”’.
These text-driven inferences directed to the speaker’s commu-
nicative intention or to the function of the text (which coincide
239
in Stevens’s poem) qualify the poem as obscure, and indeed, the

word ‘obscure’ cropped up in another passage of Fletcher’s afore-
mentioned review. In short, difficulty in ‘What We See Is What We
Think’ has a solution, but a solution which brings obscurity with
it. Trying to generalise from this case, the two preconditions for
obscurity to emerge seem to me, on the one hand, (1) a perception
of underlying unity (e.g. presence of a reliable speaker or narrator,
hierarchical relationships between the parts of the text and an over-
arching theme), and (2) a highly individualised authorial discourse
in which coherence is assumed (otherwise no underlying unity
would be sensed) but is to be inferred bottom-up, negotiated phrase
after phrase and clause after clause. The weaker the (still plausible)
inferences, the more acute the sense of engendered obscurity, and
the more compelling the ensuing search for meaningfulness—as
in the appositional series where referents obey principles of anal-
ogy (see Sect. 7.1.2), analogy being a pivotal means through which
poetry fundamentally gestures towards a symbolic order (Mutter
2011: 751).
7.1.4 Summary
The analysis has demonstrated that the reduced accessibility and

thwarted readability that characterise ‘What We See Is What We Think’
(and which cause it to be difficult) are stylistically compounded in such
a way as to prompt obscurity (hence ensuring while deferring interpret-
ability) as a derived effect. The dependency relations between overall
effects, cognitive dimensions and corresponding LIDs are diagrammed
in Fig. 7.2.
In Stevens’s poem, reduced accessibility and readability are com-
pensated for by various pointers to significance on which interpret-
ability (and obscurity) feeds. LIDs, though numerous, are mostly
located at semantic or discourse level and affect integration rather
than perceptual decoding or parsing (except for, perhaps, the inde-
terminate syntactic relations of ‘the first gray second after’, l. 10).
Some of these pointers, for instance the parable schema or generic
240
D. Castiglione
Fig. 7.2 ‘What We See Is What We Think’: breakdown of difficulty (text effects

and LIDs)
sentences, actually mitigate the difficulty brought by LIDs, as

one respondent noticed (i.e. ‘the title aided interpretation a lot!’).
Likewise, other features not covered in the analysis3 enhance acces-
sibility and readability in the face of the LIDs. Overall, ‘What We
See Is What We Think’ represents a Hermetic lineage of difficulty
that inherits from Symbolism and, even before that, from an Orphic
conception of poetry as oracular utterances through which truths
and revelations are delivered in a distorted or oblique way (e.g. the
semantic incongruities in 7.1.1, the apposed referents in 7.1.2). How
generalisable this subcategory of difficulty is will be assessed in the
next main section, in which two other poems are analysed more
succinctly.
241
7.2 Testing the Category: Hart Crane’s ‘at

Melville’s Tomb’ and Dylan Thomas’s ‘Once
the Twilight Locks no Longer’
Published in the early modernist period (Crane’s poem in 1926,
Thomas’s in 1934), the two poems analysed in this section appear to
share with Stevens’s an enactment of difficulty that paves the way to
obscurity, making them suitable candidates for the ‘elaborate utterance’
type. I analyse the two poems in parallel, with a comparative focus on
the dimensions of accessibility, readability and significance. Regrettably,
the 16-line-long ‘At Melville’s Tomb’ could not be reproduced in full, so
only the first quatrain is given below:
from At Melville’s Tomb
1 Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
2 The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
3 An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
4 Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
When once the twilight locks no longer
1 When once the twilight locks no longer

2 Locked in the long worm of my finger
3 Nor damned the sea that sped about my fist,
4 The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,
5 The milky acid on each hinge,
6 And swallowed dry the waters of the breast.
7 When galactic sea was sucked
8 And all the dry seabed unlocked,
9 I sent my creature scouting on the globe,
10 That globe itself of hair and bone
11 That, sewn to me by nerve and brain,
12 Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib.
13 My fuses timed to charge his heart,
14 He blew like powder to the light
15 And held a little Sabbath with the sun,
242
D. Castiglione
16 But when the stars, assuming shape,

17 Drew in his eyes the straws of sleep,
18 He drowned his father’s magic in a dream.
19 All issue armoured, of the grave,
20 The red-haired cancer still alive,
21 The cataracted eyes that filmed their cloth;
22 Some dead undid their bushy jaws,
23 And bags of blood let out their flies;
24 He had by heart the Christ-cross-row of death.
25 Sleep navigates the tides of time;
26 The dry Sargasso of the tomb
27 Gives up its dead to such a working sea;
28 And sleep rolls mute above the beds
29 Where fishes’ food is fed the shades
30 Who periscope through flowers to the sky.
31 When once the twilight screws were turned,
32 And mother milk was stiff as sand,
33 I sent my own ambassador to light;
34 By trick or chance he fell asleep
35 And conjured up a carcass shape
36 To rob me of my fluids in his heart.
37 Awake, my sleeper, to the sun,
38 A worker in the morning town,
39 And leave the poppied pickthank where he lies;
40 The fences of the light are down,
41 All but the brisket riders thrown,
42 And worlds hang on the trees.
7.2.1 Reduced Accessibility: Metaphors

and Incongruities
At the most general level, what Crane’s and Thomas’s poems share with
Stevens’s and between them is a staging of individual experiences that resist
being mapped onto explicit schemas: the narrator in ‘At Melville’s Tomb’
and the speaker in ‘When Once the Twilight Locks No Longer’ relay
out-of-the-ordinary events taking place in a past freed from any temporal
243
specification and therefore made exemplar as in a fable or myth. The excep-

tionality of each event (figure) is stylistically construed through repeated
violations of collocational preferences between participants, processes and
circumstances. Participants or circumstances are themselves often made ide-
ationally deviant by means of genitive or noun premodifier metaphors (e.g.,
from ‘At Melville’s Tomb’: the calyx of death’s bounty, l. 6; the circuit calm of
one vast coil, l. 9; from ‘Once the Twilight Locks No Longer’: long worm of
my finger, l. 2; the mouth of time, l. 4; red-haired cancer, l. 20). As the con-
tribution of semantic incongruities at phrasal level to difficulty has already
been investigated at some length (7.1.1), I will focus on deviant transitivity
patterns affecting both poems at clausal level. These patterns, enriched by a
semantic classification of the nouns involved (see Sect. 4.2.5.2 for the cate-
gories), are reported in Table 7.2 below and discussed thereafter.
Material processes, grammatically realised by activity verbs, dominate
both poems.4 They are carried out by concrete but mostly inanimate par-
ticipants which are as a result endowed with novel agency: the textworlds
they inhabit thus acquire a life of their own—be it an alluded marine
landscape recorded by a witness-narrator (‘At Melville’s Tomb’) or a vision-
ary tableau engaged in by a character-speaker (‘When Once the Twilight
Locks No Longer’). Such violation of noun–verb collocational preferences
accounts for the ideational unfamiliarity of Crane’s and Thomas’s poems,
leading to the construction of estranging situation models that critics have
not failed to notice: ‘[in Dylan Thomas] the profusion of heady images
blurs the clarity and the coherence of the poetic argument’ (Press 1963:
170), and ‘I wish to emphasize that it is the strangeness, the radical unfamil-
iarity of the thought, the unexpectedness of the cognitive demand that makes
Crane “difficult” ’ (Grossman 2007: 156; emphasis is the author’s). When
questioning Crane on his stylistic choices, poetry editor Harriet Monroe
singled out the very collocational anomalies listed before:
Tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy (or anything else); and how a
calyx (of death’s bounty or anything else) can give back a scattered chapter,
livid hieroglyphs; and how, if it does, such a portent can be wound in corri-
dors (of shells or anything else)
Crane’s reply is too articulated and rich in implications to be discussed

at sufficient length here (but see, for example, Dean 1996), so I will
Table 7.2 Transitivity analysis of deviant verb–noun collocations in ‘At Melville’s Tomb’ and in ‘Once the Twilight Locks
No Longer’
‘At Melville’s Tomb’ ‘Once the Twilight Locks No Longer’
244
Participant Process Adjunct/ Participant Process Adjunct/

object object
dice bequeath an embassy twilight locks locked in the long worm of my finger
ACTOR (MATERIAL OBJECT) MATERIAL GOAL (SEMIOTIC ACTOR (MATERIAL MATERIAL GOAL (MATERIAL OBJECT)
D. Castiglione
INSTITUTION) OBJECT)
numbers beat on the dusty shore sea sped about my fist
ACTOR (SEMIOTIC OBJECT) MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCE ACTOR (MATERIAL MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCE (MATERIAL
were obscured (MATERIAL OBJECT) OBJECT)
MATERIAL OBJECT)
calyx of death’s bounty giving back a scattered chapter globe stringed flask of matter
ACTOR (MATERIAL OBJECT + MATERIAL GOAL (SEMIOTIC ACTOR (MATERIAL MATERIAL GOAL (MATERIAL OBJECT)
SEMIOTIC ABSTRACTION x2) OBJECT) OBJECT)
lashings charmed fuses charged his heart
BEHAVER (MATERIAL BEHAVIOURAL ACTOR (MATERIAL MATERIAL GOAL (MATERIAL OBJECT)
ABSTRACTION) OBJECT)
eyes lifted MATERIAL altars stars drew straws of sleep
ACTOR (MATERIAL OBJECT) GOAL (MATERIAL ACTOR (MATERIAL MATERIAL GOAL (MATERIAL OBJECT +
OBJECT) OBJECT) MATERIAL ABSTRACTION)
answers crept MATERIAL across the stars he (my creature) drowned magics
ACTOR (SEMIOTIC OBJECT) CIRCUMSTANCE ACTOR (SEMIOTIC MATERIAL GOAL (SEMIOTIC
(MATERIAL OBJECT) - ? ABSTRACTION)
OBJECT)
compass… contrive farther tide sleep navigates the tides of time
SENSER (MATERIAL OBJECT) MENTAL PHENOMENON ACTOR (MATERIAL rolls GOAL (MATERIAL OBJECT +
(MATERIAL OBJECT) ABSTRACTION) MATERIAL MATERIAL ABSTRACTION)
monody wake BEHAVIOURAL mariner worlds hang on the trees
BEHAVER (SEMIOTIC OBJECT) GOAL (MATERIAL ACTOR (MATERIAL MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCE (MATERIAL
HUMAN) OBJECT) OBJECT)
245
limit myself to report and comment the poet’s explanation of the sec-
ond image (figure).
This calyx refers in a double ironic sense both to a cornucopia and the
vortex made by a sinking vessel. As soon as the water has closed over a
ship, this whirlpool sends up broken spars, wreckage, etc., which can be
alluded to as living hieroglyphs, making a scattered chapter so far as any
complete record of the recent ship and her crew is concerned. (Crane
[1926] 1997: 238–239)
What Crane does is building extra meaning from a concrete referent

(calyx ) by interpreting it as a replacement metaphor that fits the ship-
wreck schema hinted at in the poem. He does so via an inference based
on visual similarity, and the same applies to the pairing of wreckage with
hieroglyphs. The transition from hieroglyphs to scattered chapter is more
straightforward in being warranted by conceptual proximity—it is met-
onymic more than metaphoric. Just like in Stevens’s extended apposi-
tional series, Crane’s associative logic draws on non-salient inferences
of a perceptual or conceptual kind. The poet’s commentary sheds thus
light on his own writing process, demoting the obscurity Monroe com-
plains about to a side-effect, the outcome of a mode of thought—not
unlike Ashbery’s and Prynne’s arguments with regard to their difficulty
(see Sect. 2.2.7).
These subjective responses—even when they come from the very
author of the poem—only tell a partial story on difficulty. The applica-
tion of the model indeed makes us realise that the somewhat low acces-
sibility of Crane’s and Thomas’s poems is mitigated by two conspicuous
factors: first, as shown by the semantic coding in the table, the lexis is
concrete and imageable; and second, the highly structured textuality of
both poems, featuring retraceable semantic fields and a reasonably high
level of cohesion, gives a gestalt to their estranging situation models (see
Sect. 7.2.3).
Although both poems picture unfamiliar scenarios vividly, partici-
pants tend to be referentially natural in Thomas (e.g. sea, globe, stars )
and cultural in Crane (e.g. dice, compass, numbers ). This is an important
difference: together with the homodiegetic (Thomas) vs. heterodiegetic
(Crane) perspective taken in each poem, it largely accounts for the
246
D. Castiglione
sensation that the situation model is more mediated in Crane than in

Thomas. The notions of primary and secondary cognition, with which
Martindale attempts to explain the laws of artistic evolution (1991), are
a helpful interpretive heuristics. Primary cognition is ‘free-associative,
[…], the thought of dreams and reveries’; secondary cognition, on the
other hand, is ‘abstract, logical’ and ‘the thought of everyday, waking
reality’ (1991: 56). Now, although Crane is credited with pursuing a
‘non-representational logic of ecstasy’ (Grossman 2007: 156) of which
deviant collocations are the foremost textual symptom, the quota of pri-
mary cognition appears minor in Crane’s poem than in Thomas’s. ‘At
Melville’s Tomb’ operates a distinction between a textworld irreducible
to reason and a narrator who, as a stunned witness, is also a potential
interpreter of what he relays. This distinction is lost in ‘When Once the
Twilight Locks No Longer’: here, the speaker and his world merge in
a process of reciprocal identification that makes primary cognition sys-
temic while also favouring a feeling of sympathy that should enhance
the accessibility of Thomas’s poem in interpersonal terms (incidentally,
the address in ‘awake, my sleeper’ in l. 37 is part of the same strategy).5
As Martindale puts it, ‘any time you make a distinction, your thought is
relatively conceptual. Any time you see a similarity, your thought is rela-
tively primordial’ (1991: 57). In retrospect, then, the appositional series
in ‘What We See Is What We Think’ (see Sect. 7.1.2) can be reframed
in terms of primary cognition, in opposition to the secondary cognition
implicit in the counterpoint of empirical reality.
Another look at Table 7.1 makes us realise that Crane’s and Thomas’s
poems feature the same amount of noun–verb collocational violations,
so the much shorter ‘At Melville’s Tomb’ (16 vs. 42 lines) uses them
nearly three times more densely. Given that the combination of process
and participant underlying these structures constitutes the ‘experiential
centre of the clause’ (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 176), and that the
clause is ‘the central processing unit in the lexicogrammar’ (2004: 10;
see also Kintsch 1998: 69), noun–verb collocational violations are likely
to be more cognitively taxing than the phrasal violations that abound
in both poems. The lower accessibility of Crane’s poem also owes some-
thing to the underlying cultural schema being more specific (the leg-
acy of an important writer) than in Thomas’s (the myth of creation,
247
or Genesis—see Yaron 2010). In other words, Thomas’s poem offers a

more widely shared template to inhabit (to make sense of ) its situation
model compared to Crane’s.
In summary, accessibility in the two poems is obstructed by highly
individual styles that—in the wake of acknowledged precursors as
Rimbaud and Hopkins—disrupt mimesis via collocational violations.
This diffuse ideational unfamiliarity is, however, mitigated and ‘con-
trolled’ by ordered poetic structures (see Sect. 7.2.2) and highly struc-
tured textworlds (see Sect. 7.2.3). As for the differences, ‘When Once
the Twilight Locks No Longer’ offers minor resistance on account of
several factors: (1) the phrasal rather than clausal boundaries of said vio-
lations; (2) a homodiegetic speaker resulting in a more empathic read-
ing experience; (3) a more popular underlying schema likely to ease
top-down integration; and (4) the involvement of natural (often cos-
mic) as opposed to cultural (manufactured or semiotic) participants.
These factors signal a higher incidence of primary cognition, which
appeals to a more sensory and immersive reading experience compared
to ‘At Melville’s Tomb’.
7.2.2 Thwarted Readability? Moderate Syntactic

Complexity and End-Focus
The question mark in the heading is not a typo but a genuine sign that
the contribution of readability to the difficulty of either poem is far less
decisive than was true of accessibility. The main reason is that their syntax
seldom if ever exceeds the cognitive limits of readers’ working memory,
not to mention that segmentation choices further ease the progressive
integration of incoming information. It is not that Crane’s and Thomas’s
poems avoid subordination—this is not true as a cursory scanning eas-
ily reveals; it is, rather, that subordinate clauses, when they do occur, are
self-contained in a line or two and—especially in Crane’s poem—they
are internally simple: as a rule they are not modified by adverbials nor
do they feature subordinate (or embedded) structures themselves. Thus,
we tend not to lose track of the main clause: when building a textbase
and situation model out of the poems, our attention is made to follow a
248
D. Castiglione
hierarchical path whereby primary propositional units are enriched, but

not overshadowed by secondary propositional units.
Let us take ‘At Melville’s Tomb’: the non-restrictive relative clause
interposed in the first main clause (‘he saw’) spans a mere two words.
And the three circumstance adverbials that precede and that cue the
narrator’s viewpoint (one of time—the frequency adverb often; and two
of place—the prepositional phrases beneath the wave, from this ledge )
span just a line and are therefore processed together ‘on the fly’ (on the
proposal that lines are processed as units in working memory, see Fabb
2014). The same holds true of the next sentence, where a short tempo-
ral clause (‘as he watched’) is interposed within the main clause (‘Their
numbers […] beat on the dusty shore’, ll. 3–4]). Overall, this princi-
ple is applied throughout the poem: in l. 10, two coordinated partici-
ple clauses with temporal function are confined to a line (‘its lashings
charmed and malice reconciled’, also an instance of syntactic parallel-
ism) and, just like the space adverbial preceding it (‘in the circuit calm
of one vast coil’ l. 9), pave the way to the main clause. This in turn
obeys the principle of end-focus, that is, the tendency to place the
most important information of a sentence (here the main clause) at the
end. True, integration might be somewhat harder for the second quat-
rain in which, just like for Stevens’s poem (but not to the same extent),
clauses and phrases are apposed and therefore implicated more loosely
than if explicit syntactic markers were used: ‘A scattered chapter, livid
hieroglyph, / The portent wound in corridors of shells’ (ll. 7–8). The
same holds true of the last line (‘This fabulous shadow only the sea
keeps’), which hinges on a syntactic ambiguity: shadow and sea could
alternatively be read as either subject or object. Still, these are local
opacities at the syntax/semantics interface responding to ideas of mul-
tiplicity and indeterminacy better suited to obscurity than to difficulty.
Compared to ‘At Melville’s Tomb’, syntax in ‘When Once the Twilight
Locks No Longer’ appears more complex, given that sentences generally
unfold throughout several lines. And yet, the same hierarchical principle
applies by means of which key information units are retained in read-
ers’ working memory. The first stanza opens with a subordinate tempo-
ral clause (‘When…’, also found at the beginning of the second and the
sixth stanza) which features a reduced relative clause (‘[that was] locked
249
in the long worm…’) and another coordinate clause introduced by nor.

At this point, we get to the coordinated clauses in l. 4 (‘the mouth of
time sucked’) and in l. 6 (‘swallowed dry the waters’) concluding the
stanza. Although the syntax is more complex here than in ‘At Melville’s
Tomb’, as there are two levels of subordination, the principle of end-
focus once more ensures that the provisional situation model built out of
each stanza is a structured one. The remaining stanzas never exceed this
still manageable syntactic complexity. In the second stanza, for instance,
the main clause in l. 9 and the –ing clause that follows (‘I sent my crea-
ture scouting on the globe’) are elaborated by an apposed parenthetical
(‘That globe itself of hair and bone’, l. 10) that organises information
horizontally, just like coordination does. This instance of apposition is
less demanding than the aforementioned one in Crane’s poem or that in
Stevens’s poem, as it explicitly elaborates on globe (cohesively repeated
in quasi-anadiplosis) rather than juxtaposing indirectly related elements.
Once the information focus is shifted from the speaker’s act of sending
his creature ‘scouting on the globe’ to globe itself, the remainder of the
stanza coherently promotes globe to a grammatical subject (‘that globe
[…] had stringed’, ll. 11–12). Thomas never strays from the principle of
building up to two levels of subordination spanning just one line each,
as shown in the relative clause postmodifying globe and featuring a par-
enthetical in it (l. 11, ‘that, sewn to me by nerve and brain’).
Although far from exhaustive, my syntactic analysis demonstrates that
integration—on which readability heavily hinges—is never seriously
threatened in the two poems. While especially in Thomas’s poem read-
ers’ eyes may occasionally need to jump back and forth to keep track
of given and incoming information, the main clauses are constantly
made salient by the following factors, either combined or in isolation:
the principle of end-focus, the reduced size of interposed adverbials or
subordinate clauses and a strong tendency for syntactic units to match
lines—which makes the few markedly enjambed lines foregrounded
(e.g. ll. 2, 6 and 13 in Crane’s poem; ll. 1 and 10 in Thomas’s). Finally,
it is worth mentioning the role of literary structure in easing read-
ability: each quatrain in Crane’s poem and each sestet in Thomas’s
focuses on a facet or stage of thematic development, unravelled within
the typographical boundaries of the stanza; and an array of rhymes
250
D. Castiglione
(e.g. bELLS-shELLS, Crane, ll. 5–8; tOWN-dOWN, Thomas, ll. 38–40)

and half rhymes (e.g. cOIL-reconcILED, Crane, ll.9–10; lONGER-
fINGER, Thomas, ll. 1–2) primes words in end-line position, aiding
integration by stressing the highly structured textuality of both poems.
7.2.3 Interpretability and Obscurity: Lyrical I, Narrative

Schema and Simple Replacement Metaphors
As argued in 7.2.1, the speakers of both Crane’s and Thomas’s poems

are witnesses of events that are clearly set apart from ordinary expe-
rience, tapping (like Stevens’s poem) into metaliterary themes:
the inheritance of a great writer whose work and imaginative world are
hinted at in a heartfelt homage (‘At Melville’s Tomb’) and an allegory
of literary creation whereby the referent behind ‘my creature’ (l. 9), ‘my
own ambassador’ (l. 33) and ‘my sleeper’ (l. 37) is presumably the poem
itself that painfully separates from its author and acquires a life on its
own (‘When Once the Twilight Locks No Longer’).6 It is this adhesion
to niche themes that which makes these informative and worth relaying,
thereby fulfilling the convention of significance. So, while in Strand’s and
Betjeman’s poems the precondition for significance lies in their themes
representing a shared and relatable human condition, in Crane’s and
Thomas’s it lies, by contrast, in the representation of a personal condition
not meant to be shared experientially but rather participated through
its literary rendition. Of course, all this bears the signs of a Romantic
(and then Symbolist) poetics, the birth of which Steiner associated with
ontological difficulty (1978; see Sect. 2.1.1). Indeed, a possible model
for both poems is Coleridge’s 1797 poem ‘Kubla Khan’ (1997): here a
speaker feverishly relays, in the past simple, the extraordinary appearance
of an exotic land (the Mongol Empire) where ‘the shadow of the dome
of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves’ (ll. 31–32).
One does not need to produce a detailed literary interpretation of ‘At
Melville’s Tomb’ or ‘Once the Twilight Locks No Longer’ to realise that
the poetics they appeal to is itself a warranty for a kind of individualistic
significance to emerge; obscurity precisely stems from our having cer-
tain intuitions about a poem’s significance (e.g. my theme formulation
251
at the beginning of this section, the endorsement of an illustrious lit-

erary tradition) while also entertaining a hard-to-articulate feeling that
much of that significance is barred from us. But how is significance
built in the two poems? According to the model, the lack of an explicit
subject that is ‘resonant’ almost by default (like in ‘The Late Hour’
and ‘Loneliness’) as well as the violation of empirical factuality should
prompt readers to shift their standards of relevance from the situation
model to the theme, that is from the immediate satisfaction resulting
from schema-reinforcement (like in Strand and Betjeman) to an infer-
ence-based formulation of abstract meanings that could pay off the
deferral of immediate satisfaction.
Crane’s and Thomas’s poems are textually contrived to fulfil the read-
er’s quest for significance, which is why they can be located towards
the pole of obscurity rather than of nonsensicality or baffling literal-
ness (see Chapter 8). First of all, they adhere to the poetics of the lyric
in foregrounding individual consciousness (Carney 2008), reflected in
the presence of a unitary poetic self—be it the narrator of ‘At Melville’s
Tomb’ or the speaker in ‘When Once the Twilight Locks No Longer’.
This is a fundamental organising principle, for it ensures that the poem
is read as if it were an utterance to be faithfully trusted. That the speaker
presents himself as unitary and trustworthy is, in turn, crucially pro-
jected in his unwillingness to renounce structured discourse—key signs
of this being (1) the presence of narrativity, albeit elliptical (Crane) or
allegorical (Thomas, Stevens), (2) of discernible and recurrent semantic
fields throughout, (3) foregrounding of (traditional) literary form, and
(4) an unfailing adhesion to one degree of formality, as register-mixing
would undermine the stability of the self (see Sect. 7.3).
While the absence of these four LIDs is of course also true of the
easy poem (see Chapter 6), the difference between these and Stevens’s,
Crane’s and Thomas’s poems essentially lies in the degree of relatabil-
ity of the subject, as well as in certain stylistic techniques through
which the textworlds are represented (hindering, to an extent, topic
identification itself ). These techniques are mostly to do with a sys-
tematic deployment of restricted collocations abundantly discussed
before (see Sects. 7.1.1 and 7.2.1). Another related feature, but one
more directly involved in exegetic interpretation and therefore in the
252
D. Castiglione
creation of obscurity, is simple replacement metaphors (Brooke-Rose

1958: 26). There are cues in Thomas’s poem to interpret the aforemen-
tioned ‘my creature’ (and by implication also ‘my own ambassador’ and
‘my sleeper’) as referring to the poem itself: intertextually, the analogy
between one’s son and one’s poetry is already in Ben Johnson’s ‘On My
First Son’ (1603; see Hühn et al. 2016: 20–24) and in Mallarmé’s ‘Don
Du Poème’ (1865; see Riffaterre 1984 [1978]: 150); and textually, the
explicit reference in l. 18 (‘He drowned his father ’s magic in a dream’,
emphasis added). Likewise, but more tentatively, dice in Crane (l. 2)
may be read as a simple replacement metaphor embodying the abstract
concept of as ‘risk’ or ‘chance’ (this is confirmed by Crane himself in
the letter to Monroe mentioned earlier: ‘dice as a symbol of chance
and circumstance is also implied’; Crane 1997 [1926]: 238). All in all,
obscurity is cognitively made of a cluster of inferences motivated by
the promise of significance and directed to theme formulation, passing
through the filter of local semantic incongruities.
7.2.4 Summary
Both for ‘At Melville’s Tomb’ and ‘When Once the Twilight Locks No
Longer’, the model has posited obscurity effects resulting from a con-
flicting perception of ideational disorder (which reduces accessibility)
and structural order (which warrants for significance). Metaphors and
semantic incongruities LIDs are responsible for the former aspect; the
lack or diminished presence of discourse LIDs is responsible for the
latter. In this respect, Crane’s and Thomas’s poems belong to the same
genealogy of difficulty as Stevens’s ‘What We See Is What We Think’:
the initial difficulty caused by reduced accessibility may give rise to
obscurity. Where Crane and Thomas differ from Stevens is in the online
experience of difficulty captured by readability: as I have argued, the fre-
quent match between lineation and clause-based syntax in Crane’s and
Thomas’s poems makes them easier to process than the frequent mis-
match between lineation and phrase-based syntax in Stevens’s poem.
In summary, while the three poems are at once difficult and obscure,
Stevens’s poem poses more syntagmatic challenges than Crane’s or
Thomas’s.
253
Finally, more fine-grained differences emerge once we consider how

each dimension of difficulty is construed. For instance, whereas lack of
accessibility in Stevens is both ideational and interpersonal, in Crane
and Thomas it is ideational only, owing to their elements of subjectiv-
ity (e.g. fabulous, l. 16, Crane; first-person narration, Thomas). And
within the ideational level, Thomas’s poem is comparatively more acces-
sible than Crane’s due to the underlying script of Genesis (which also
alerts readers to the poem’s significance), the phrasal rather than clausal
nature of most semantic incongruences, and a foregrounding of primor-
dial content through the semantic fields of the body and the cosmos.
Figures 7.3 and 7.4 diagram these and further similarities and differ-
ences, with which the section concludes.
Fig. 7.3 ‘At Melville’s Tomb’: breakdown of difficulty (text effects and LIDs)
254
D. Castiglione
Fig. 7.4 ‘When Once the Twilight Locks No Longer’: breakdown of difficulty

(text effects and LIDs)
7.3 Problematising the Category: Geoffrey

Hill’s Stanza 33
The ‘elaborate utterance’ type works as a good interpretive heuristics in
the cases of Stevens, Crane and Thomas: these poems might be concep-
tualised as peculiar utterances from a lyrical speaker (Thomas) or from
a less obviously involved narrator (Stevens, Crane). The last poem ana-
lysed in this chapter, however, is literally intended as an utterance:
255
33
1 YES, I know: fantasies see us out
2 Like a general amnesty, with son
3 Et lumière and civic freedoms.
4 Something mùst give, make common cause,
5 In frank exchange with defamation.
6 So talk telegraphese, say: FORTITUDE
7 NEVER MY FORTE. BLOOD-IN-URINE SAMPLES
8 RUIN EURO-CULTURE. Try NO to eách
9 Succession of expenses; nominal
10 Acceptance, each makeshift honour botched
11 As though by royal appointment. And PASS to all
12 Duties, rights, privileges, of despair.
Utterances, the reader will recall, are instances of language in action,

usually spoken, the discourse counterparts to such theoretical units as
the clause or the sentence in grammar. The collection hosting Stanza 33
is indeed titled Speech! Speech! (Hill, 2000). As argued by Ann Hassan,
the poem is ‘a compelling example of the difficulties inherent in the act
of making public utterance in the contemporary age’ (2012: 3; emphasis
added). This prepares the reader to expect the poetic discourse to be mod-
elled after speeches, a hybrid discourse type combining spoken delivery
and written textuality. Like the remaining 119 stanzas of the collection,
Stanza 33 fulfils these expectations while subtly sabotaging them: not
only is the assumedly public speech contaminated with traits of interior
monologue; but the sketched monologue itself is largely an ironic echoing
of media discourses, so it is at once deprived of the authentic touch of
the interior monologue and of the official, solemn or inspiring nature of
speeches. It is, in fact, both a parody and a satire, which makes the level of
significance more mediated than has so far been the case (see Sect. 7.3.3).
There are further analytical complications in that Hill’s stanza is not a
standalone poem, but a self-contained fragment within a long poem. To
mitigate these, I will give an overview of the collection, suggesting how such
contextual awareness can illuminate the individual fragment. In a review,
Bromwich insightfully proposes that ‘‘‘Speech! Speech!’’ aims to be read
256
D. Castiglione
as a single continuous gesture, though the idiom of the poem tends toward
fragmentation ’ (Bromwich 2001; emphasis added). At the macro-end of
the scale, the collection displays an iconically motivated structure whereby,
as Bromwich reminds us, each stanza corresponds to one of the 120 days
of Sodom from De Sade’s eponymous work (1785). At the micro-end of
the scale, the formal unity of each stanza is undermined by LIDs ranging
from graphological deviation to register-mixing and examined in successive
sections. Such interplay between unity and dispersion, between order and
chaos, has been argued to aesthetically reflect deconstructivist principles:
The same question that troubled Derrida about the notion of a decon-
structivist architecture – how can one deconstruct and still have architec-
ture? – troubles long poems modelled on deconstructivist architecture:
how can one build a large-scale poetic structure and deconstruct it at the
same time? (McHale 2004: 14–5)
McHale’s question applies to several postmodernist long poems, one of

which by Geoffrey Hill himself—his Mercian Hymns (1971) reviving the
high modernist poetics of Eliot and Jones (McHale 2004: 118). The more
recent Speech, Speech! is another test bed in this sense: it is in fact possible
to sample Hill’s difficulty through a single stanza, also considering that each
stanza enjoys a certain degree of independence on account of its being num-
bered and presented on a separate page (see also Hassan 2012: 5). When
moving into obscurity, though, the wider context (e.g. the neighbouring
stanzas, the intertexts) will gain considerable weight (see Sect. 7.3.3).
7.3.1 Reduced Accessibility: Lack of Coherence, Abstract

Words, Multiple Addressees
Participants found Hill’s stanza somewhat less accessible than Stevens’s

poem, as reflected in its higher average comprehension score (3.1 vs.
2.4, in a scale from 0 to 5, where 0 = very easy). Although crudely syn-
thetic, this measure is a gateway to more detailed evidence concerning
the degree of intersubjective topic agreement in the stanza (Table 7.3).
As in Stevens’s poem, there is no majority consensus regarding the
aboutness of Hill’s stanza. Four out of ten respondents’ comments feature
257
Table 7.3 Wordlist Word Freq. across participants

for responses to Q3—
FANTASIES/FANTASY 4.00
Stanza 33
DREAMS 3.00
INSTEAD 3.00
LIFE 3.00
SOCIETY 3.00
DESPAIR 2.00
EURO 2.00
PEOPLE 2.00
POET 2.00
THEM 2.00
fantasy (with or without plural inflection), and three out of ten dreams,
life, society and instead.7 Interestingly, only one of these words occurs
verbatim in Stanza 33, which cues a certain degree of elaboration in the
responses. Indeed, these keywords typically occur in thematic inferences
that go beyond the selective recalling or paraphrasing of content, and are
therefore much in the same vein as in responses to Stevens’s poem:
‘I think the poem is about media’s hold on people and the overall
power media can have on society’ (Participant 2)
‘A series of declarations on what is wrong with life and how we
should live it’ (Participant 3)
‘The poet’s frustration with a society that encourages despair
because it is so constricting. Of course fantasy is a way to escape
but only because it is the only thing left’ (Participant 5)
‘It is about everyone making their dreams a common cause, instead
of just living and accepting everything life gives you’ (Participant 9)
Crucially, these comments conform to Culler’s convention of sig-

nificance (2002 [1975]: 205; see Sect. 3.5) for they touch upon
themes that are core to human concerns. And as stated in earlier sec-
tions, envisaging significance is a necessary precondition for obscurity
(see Sect. 7.3.3). The readers’ relative emphasis on society is clearly
warranted by the semantic field of law (general amnesty, civic free-
doms, duties, rights ); their mention of dreams can instead be associ-
ated with the near-synonym fantasies, the only one retrieved from the
text on account of its salient, text-initial position. Life is not captured
258
D. Castiglione
by any conventional sense relation, but it stems from more indirect

inferencing—possibly the relevance to life of both ‘fantasies’ and ‘soci-
ety’, hinting at its private and communal sphere, respectively.
Some of the comments verging on issues of local intelligibility ver-
balise incomplete or impeded lexical access due to Hill’s deployment of
specialised vocabulary (see Sect. 4.2.5.1):
‘I am not sure what ‘telegraphese’ means’ (Participant 1)

‘Words from languages I am not fluent in make those parts harder
to understand’ (Participant 9)
Besides the French et lumière (see Sect. 7.3.3), most of the words
respondents struggled with are of Latin or French origin: defamation,
telegraphese, fortitude, succession, acceptance, appointment, privileges.
Polysyllabic words like these have been recognised as one of Hill’s most
distinctive stylistic markers, tuning the reader’s ear to the diachronic
stratification of the English vocabulary (McHale 2004: 108). Moreover,
Latinate words are ‘associated not only with a formal, public style but
also with a range of meaning that is primarily abstract’ (Adamson 1998:
573). On Adamson’s account, then, Latinate vocabulary is key in con-
ferring Stanza 33 both a public dimension and an aura of abstract-
edness. As these are abstract words, their imageability is also low,
giving rise to a more conceptual situation model compared to those of
Stevens’s, Crane’s and Thomas’s poems.8
Participants also showed sensitivity to the fragmentary textuality of

the stanza:
‘Poem starts as though it is a section out of a longer piece’ (Partic-
ipant 2)
‘Cannot find meaning in this as it seems to not fit in the poem’
[referring to lines 6–9] (Participant 5)
‘Some of the lines are fragments and thus do not make sense in the
initial reading’ (Participant 6)
Related to the lack of coherence LID (see Sect. 4.2.8.2), these com-
ments verbalise thwarted integration, simultaneously affecting
259
Table 7.4 Sample occurrences of ‘Yes I know’ in the COCA

SPOK You know, freedom of choice, Bill and freedom of—(CROSSTALK)
O’REILLY: Yes I know that but you
SPOK Are you going to take him down or
what? MARTIN: Yes I know but – but you know what
FIC And did you know, she is a scientist too? “ Yes I know, Achi!” the
child squealed and ran off to interrupt her
accessibility and readability. The first respondent’s intuition is accounted

for by the fact that the lexical bundle ‘YES, I know’ (l. 1) normally
occurs in conversation as part of an adjacency pair—a response token
presupposing a previous utterance (Table 7.4).
The occurrences come from spoken conversation (SPOK) or fiction
(FIC), where simulated speech is often exploited to achieve effects of real-
ism (Leech and Short 2007 [1981]: 160–166). Borrowing from these reg-
isters, Hill puts in relief the dialogic nature of language and so partakes
to the long-standing aesthetic pursuit of representing ‘common speech’
from Romanticism onwards (Adamson 1999).9 Given this background,
‘YES, I know’ cues the lack of autonomy of the stanza by presupposing
preceding discourse. In cognitive terms, this lexical bundle most likely
activates a conversation text schema from the reader’s long-term memory.
Such schema must include some intuitive knowledge of well-formedness,
notably the requirement of adjacency pairs, leading in turn to the strong
assumption that something before has been omitted or left implicit.
The backward search for the first part of the adjacency pair yields no
results though, for the previous stanza does not end on a statement pre-
supposing shared knowledge, one that would warrant ‘YES, I know’ as
a response token. Rather, by featuring the idiomatic expressions ‘MAKE
ANSWER’ and ‘confessional to the bone’ (stanza 32; ll. 7, 12), it shifts
the grounds from a mimesis of conversation to a sort of metalinguistic
commentary:
MAKE ANSWER here

submits a bulk recognizance: e.g.,
as in heart’s blood slammers against appeal;
if instress then with unselfknowing temper
confessional to the bone.
(Stanza 32; ll. 7–12)
260
D. Castiglione
Cut off from the interpersonal (exchange-based) norms of communica-

tion it is normally entrenched in, ‘YES, I know’ is turned into an aes-
thetic illustration of the speaker’s impulse to confess. As a result, the
coherence across the two stanzas is not experiential and top-down (i.e.
warranted by a text schema) but rather conceptual and bottom-up (i.e.
warranted by inferences affecting individual words, collocations or lexi-
cal bundles).
The perception of fragmentation is also indebted to graphological
deviation: capitalisation in ll.1 and 6–8, and unusual graphic accents in
ll. 4 and 8 (mùst and eách ). As argued in 3.2.2, graphological deviation
prompts a heightened attention resulting in a slowed-down, possibly
deeper processing (Emmott et al. 2006). The capitalised non-sequiturs
in ll. 6–8 (‘FORTITUDE / NEVER MY FORTE. BLOOD-IN-URIN
SAMPLES / RUIN EURO-CULTURE’) discursively mimic newspaper
headlinese while humorously undermining their drive to relevance and
informativity. The stretch from ‘FORTITUDE’ to ‘EURO-CULTURE’
is incoherent both extrinsically (looked at in its co-text) and intrinsi-
cally (taken in isolation). Extrinsically, there is no experiential transition
between it and the preceding discourse, just a bridging inference of a
metalinguistic kind: namely that the properties of telegraphese (l. 6) are
exemplified by the capitalised lines. The stanza therefore glosses itself,
intensifying the autotelic nature of the poetic text (Leech 2008: 105)
already emergent in Stevens, Crane and Thomas, but kept at bay in
Strand and Betjeman. Intrinsically, the capitalised clauses (the former
with deleted ‘to be’) construe unrelated figures: one revolving around
moral virtues, and the other voicing out economic concerns.
The concision demanded by telegraphese also establishes a cause–
effect relationship that appears anything but straightforward: ‘BLOOD-
IN-URINE SAMPLES / RUIN EURO-CULTURE’ (ll. 7–8) has been
interpreted by Hassan as hinting ‘at a legacy of violence’, since ‘BLOOD-
IN-URINE’ refers ‘to prisoners being beaten until they pass blood in
their urine (haematuria)’ (Hassan 2012: 102). The statement is so con-
densed, with a sudden ontological transition from MATERIAL OBJECT
to SEMIOTIC INSTITUTION, that—were it not for Hassan’s infer-
ence—integration of the two parts would likely fail, with surface effects
of humorous nonsensicality. So, the fact that word choice has been guided
261
by considerations of orthographic similarity (i.e. the anagrammatic

inclusions of forte in fortitude and of ruin in urine ) in no way lessens
these processing challenges at integration level. The comicality lingering
behind this ontological shift is, moreover, halted by the negative conno-
tation of RUIN and the formal register of the Latinate vocabulary. When
these pieces are placed back into their co-text and seen as pieces of exter-
nal information reported by a pugnacious, confrontational speaker (the
preceding say working either as a discourse marker or as a reporting verb),
what emerges is a satirical critique of verbal consumerism, of the principle
that information ought to be packed for quick consumption regardless of
whether loss of sense is threatened or not. It is at this fundamental level,
of strenuous opposition against the loss or degradation of meaning, that
Hill’s stanza cannot but be obscure (see Sect. 7.3.3), thus giving readers
the conditions for their own ‘restorative’ meaning-making process.
That the convention of significance guides readers’ inferences in the
face of local incongruities is indeed shown by the response of one of
them who glosses ‘BLOOD-IN-URINE SAMPLES’ as follows: ‘per-
haps a ref. to the medical system → proposing a sense of danger / threat
in this unhealthy age?’. In this comment, the discrete object samples
(incidentally, the only concrete noun in the poem alongside its modi-
fiers blood and urine ) is made to stand for a more general and abstract
semantic associate, ‘medical system’. Through a further inferential move,
‘medical system’ leads to ‘unhealthy age’, in which the clinical and polit-
ical implications give way to existential ones. The sequencing of these
associations follows an increasing emphasis on core human concerns:
urine samples are trivial per se, and the medical system encompassing
them becomes meaningful only if allows a transition towards something
still broader—nothing less than the state of civilisation.
Overall, such fragmentary textuality brought by quasi-non-sequiturs
and blurred textual boundaries (the opening feels abrupt, the ending
feels provisional) consorts with abstract nouns in building a textbase and
situation model more opaque and centrifugal than in Stevens, Crane or
Thomas. Hill’s utter avoidance of definite determiners partakes to the
same strategy. Partly a result of headlinese, the lack of definite articles
is still striking as it runs against general norms of usage—‘the’ being by
and far the most frequent word in English (source: COCA). While this
absence arguably lies below the threshold of immediate perception, it
262
D. Castiglione
does contribute to a feeling of non-situatedness or daunting omnipres-

ence where nothing is clear-cut, from those fleeting and disembodied
fantasies (l.1) onwards.
The poems analysed earlier offer a visual rendition of individual worlds
by means of narration; the ‘genetically modified’ interior monologue
template of Stanza 33, by contrast, enacts a purely verbal rendition of a
world which the speaker has to share with others willy-nilly (deep down,
this difference is the difference between the lyrical and the dramatic
genre). Formally, Hill’s stanza ticks all boxes of the interior monologue
stylistic checklist (Wales 2011 [1990]: 231–232): first person pronoun,
present tense and foregrounded deixis.10 Functionally, the fact that the
interior monologue technique suggests ‘inchoate thought processes, or
the rapid succession of thoughts or topic shifts ’ (Wales 2011 [1990]: 232;
emphasis added) can account for the abrupt ideational shifts in the
stanza. The sequencing of such shifts requires some amount of inferen-
tial activity but is far from unpredictable: the collective reference behind
common cause (l. 4) harks back to us (l. 1); telegraphese (l. 6) shares with
frank exchange and defamation (l. 5) the semantic field of ‘communi-
cation’ etymologically alluded to by common; and exchange itself also
belongs to the economic domain clearly mentioned in EURO (l. 8) and
expenses (l. 9). Far less obvious than the monologue textual schema is the
quiz-show situational schema hinging on the three capitalised answer
words ‘YES’, ‘NO’ and ‘PASS’, as subtly noticed by Hassan (2012: 101).
In spite of the interior monologue textual schema, access to an indi-
vidual consciousness is severely hampered. This is because some parts
(i.e. the idiomatic expressions, the collocations, the capitalised clauses)
appear to have an exogenous provenance and to be simply borrowed by a
speaker-ventriloquist. Other lines can instead be attributed to the speak-
er’s authentic self (like in the monologue tradition) on behalf of their
semantic density befitting the requirements of a reflective consciousness
(e.g. ll. 1–3, ‘fantasies see us out / Like a general amnesty, with son / Et
lumière and civic freedoms’ and ll. 11–12, ‘And PASS to all / Duties,
rights, privileges, of despair’). Overall, Stanza 33 seems to formally enact
Bakhtin’s claim that ‘every utterance participates in the “unitary lan-
guage” (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time
partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying
263
forces)’ (Bakhtin 1981: 272). So some remnants of confessional authen-

ticity, inherited from high modernism, conflictingly cohabit with a post-
modernist outlook, for postmodernism treats ‘the “self ” as a construct,
not as an organic unity’ (Mellors 2005: 23) and likewise concedes that
‘art is always already enmeshed in ideology’ (2005: 41).
Register-mixing, the LID that problematises the identity of the
poetic persona, severely affects the perception of unity, intention and
finality and thus can be baffling for readers. As noticed by McHale with
regard to the earlier Mercian Hymns (1971):
Markers of style and register ought to allow us to reconstruct a speak-

er’s social identity and the social situation of utterance. But how are we
to make situational sense of a patchwork of registers such as we find in
hymn X? (2004: 125)
Although tracing a unitary speaker is problematic in Stanza 33, inter-

personal accessibility is high owing to the imperative mood interspersed
throughout (i.e. talk, say, try, PASS ). Indeed, imperative forms ‘prompt
us to infer an I-You dialogue, even when the presence of an I or a You
has not been explicitly stated’ (Adamson 2006: 21). Yet the referent
behind the implied second person pronoun appears multiple: Is the
addressee the reader, forcibly involved, compellingly exhorted to act,
her perlocution inscribed in the very textuality of the stanza? Or is it
the speaker himself in a continuous self-addressing act? Or is it a fictive
audience, as multi-modally suggested by the book cover of the Penguin
Edition featuring a painting by Honoré Daumier where an applaud-
ing public makes eye contact with the viewer? Uncertainty of addressee
attribution stems from the difficulty of positioning the second person
pronoun ‘on the proximal-distal axis’ (Adamson 2006: 20). The leeway
allowed by ‘you’ gives rise to an interpersonal multiplicity that bestows
significance, hence the condition for obscurity, on Hill’s stanza (see
Sect. 7.3.3). Incidentally, the wide reference attribution range behind
the implied ‘you’ is a processing hurdle not found in any of the poems
so far analysed, and it produces ‘an ontological hesitation between the
virtual and the actual’ (Herman 1994: 378).
264
D. Castiglione
7.3.2 Thwarted Readability: Informativity, Syntactic

Ambiguity and Syntax–Line Mismatch
At 72.45 ms/char, the average reading speed for Stanza 33 is virtually iden-
tical to that of Stevens’s poem (73.39 ms/char). At least in quantitative
terms, then, the two poems offer a comparable experience of online tex-
tual resistance. This section will investigate whether such close similarity of
measured effects stems from a deployment of similar LIDs; in doing so, it
will provide a qualitative counterpart to this quantitative piece of data.
One key LID in Hill’s stanza is informativity (see Sect. 4.2.8.1), split
into its two subcomponents—type/token ratio and lexical density (the
proportion of lexical to functional words). Hill’s stanza has an extremely
high type/token ratio (91.55), cueing an almost absolute lack of repe-
titions. The opposite is true of Stevens’s poem, whose repetitions bring
the type/token ratio down to 65.36, almost the same as Strand’s poem
(61.90). How is it possible, given this huge gap, that the reading speed
for the two texts is so close? Either type/token ratio is not a strong
LID when it comes to textual resistance, or too many other factors
are involved. I am favourable to the second option, which is also a
reminder that only an experimental setting manipulating each LID
separately would allow teasing out each individual contribution.
Although this is not unfeasible, it belongs to a later stage of theory
development (see Sect. 3.2).
One of such factors is that repetitions in Stevens are not cohesive but
expressive, so each repeated instance is not a previously accessed piece
of information but an occasion inviting new inferences (and, by impli-
cation, causing longer reading times). As for Hill’s stanza, its high type/
token ratio proves that the register it draws upon is that of speeches:
despite its spoken features (I–you–we deixis, commands, collocations,
sentence-opening conjunctions, reported clauses…), there is no redun-
dancy, and nothing of the fillers, incomplete utterances and concrete
vocabulary typical of casual conversation.
Lexical density in Stanza 33 and in ‘What We See Is What We Think’
was analysed with the freely available online tool Analyse My Writing
(http://www.analyzemywriting.com/). It is 66.18% in Stanza 33,
therefore comparable to informative genres such as Wikipedia articles
265
(around 60%) and 52.78% in Stevens’s poem, closer to average pro-

portions for fictional prose (around 50%; source: Analyse My Writing).
Hill’s stanza is more densely packed with information than Stevens’s
poem, whether one considers type/token ratio, lexical density or both.
Another factor that plausibly accounts for the slow-down reading of
Hill’s stanza is the complexity of vocabulary already discussed with
regard to accessibility. The aforementioned online tool has revealed
that words in Stanza 33 are on average 5.24 syllables long, remarkably
more than the 4.37 figure for Stevens’s poem. On the other hand, the
clause-based syntax of Hill’s stanza may ease the processing of the text
compared to the phrase-based syntax of Stevens’s poem (see Sect. 7.1.2),
thus levelling out the slow-down effects of Hill’s stanza’s higher informa-
tivity. This in turn leads to the proposal that resistance, which is part of
difficulty, is like the latter a dynamic system where different combina-
tions of LIDs may yield similar behavioural outcomes.
Syntactic complexity appears minimal if measured in terms of subor-
dination: except for two projected clauses—in l. 1, starting from ‘fanta-
sies sees us out’ and cast in free direct thought, and in l. 6, starting with
‘FORTITUDE’ and cast in free direct speech, there are no instances
of subordination. The syntax gets more complex when one considers
phrasal post-modification: the already mentioned first projected clause
is postmodified by two conjoined circumstance adverbials of manner
in the form of prepositional phrases (‘like a general amnesty’, l. 2, also
a simile; and ‘with son / Et lumière and civic freedoms’, ll. 2–3). This
is still manageable complexity, though, because at sixteen words the
projected clause is not likely to become a burden on working mem-
ory. Conspicuous adverbial post-modification resurfaces in the passage
going from ‘nominal’ to ‘appointment’ (ll. 9–11): here the phrases look
apposed as in Stevens’s poem, prompting us to read them as reformu-
lations of each other; the last of these phrases (‘each makeshift honour
botched / As though by royal appointment’) is the most complex with
its embedded –ed participle clause followed by a comparative phrase.
Interestingly, it is possible to extend this phrase-based syntax to
the last line and a half, from ‘And PASS’ to ‘despair’, if PASS is read as
a noun. This parsing option is semantically primed by civic freedoms (l.
1) and syntactically by the preceding noun phrases in object position
266
D. Castiglione
(NO, undergoing interjection-noun conversion, l. 8; nominal accept-

ance, ll. 9–10) that allow to posit an ellipted ‘try’ before PASS. The verb
option is pragmatically primed by the aforementioned quiz-show schema,
semantically by succession (l. 9) and royal appointment (l. 11), since ‘pass’
implies transmission by inheritance (OED ), and syntactically by the other
verbal forms in the imperative mood: say (l. 6) and try (l. 8). This ambi-
guity is permanent and an element of polyvalence that befits obscurity
(see Sect. 7.3.3). The syntactic ambiguity that comes next (all / Duties, ll.
11–12) is by contrast temporary: although in the co-text the quantifier all
functions as a modifier, until we have left l. 11 there remains the possibil-
ity that it is parsed as a quantifying pronoun (e.g. ‘all… of you’). A prop-
erly designed experiment (e.g. a sentence-completion task combined with
think-aloud protocols) may bring empirical substance to this hypothesis.
Where Stanza 33 and ‘What We See Is What We Think’ resemble
each other is in the constant mismatch between syntax and line, that
is, in the overwhelming majority of enjambed over end-stopped lines.
Only three out of twelve lines are end-stopped in Hill, so enjambed
lines account for 75% of the total—a proportion very close to the
72.2% figure of Stevens’s poem. Applying Levin’s classification already
relied upon in 6.1.2, it appears that all enjambments in Hill’s stanza
are of medium intensity, roughly balanced between those interrupt-
ing clauses (five out of nine) and those interrupting phrases (four out
of nine). This parallels what observed in Stevens’s poem, where most
enjambments belong to the same types, except for one key distribu-
tional difference: while Stevens’s poem rhythmically marks off its
ending by gradually abating the force of its enjambments in a musi-
cal diminuendo, most strong enjambments in Hill’s stanza are found
in its second part (ll. 8, 9, 11). A crescendo is then enacted whose
abrupt termination in l. 12 marks a discontinuous, provisional rhythm
that echoes the fragmentary textuality of the stanza (see Sect. 7.3.1).
This syntax/line mismatch is also instrumental in boosting wordplay:
it does so by enabling the temporary syntactic (word class) ambigu-
ity of all (l. 11) and the cross-linguistic lexical ambiguity of son (l.
1), a homograph of the French for ‘sound’ (‘son et lumière’ referring
to ‘outdoor multimedia shows’, Hassan 2012: 102); and by putting
in relief the two main senses of the polysemous adjective nominal
267
(l. 9) as well as an unexpected clause completion (i.e. ‘BLOOD-IN-

URINE SAMPLES / RUIN EURO-CULTURE’, see Sect. 7.3.1). All
in all, syntax–line mismatch deautomatises reading by favouring online
inferences that are integral part of the experience of significance and
obscurity.
7.3.3 Interpretability and Obscurity: Intertextuality,

Metalinguistic Reflexivity
When analysing the dimension of accessibility in Hill’s stanza, some of

my stylistic observations almost ‘naturally’ leaned towards an exegetic
interpretation, that is, towards an attribution of intention and there-
fore of meaningfulness. In particular, the conflict between the formal
tribute paid to the interior monologue technique on the one hand
and its functional sabotaging on the other points towards a critique of
commodification, first and foremost the commodification of language.
When mimicking headlinese, the speaker ambivalently portrays him-
self as besieged by discourse media while preserving himself as morally
uncorrupted: headlinese is marked off from the speaker’s idiolect syn-
tactically (reported clauses), graphologically (capitalisation) and seman-
tically (non-sequiturs). Such an attitude closely resembles Pound’s, who
deplores the effects of usura on art in Canto XLV (1936) and who, in
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), gloomily foresees that ‘a tawdry cheap-
ness / shall reign throughout our days’. The lexis itself of Stanza 33
homages the last poem mentioned, for the rather uncommon fortitude
and botched occur in both.
Intertextuality in Hill’s stanza is then of different types: local and allu-
sive in discreetly harking back to Poundian lexis and discourse (e.g. use of
personae, reduced degree of coherence, reliance on spoken techniques—
see 8.1) and, by implication, to the speakerly attitude underlying these
features; global in modelling its structure after de Sade’s The 120 Days
of Sodom (see Sect. 7.3); and local but rather explicit in referring to
the French Revolution motto ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ (Liberty,
Equality, Brotherhood) through the bilingual, code-switching noun
phrase ‘son / et lumière and civic freedoms’ (ll. 1–2). The relationship
268
D. Castiglione
between the source and the text hinges upon elements of semantic relat-
edness: son (if accessed in its English sense) alludes to ‘brotherhood’
through the conceptual metaphor NATION IS A FAMILY (e.g. ‘we are
all sons of one country’); civic freedoms to ‘liberty’ via literal translation
despite the ironic premodification and the plural suffix which makes
ideals countable (commodities?); and lumière, via the shared root ‘light’,
hints at to the Enlightenment, a cultural precondition for the revolution
to break.
The motto so uncovered is an example of textual scrambling (see
Sect. 7.1.1), crucially described by Riffaterre as ‘an icon of intention’
(1984 [1978]: 150). Not only can intertextuality and intention be con-
nected as in this case, but more importantly they both contribute to sig-
nificance: intertextuality situates the text within a larger web or system
of references that helps make sense of it by multiplying the occasions
for text-driven inferential processing (i.e. deriving new knowledge from
available data or acquired facts)11; hypotheses on intention, on the other
hand, enable readers to ascribe communicative purport and coherence
to the text, which comes to be regarded as a fictional utterance. Notice
that only to an extent is the presence of a contradictory or unreliable
narrator (e.g. one drawing on irony, infringing the maxim of quality)
a hurdle for readers: while it defers accessibility behind the literal level,
thus engendering obscurity, it also makes them more aware of a strategy
on his part. This is what gives Hill’s stanza a purpose that keeps it away
from nihilism (on the ethical plane) as well as from nonsensicality (on
the pragma-semantic plane).
The wider interpretive scope of Hill’s stanza as opposed to Strand’s
poem can be illustrated by comparing two fully fledged answers by a
skilled participant to the question ‘What is the poem about?’ in the first
empirical study (Fig. 7.5).
These comments are unmatched for their argumentative develop-
ment within the time constraints set by the test (see Sect. 5.2.1). The
two sense-making strategies adopted differ considerably, however. The
comment on Hill’s stanza features a tight interplay between the top-
ics identified and the stylistic evidence through which they are inter-
preted (incidentally, many of the aspects covered in my own analysis are
269
Fig. 7.5 Stanza 33 and ‘The Late Hour’: two interpretive comments by a

participant
mentioned). Textual evidence is recruited to support an exegesis culmi-

nating in a theme formulation like ‘The poem is suggesting that what
we think we know about in regard to politics and the economic climate
does not really provide a solution’. The comment on Strand’s poem, on
the other hand, is more akin to a paraphrase: no theme is formulated,
and the iconic remark on the enjambment ‘imagine / her eyes’, how-
ever subtle, remains local in scope. This can be explained by means of a
trade-off between relevance and minimal effort: if the accessed situation
model is felt satisfactory (e.g. aesthetically pleasing, complying with the
convention of significance by means of pre-existing schemas), then the
reader has less incentive to venture onto global thematic inferences. On
this account, the aside ‘whether literally or metaphorically I don’t think
is important’ becomes very telling.
The inferential chains prompted by Hill’s stanza (and Stevens’s poem)
are rationalised as depth of meaning by readers. Its verbal manifestation
through formulations of theme and formal symbolism is intertwined
with a need or a desire for re-reading: ‘I did enjoy it – especially upon
re-reading it and I could explain what I thought its meaning was’ or
270
D. Castiglione
‘the meaning I have got from it became clearer after multiple read-
ings’.12 In general, depth of meaning can be argued to be a function of
certain LIDs: abstract nouns, thanks to their inherently more complex,
more indeterminate denotata; intertextuality, signalling the belong-
ing of the text to a pre-existing system of reference that quite literally
puts it into perspective; markers of subjectivity (e.g. evaluative words,
deixis, modality, the schema of interior monologue) that favour hypoth-
eses on intention (i.e. the text’s illocutionary force); and stylistic choices
that prompt hypotheses of formal symbolism by reflecting the metalin-
guistic status of the stanza: the reference to telegraphese discussed ear-
lier; the motivated polysemy of nominal (l. 9), whose two main senses
straddle between the philosophy of language (i.e. ‘existing in name
only’) and the language of economy (i.e. ‘far below the real value of cost
of something’); and the turning of uncountable nouns into countable
ones through the quantifier each (each succession, ll. 8–9; each make-
shift honour, l. 10). Pointing to a commodification of values, this tech-
nique reverses an established practice in advertising discourse, namely
the turning of count nouns into uncountable nouns to make goods and
products appear more dignified (Woods 2006: 31).
7.3.4 Summary
This analysis has uncovered the complexity of Stanza 33 by demon-

strating the extent to which its numerous LIDs are interrelated and
functional to an overarching purpose that, while opaque at first, is grad-
ually disclosed through text-driven inferences that eventually allow to
domesticate the initial perception of fragmentation. This reading pro-
cess, inscribed in the style and discursive structure of the text, parallels
the one hypothesised for Stevens’s poem: by deploying partly similar
and partly different LIDs, both poems enact reduced accessibility and
processing resistance while providing clues to interpretability—more
overtly in Stevens, with more mediation in Hill. In contextual terms,
this unevenness in significance exposure may derive from Stevens’s and
Hill’s diverging poetics (modernist and epistemological in the former,
postmodernist and satirical in the latter), as well as from the fifty-year
271
Fig. 7.6 Stanza 33: breakdown of difficulty (text effects and LIDs)
period elapsing between the two poems, from post-war 50 s (Stevens)

to the globalisation at the onset of the new millennium (Hill) (Fig. 7.6).
7.4 Conclusion
The four poems analysed in this chapter all instantiate, to different
degrees, the ‘elaborate utterance’ category: the presence of a speaker or
organising consciousness is perceivable, and his individualised, indirect
discourse discloses a purpose and a promise of significance by means
of which readers experience the transition from difficulty to obscurity.
The most straightforward presence of a speaker-character is in Thomas’s
poem, whose viewpoint naturally aligns with that of readers ready to
embrace the mythopoeic fiction of poetic discourse. Hill’s stanza is no
less blunt in staging a speaker, but register-mixing and echoic irony are
likely to thwart viewpoint alignment, a key precondition for immer-
sion to occur. Stevens’s and Crane’s poems, on the other hand, opt for
272
D. Castiglione
a heterodiegetic narration, striving for an ideal of impersonality that

Stevens accomplishes more fully. Still, both poems encourage view-
point alignment to a degree through adverbials of space (Crane) or time
(Stevens), alongside the concreteness of several of their referents.
The concreteness–abstractedness divide is precisely the LID which
allows us to draw a line between the verbal, interpersonal slant of Hill’s
stanza and the visual, ideational slant of the other three poems. Through
its communication verbs and abstract referents, Hill’s stanza appeals
to secondary cognition more forcefully than either Stevens’s or Crane’s
poems (where the two stand in a sort of dialectical tension), which in
turn feature this dimension more prominently than Thomas’s poem. A
common element of all poems is their metaliterary and metalinguistic
reflexivity, that is their disposition to reflect on themselves as creative
processes or verbal constructs: the enactment of imagination as a pre-
supposition of artistic creation in Stevens and Thomas; and intertextu-
ality as a claim to continue (or at least to gesture towards) a cultural
tradition in Crane and Hill. This attitude lexically surfaces in words
belonging to the semantic field of writing (e.g. phrase in Stevens, hier-
oglyph in Crane, telegraphese in Hill; in Thomas, we can infer ‘poem’
through simple replacement metaphors). The importance of reflexivity
as a new LID candidate lies in its quite literal enactment of the ‘closure’
of the difficult poem (note that neither Strand’s nor Betjeman’s poems
feature any traces of reflexivity).
Even more crucially, the stylistic analyses have allowed teasing out
those LIDs that are conducive to obscurity. As a general rule, obscurity
results from systematically deploying LIDs at the lexico-semantic level
while sparing all or most of those at discourse level. So, while restrict
collocations are widespread in the four poems and local syntactic ambi-
guities can be found in three of them (Stevens, Crane, Hill), an under-
lying, ‘disfigured’ textual schema underpins them all: parable in Stevens
and Thomas, witness report in Crane and interior monologue in Hill.
One could go as far as saying that narrativity and subjectivity are the
most central indicators of both accessibility at decoding level and signif-
icance at inferencing level: Thomas’s poem, which features both, resem-
bles in this respect Strand’s and Betjeman’s and thus is less difficult than
273
Stevens’s and Crane’s (narrative and only minimally subjective due to

impersonality) or Hill’s (subjective but not narrative).
While mainly driven by the lack of some global LIDs, the percep-
tion of obscurity also owes something to certain local stylistic features:
generic sentences (like in Stevens), a straightforward textual embodi-
ment of meaningfulness; lexical or syntactic ambiguity (like in Stevens,
Crane and Hill), a gateway to ideational polyvalence; abstract nouns
(like in Hill), pointers to ideational complexity and indeterminacy; and
simple replacement metaphors (like in Thomas), intertextual scram-
bling and restricted collocations (like in Stevens, Crane and Hill) enact-
ing a dialectic with other texts and discourses and thus expanding the
reader’s associative range. Taken together, their effects can be rational-
ised as depth of meaning or a need for re-reading, as attested by some
responses. To conclude almost aphoristically, obscurity is the preser-
vation of structure and purpose behind an opaque surface. As such, it
is both the offspring of difficulty and its replacement: struggling with
decoding and (local) integration, we find ourselves producing text-
driven inferences that can pay off the initial investment of energy.
Notes
1. Elaboration here is used in its everyday sense, not in the technical sense
of a logico-semantic relation (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 377).
2. I owe this brilliant observation to my student Ecaterina Mazur, whose
short essay ‘Towards a Theory of Imagination: Reading Wallace Stevens
through Modern Philosophy’ is available at www.inrealtalapoesia.com.
3. For instance, the high imageability of some vocabulary items: phantoms
has a 499 imageability rating, afternoon 512, pyramid 613, trees 622,
and so forth.
4. This stands in stark contrast with the prevalence of mental, relational
and existential processes in ‘What We See Is What We Think’—
accounting for the more rarefied, static situation model likely to emerge
for this latter poem.
5. This argument aligns with Yaron’s when she notices that ‘in the first
stanza, it is the universe and the human body that merge. Thomas halts
the twilight with his finger, the sea in his fist and dries up the water,
274
D. Castiglione
thereby identifying - according to my hypothesis - himself with God

who wields power over the components of the universe’ (Yaron 2010).
6. Thomas’s final addressing act (‘Awake, my sleeper, to the sun’, l. 37)
harks back to the medieval literary form of the canzone, in the envoy
of which the poet can address its own poem (e.g. Dante’s first canzone
in The Convivio: ‘canzone, io credo che saranno radi / color che tua
ragione intendan bene’, ll. 53–4—‘My song, I think they will be few
indeed / Who’ll rightly understand your sense’, transl. Richard H.
Lansing). A more recent example is Pound’s envoy that concludes Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley (1920): ‘Go, dumb-born book / Tell her that sang me
once that song of Lawes’.
7. However, a function word, instead, has been included because the lin-
guistic co-text of Hill’s stanza makes it as meaningful as a fully lexical
word.
8. Unfortunately, the MRC psycholinguistic database does not include
any data on imageability for most of the words in Hill’s stanza;
however, comparable words in the database display imageability
scores ranging from 100 to 400, which is quite a long way from the
550 + scores of many attested words in MS (see Sect. 6.1.1)
9. For instance, in a vein similar to Hill’s stanza, Matthew Arnold’s ‘To
Marguerite’ (1852) also begins with the interjection yes! (Adamson
1999: 667).
10. Although time and space deixis in the Hill stanza are underspecified,
the present tense and the imperative mood have a strong indexical
function.
11. Peskin (1998) experimentally demonstrates that intertextuality is one
of the key resources through which expert readers (e.g. doctoral stu-
dents and members of staff) draw on in tackling challenging poems.
Of course, the literary competence required to detect intertextual ref-
erences is related to the charge of elitism directed against difficulty (see
Sect. 2.4.3). By my reconceptualisation of difficulty, I instead wish to
suggest that elitism becomes a potential issue only when difficulty gives
way to subsequent obscurity and when obscurity itself is mainly an
issue of intention coupled with intertextuality. For a more detailed dis-
cussion, see the Conclusions.
12. Incidentally, these data highlight the importance of re-reading para-
digms in empirical studies (Dixon et al. 1993: 17). Of course, the risk
of low ecological validity of asking respondents to re-read irrespective
275
of their willingness to do so will have to be counteracted by sensi-

tive research methods (e.g. longitudinal studies, board diaries…) for
research on difficult poetry to develop. See the Conclusions for sugges-
tions in this respect.
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8
Permanent Difficulty:
Against Thematic Significance
Difficult poems of the kind analysed in the previous chapter gesture

towards significance: they invite readers to theme formulation by means
of underlying textual schemas that betray an ultimately coherent and
trustworthy speaker—even in the face of irony, as in Hill’s stanza, for
irony presupposes a target and hence a finality. The intuition that extra
meaning lingers behind an otherwise forbiddingly dense and unfamil-
iar poetic discourse compensates for the unusual energy investment at
the level of accessibility and readability. But what happens if the clues
to significance diminish so sensibly so as to offer little pay-off for one’s
effort? What if the impairment of basic comprehension inhibits sub-
sequent inferential activity? This chapter will attempt to answer these
questions.
There are fundamentally two, non-mutually exclusive routes through
which poems circumvent traditional significance (and hence obscurity)
without conceding anything in terms of either accessibility or reada-
bility: (1) by making textual schemas collapse in what turns out to be
essentially a representation of chaos where any functional or psycho-
logical sense of motivation goes astray; and/or (2) by preserving such
textual schemas while intensifying semantic deviance to the point of

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1_8
280
D. Castiglione
nonsense—as if the speaker freed herself of the expectations associated

with a lyrical subject or, more radically, did without a fully working
consciousness. Both strategies react against exegesis and actively enact
the loss of a symbolic order rather than building a discourse around it,
as Hill’s stanza does. What remains is a phantom of significance, the
component of formal symbolism over that of theme.
The analyses that follow should help clarify these somehow abstract
claims. Of the two main parts of the chapter, the former (Sect. 8.1) is
devoted to poems mainly instantiating strategy (1), whereas the lat-
ter (Sect. 8.2) to those mainly instantiating strategy (2). The poems
analysed in Sect. 8.1 are Pound’s extract from Canto LXXXI, Howe’s
‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’ and Stein’s ‘A Box’; those analysed in
Sect. 8.2 are Stein’s extract from Patriarchal Poetry and Bernstein’s first
stanza from ‘Safe Methods of Business’. The analyses will demonstrate,
among other things, that the LIDs in these poems work by subtraction
rather than by addition: metaphors with richly implicated domains give
way to incongruities where little or no common ground can be estab-
lished; the participant plus process centre of the clause is variously
undermined, with main syntactic constituents often missing; most dis-
course LIDs (lack of informativity, of coherence, of narrativity, and of
subjectivity) are instantiated throughout.
8.1 Difficulty as Literal Resistance: Formal

Symbolism as Icon of Disorder
8.1.1 Ezra Pound—An Extract from Canto LXXXI
Pound’s Cantos are arguably the epitome of modernist difficulty,

as highlighted by the selection of critical observations reported in
Sect. 5.1.2. ‘Difficult’ was likewise the first adjective my students
spontaneously used when asked to exchange their impressions on this
author. At first, they grounded Pound’s difficulty in his notorious use
of foreign languages and culturally pregnant proper nouns tied with the
8 Permanent Difficulty: Against Thematic Significance
281
processing stage of activation, both lexical and encyclopaedic; but later

they concurred that Pound’s compositional method and ensuing poetic
structures played a no less important role in challenging other aspects of
sense-making (i.e. the processing stage of integration).
These two simultaneous attacks on comprehensibility—one local,
the other global—are both showcased by an extract from Canto LXXXI
(1948; ll. 43–58). This displays ‘elusive connections’ (Perloff 1985: 9)
and has been chosen owing to its congeries of personae arranged in sud-
den and seemingly unwarranted shifts. Like for Hill’s stanza, the back-
drop of the whole Canto—especially the immediate co-text—is taken
into account whenever necessary so as to counteract the risk of ana-
lytical myopia. Beyond assessing the difficulty of Pound’s extract, the
analysis will help disentangle an intriguing critical knot. Consider the
following claim by Carne-Ross, approvingly quoted by Perloff:
What is difficult about Pound’s poetry is its “simplicity”… the whole

reverberating dimension of inwardness is missing. There is no murmur-
ous echo chamber where deeps supposedly answer to deeps. […] Pound’s
whole effort is not to be polysemous but to give back to the literal first
level its full significance, its old significance. (Carne-Ross 1979, reported
in Perloff 1985: 9–10; emphasis is the author’s)
This claim is worth our attention for more than one reason. First, it
severs the assumedly tight link between difficulty and complexity (see
Sects. 2.2.7 and 4.1). As a result, its argument looks paradoxical and
difficulty itself is turned upside down almost provocatively. Second, the
word ‘simplicity’ puts it bluntly at odds with the opinions of other crit-
ics (e.g. Nadel finds the Cantos ‘certainly complex’, 2007: 63). Last, and
most relevant for the current chapter, it suggests that Pound’s difficulty
is independent from ‘the whole reverberating dimension of inward-
ness’ which is central to the transition from difficulty to obscurity (see
Chapter 7). This should make Pound’s work a touchstone for the type
of difficult poems examined in this section, renouncing obscurity with-
out engaging in nonsensicality. Below is the extract, followed by the
usual three-dimensional stylistic analysis.
282
D. Castiglione
1 Possum observed that the local portagoose folk dance

2 was danced by the same dancers in divers localities
3 in political welcome …
4 the technique of demonstration
5 Cole studied that (not G.D.H., Horace)
6 ‘You will find’ said old André Spire,
7 ‘that every man on that board (Crédit Agricole)
8 has a brother-in-law.’
9 ‘You the one, I the few’
10 said John Adams
11 speaking of fears in the abstract
12 to his volatile friend Mr. Jefferson,
13 (to break the pentameter, that was the first heave)
14 or as Jo Bard says: ‘They never speak to each other,
15 if it is baker and concierge visibly
16 it is La Rochefoucauld and de Maintenon audibly.’
8.1.1.1 Reduced Accessibility: Proper Nouns,

Pseudo-Conversation, Topic Shifts
Response data on accessibility put in evidence that participants found

Pound’s extract notably hard, giving it a self-assessed comprehension
score of 3.5 out of 5 (Hill’s stanza was given 3.1, Stevens’s poem 2.4).
Intersubjective agreement on topic identification is therefore unsurpris-
ingly low, as shown by Table 8.1.
Just two lexical items recurred across different participants, with only
one attaining three occurrences, that is, going (slightly) beyond the
minimum threshold of intersubjective agreement. Still, it takes just a
straightforward generalising inference to derive ‘poetry’ from pentame-
ter (assuming participants have some smattering of poetic meter) and
‘politics’ (or the derived adjective ‘political’) from the proper names

for responses to Q3—
Politics-political 3.00
Pound’s extract from
Poetry 2.00
Canto LXXXI
283
impersonating it, such as the American Founding Fathers John Adams

and Jefferson.
Differently from Strand, Stevens and Hill, topic formulation is some-
times tentative or openly renounced:
‘As a whole I cannot decipher it’ (Participant 8)

‘It’s intended for a political message, though don’t know what it is’
(Participant 9)
‘The confusion & disagreement of critical response?’ (Participant 5)
The first statement is a plain admission of interpretive defeat; the sec-

ond cursorily posits intention (which would align Pound’s extract to
the poems analysed in Chapter 7) but then immediately backs away
from any further elaboration, thus again indicating the high opacity
of the text; the third, hedged by the interrogative cueing tentativeness,
resorts to iconic interpretation by assigning meaning directly to struc-
ture instead of carving out a theme from decoded content. This is a
crucial point, implying that the textual metafunction gains prominence
at the expense of the ideational one during the meaning-making pro-
cess. While in the ‘elaborate utterances’ category form bolsters semantic
meaning (e.g. the text-driven inferences in Stevens’s poem), in Pound’s
extract form replaces semantic meaning: the burden of significance falls
now on formal symbolism. As will be seen, iconic interpretations like
these are sometimes the only available ones when dealing with poems
from this difficulty type.
Moving from global understanding to local processing, nine out
of ten participants answered in the positive to Q2 (‘Have you had
any specific problems in understanding some parts of the text?’—see
Sect. 5.1.2): the reference of the proper nouns was the most frequently
singled out LID (seven out of thirteen comments), followed by the lack
of coherence LID (four comments). This bifurcation mirrors the infor-
mal responses in one of my classes mentioned earlier and in turn war-
rants my analytic focus on these two LIDs.
A heavy reliance on full proper nouns is a stylistic constant of the
Cantos: they are frequent in the extract from Canto XXXVIII (1934)
analysed by Steiner (1978: 22–27; see Sect. 4.2.5.5) and are no less
284
D. Castiglione
pervasive in our extract, published fourteen years later. Of the eleven

occurrences (almost one per line), ten apply to individuals from eco-
nomic, literary and political domains and one to an institution (the
bank Crédit Agricole ). Readers may be familiar to different degrees with
each of them, however: while many in the Western world are likely to
activate a satisfactorily accurate encyclopaedic entry for Mr. Jefferson or
John Adams, the activation of La Rouchefoucauld and de Maintenon is
less likely, for it requires more specialist literary knowledge.
A case in point is Possum, the only proper name without a surname
in the extract (not to be confused with its homonym from zoology).
It arguably stands for T. S. Eliot, for this was a self-attributed nick-
name in the poet’s light verse collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical
Cats (1939). Without this piece of background knowledge, the odd
first name is likely to be associated not with the prominent modernist,
but with some eccentric bearer—perhaps an ancient-sounding persona
owing to the Latin pseudo-morpheme—um. Equally interesting, but
for more discourse-related reasons, is the fact that Pound’s parenthetical
‘(not G.D.H., Horace)’ was singled out by a participant as confusing
albeit it was meant to disambiguate the reference of Cole: the clarifica-
tion, aesthetically dictated by reasons of documental accuracy, cogni-
tively increases the reader’s processing load at activation level.
Referents like these are activated only coarsely, based, for instance, on
the basic inference that behind each name lies a male human being, or
the slightly less basic one that these names are not fictional but attested
in history. Such coarse or schematic access leads to the construction of
an underdetermined situation model, at least until the item in question
is looked up. ‘It is difficult to understand without knowing the con-
text’, one participant understandably points out, and indeed, full proper
nouns almost compel us to step outside the perimeter of the poetic text:
depending on encyclopaedic, not on semantic knowledge, they turn the
poem from a sealed, self-sufficient room into a door to outer reality.
After full proper nouns, lack of coherence is the LID respond-
ents verbalise more often: ‘it seems like a series of random quotes’
(Participant 3), ‘can’t find where one idea ends & another begins’
(Participant 5), and ‘separate pockets of meaning’ (Participant 8). This
last comment captures, perhaps inadvertently, a key facet of Pound’s
285
extract’s lack of coherence: its being mostly realised inter-sententially

rather than intra-sententially. Each sentence in Pound’s extract makes
individual sense: not only is it syntactically well-formed, but the figures
each of them construes are highly cohesive and ideationally plausible.
Take the projected that-clause at the beginning (‘that the local porta-
goose folk dance/was danced by the same dancers in divers localities/in
political welcome’, ll. 1–3): through semantic redundancy, polyptoton
(local-localities; dance-danced-dancers ) maintains the figure in focus; con-
currently, the definite article in l. 1 and the semi-determiner same in l.
2 align the reader’s viewpoint to Possum’s, thus engendering a feeling
of situatedness. This is also enhanced by three consecutive post-modify-
ing adverbials: ‘by the same dancers’, ‘in divers localities’ and ‘in polit-
ical welcome’. This instance exemplifies just how coherent, on a clausal
level, Pound’s extract is; the reader can verify by herself the comparably
high intra-clausal coherence of ll. 6–8 and ll. 9–12.
The exception to the rule is, of course, lines 15–16: ‘if it is baker and
concierge visibly / it is La Rochefoucauld and de Maintenon audibly’.
The conditional structure (‘if X [then] Y’) encodes a mutual implica-
tion (logical deduction or cause–effect relationship) between the two
existential clauses forming this sentence. This implication is further
highlighted by the syntactic parallelism of the two lines, with their
semantically related adverbs audibly and visibly placed at line ending.
Yet there hardly is any experiential anchoring for such connection to
take place, either contextually or in the reader’s long-term memory: the
relevance of concierge to La Rochefoucauld and of baker to de Maintenon
remains elusive, and the adverbs look out of context since the existential
verb ‘to be’ typically resists adverbial modification. The odd conditional
sentence will be arguably processed as a humorous non-sequitur, not
unlike Hill’s headlinese (see Sect. 7.3.1).
In general, though, coherence-threatening shifts in Pound’s extract
occur across sentences, not within them: figures are ideationally plausi-
ble but sequences are mostly not. The first shift is in l. 4: albeit softened
by the ellipsis signalling a suspended discourse (and thus paving the way
for a topic shift), it feels structurally abrupt. The reason for this is that
the technique of demonstration, which we tend to process as subject by
default (subjects typically occurring at sentence-initial position), turns
286
D. Castiglione
out to be the pre-posed object of studied (l. 5) cataphorically restated

by the demonstrative pronoun that (l. 5). The marked word order of
this second sentence is internally foregrounded with respect to the SVO
norm of the preceding lines, requiring readers to suddenly revise their
parsing strategy. And yet, at the same time, integration is encouraged
since technique and demonstration cohere, via weak implicatures, to
dance and political, respectively. A tension is therefore created between
structural discontinuity and ideational continuity and between obstacles
to parsing and cues to integration.
Line 6 initiates a new shift since André Spire’s direct speech inter-
rupts the narrator’s voice (which amounts to a conventional inter-
personal shift) but it does so abruptly, given that the content of the
utterance is unrelated to the preceding narration (which amounts to
an unconventional ideational shift). It is as if this utterance were heard
and recorded on the fly, and the narrator demoted from a discursive
authority (e.g. the monologic speaker of the poems in Chapter 7) to
a responsive collector of data: this is a consequence of Pound’s collag-
ist technique, on account of which ‘it is up to the reader to fashion
connections’ (Nadel 2007: 56). From here on an apparently dialogic
moment unfolds (ll. 6–12) marked by reporting verbs, direct speech
and I–you deixis. But the dialogue is only apparent, as while it displays
the grammar of conversation it violates basic pragmatic norms of com-
munication. André Spire’s utterance (ll. 6–8) forms no adjacency pair
with John Adams’s (l. 9) despite their textual contiguity: so blatantly
does John Adam’s utterance violate the maxim of relation that it is
impossible to interpret it as a reply to André Spire. Yet we might still be
tempted, owing to the grammar of conversation, to momentarily mis-
take André Spire for the referent of you (l. 9), when in fact this pronoun
cataphorically refers to Mr. Jefferson (l. 12). Pronoun resolution is tem-
porarily ambiguous: the correct assignment of reference is revealed only
after the structure of Pound’s extract has deceitfully reinforced our pro-
cessing automatisms.
This ingenious dialogue/juxtaposition trompe l’oeil is interrupted by
the last utterance in direct speech (ll. 14–16) featuring a tense shift
from past to present (said → says ) and the coordinator or (l. 14) indicat-
ing either exemplification or alternation. As a result, one may perceive
287
a fleeting didactic note that, I believe, cues a narratorial stance. Such

a stance is clearly encoded in the parenthetical in line 13, which could
be attributed to Pound himself due to his well-known aversion for the
pentameter (Adamson 1999: 613). This contextual hypothesis also rests
on a well-established function of parentheticals, namely their likelihood
to signal ‘an interpolated thought or an utterance in a different tone of
voice or by a different speaker ’ (Perkins 1987: 45; cited in Tartakovsky
2009: 233; emphasis added). Syntactically, the infinitive clause acting
as subject ‘to break the pentameter’ in the parenthetical is topicalised
and reinstated by the pronoun that. Biber et al. provide a comparable
example of such ‘prefacing’ strategy, which they see as typical of conver-
sational registers alongside tag questions: ‘North and South London –
they’re two different worlds, aren’t they?’ (2002: 439). This construction
gives line 13 a flavour of spoken prosody, which should allow perceiving
a speaker’s voice more distinctly than in the posited unmarked variant
‘the first heave was to break the pentameter’.
Overall, the stylistic evidence shows that the difficulty of Pound’s
extract is heavily indebted to its sudden shifts across its multiple speak-
ers, exacerbated by a peculiar arrangement of the lines. The opacity
of the extract is mostly interpersonal rather than ideational: although
speakers are recognisable in their being named, they also appear inter-
changeable, personae or masks rather than fully fledged characters: not
only because the rationale behind their sequencing is elusive almost to
the point of randomness, but more importantly because they all play
the same part, performing the semantic role of Sayers for a few lines
each.
8.1.1.2 Boosted Readability: Narrativity,

Parataxis, Line/Syntax Match
The reading speed elicited by Pound’s extract is very high—

62.76 ms/char, on a par with Strand’s poem. This result came as a sur-
prise, for while at the level of accessibility Pound’s extract proved to be
one of the hardest among the poems tested, when it comes to reada-
bility it turned out to be among the easiest. The general theoretical
288
D. Castiglione
implication one may draw is that these two dimensions of difficulty,

although typically interrelated, can be independent from each other.
This supports Wallot et al. argument that reading times do not neces-
sarily cue a ‘severely compromised reading activity’ (2014: 1751). One
may speculate that the blatant disconnectedness of Pound’s extract
could have dissuaded readers from investing more reading effort, thus
giving rise to shallow processing. Yet this otherwise plausible hypothesis
is falsified by the response data obtained for another poem, Howe’s ‘A
Small Swatch Bluish-Green’ (see Sect. 8.1.2): while it resulted even less
accessible than Pound’s, it elicited extremely slow reading times.
I believe the only way out of the conundrum is to admit that some
LIDs are irrelevant to readability, while other stylistic features enhance
it. It is possible that lack of coherence at sequence level affects pro-
cessing globally but fails to show up locally, that is, it ‘escapes’ online
behavioural measurements. By contrast, the other features of the extract
are likely to maximise decoding (activation + parsing1), speeding up the
reading even if integration is thwarted and understanding unattained.
These are: concrete vocabulary (about 80% of the nouns, 21 out of 26,
have concrete reference); syntactic simplicity (there is maximum one
level of subordination—two relative that—clauses in ll. 1–2 and 6–7,
a non-finite clause in l. 11, a zero conditional sentence in ll. 15–16);
utterances expressed in direct speech prompting immediacy; and seg-
mentation choices whereby each line typically corresponds to major
syntactic units, typically clauses, either finite or non-finite, dependent
or independent (i.e. ll. 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15 and 16).
Yet at a more fundamental level, the readability of Pound’s extract
must be a function of its underlying narrative schema that accounts for
some of the features just listed. This is a hypothesis I offer in a recent
paper (Castiglione 2017): struck by the unexpected similarity of read-
ing speed elicited by Strand’s poem, Pound’s and Ballard’s extracts (see
Sect. 6.1.3), I came to realise that they are all underpinned by a narra-
tive schema despite and beyond other obvious stylistic differences. And
there is empirical evidence that ‘narrative passages […] are easier to read
than passages in the descriptive and expository genres’ (Graesser et al.
1980: 138).
289
What is new about my hypothesis is the idea that linguistic, rather

than functional instantiation of the schema, suffices for (online meas-
ured) readability to be enhanced. Pound’s extract does contain key
grammatical features that are statistically distinctive of narrative fic-
tion: proper nouns, reporting verbs and adverbials of place (Biber and
Conrad 2009: 150). Yet it also lacks the basic requirement of ‘non-ran-
domly connected events’ that structurally define prototypical narratives
(Toolan 2001 [1988]: 8).2 Because Pound’s extract was read at a speed
similar to that of a text like Ballard’s, which is both formally and func-
tionally narrative, one must deduce that reading times associated with
resistance (or lack thereof ) respond to word- and phrase-level stylistic
features, not to inter-sentential cohesive features on which functional
expectations rest. The latter, by contrast, are likely to chiefly affect the
dimension of accessibility, as they pose more serious demands on infer-
encing than on decoding. All this holds true for first readings only; on
re-reading, the focus is likely to shift from local to global processing,
from decoding to inferencing, with the underlying LIDs (and ensuing
experience) of resistance itself changing as a consequence. But this fur-
ther hypothesis is for future research to investigate.
8.1.1.3 Deferred Interpretability: Formal Symbolism

and Delinearised Tropes
As a heuristic notion, density captured well the air of family resem-

blance among the poems in Chapter 7. It would not suit Pound’s
extract, though: readers do not have to plough through the text because
the resistance the extract poses on syntagmatic decoding is very low.
Rather than a dense, single-voiced utterance, we have a diffuse mul-
ti-voiced space in which Gestalt principles of organic form are consid-
erably weakened. Deprived of a dominant locutionary centre, Pound’s
extract defies exegetic attempts to trace significance back to a single
source, thus opposing the very grain of obscurity. The narrator’s voice is
one among others, so it would be misguided to equate the content of its
utterances to the significance of the whole extract. True, the parenthet-
ical in l. 13, which I have attributed to the narrator (see Sect. 8.1.1.1),
290
D. Castiglione
can be read as a metapoetic gloss: not only does the extract ‘break’
the pentameter through the use of free verse, but the gloss follows the
only pentameter in the extract (‘to his vo | lati | le friend | Mr Jef |
ferson’ has five feet, as the scansion shows). But then likewise Jo Bard’s
statement ‘they never speak to each other’ (l. 14) glosses the pseudo-
conversation uncovered earlier.
Like Stevens’s, Thomas’s, Crane’s and Hill’s poems, Pound’s extract
embodies the autotelic nature of poetic discourse (Jakobson 1960;
Leech 2008: 5). But while in those poems formal symbolism accom-
panies thematic density, formal symbolism in Pound replaces thematic
density—and this is a crucial difference. Indeed, the content of these
utterances themselves (a statement of purpose, l. 13; an apparently
casual remark, l. 14) is not ideationally meaningful as, say, that of
a generic sentence (e.g. ‘what we see is what we think’ in Stevens). It
is then no surprise that some of the participants’ tentative interpreta-
tions explicitly incorporate formal symbolism and/or rely on metalin-
guistic glosses: ‘How a group of dances are all connected somehow but
don’t talk to one another ’ (Participant 3, emphasis added); ‘free verse,
breaking away from constraints on poetry in the past, reflects the free-
dom within societal constraints’ (Participant 9). Semantic content does
not suffice to enable theme formulation: significance is largely deferred
from content to form, so the iconicity of the text becomes its ultimate
nature, not an accessory feature.3
Despite the dominance of formal symbolism, significance of a the-
matic kind is not entirely absent from Pound’s extract, but it is inter-
textually derived and then scrambled, displaced. There exists indeed a
POETRY IS DANCE conceptual metaphor that has at least two illus-
trious literary instantiations. In Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism
(1711), there is an explicit analogy: ‘True ease in writing comes from
art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance’
(ll. 362–363; emphasis added). And in a more indirect vein, Emily
Dickinson’s poem 326 (‘I Cannot Dance Upon My Toes’) has often
been interpreted as a mapping of ‘the footwork of the dance onto the
metrical feet of poetry’, much to Freeman’s annoyance (2005: 45). The
connection is even more tentative for Pound’s extract: all we can say is
291
that dance (l. 1) and pentameter (l. 13) stand in relative textual prox-
imity, with technique (l. 2) mediating between the two. Whether this
proximity is accidental or Pound’s knowledge of the literary trope has
guided his selection of the referents is impossible to determine without
the support of contextual sources (e.g. Pound’s explanatory letters). In
the reception-oriented outlook of the model, what matters is that previ-
ous knowledge of the delinearised trope (arguably a preserve of the lit-
erary specialist) can offer a conceptual basis for inferencing work of a
more traditional kind.
It is now possible to assess the validity of Carne-Ross’s claim, which
paradoxically paralleled Pound’s difficulty with his literalness—a modal
sort of difficulty, to borrow from Steiner’s typology, requiring a decisive
shift in readerly attitude (see Sect. 2.1.1). Carne-Ross is right insofar as
Pound effectively resists semantic complexity and polyvalence (Pound’s
extract has no novel metaphors, nor restricted collocations prompt-
ing a blending of different semantic domains). What I find more prob-
lematic is the critic’s equation between this literalness and significance:
under my definition, significance in Pound’s extract lies in formal sym-
bolism, and therefore, in the literary and linguistic structure of the text,
the role of literalness is rather to shift our standards of literary relevance
from the ideational to the textual metafunction or, in rhetorical terms,
from inventio to dispositio and elocutio. If, however, Carne-Ross used
significance as a synonym of ‘importance’, then our views would align:
without literalness, access to (formal) significance would be obfuscated.
The critic’s emphasis on simplicity, baffling as it sounds when applied
to Pound’s poetry, likewise holds true to an extent: although a few lines
cannot of course be representative of Pound’s immense poetic output,
I have shown that an extract from a famous Canto is syntactically and
lexically simple (proper nouns aside—these are morphologically sim-
ple but their semantic complexity is open to philosophical debate: see
Sect. 4.2.5.5). Moreover, and importantly, the lack of organising princi-
ples other than those of the composition itself (here, the trompe l’oeil that
deautomatises utterance attribution) points to a horizontal rather than
hierarchical arrangement of the elements: this means that Pound’s extract
is not complex in the sense given to this concept here (see Sect. 4.1).
292
D. Castiglione
8.1.1.4 Summary
The analysis has shown that Pound’s extract belongs to a different lin-
eage of difficulty compared to the poems in Chapter 7—with the par-
tial exception of Hill’s stanza, which hybridises the two types. The
most obvious divergences lie in readability and interpretability: Pound’s
extract offers surprisingly little resistance to reading and its signifi-
cance owes virtually nothing to the semantics of the text. But there are
important differences in how low accessibility is constructed, too. Low
accessibility in Pound derives from the profusion of proper nouns with
homophoric, historic referents imposing themselves as hurdles during
activation, just after word decoding (Sect. 8.1.1.1). The latter opera-
tion is deautomatised in portagoose (l. 1), most likely a misspelling of
‘Portuguese’. My hypothesis rests on co-textual evidence (e.g. replacing
portagoose with ‘Portuguese’ yields a semantically acceptable clause) as
well as on background knowledge—the poet’s penchant for misspellings
and other markers of speech/writing interaction (Perloff 1985: 76; see
also mebbe as a misspelling for ‘maybe’ towards the end of the Canto).
Another key difference in the construction of low accessibility is that
Pound’s has to be sought in the textual-interpersonal metafunction, not
in the ideational: the textworld in the extract currently analysed never
fails to cling to the factual; yet the data are presented ‘raw’, unmediated
by a discursive consciousness. Pound’s ‘editing’ technique highlights for-
mal affinities between the parts (typically, the co-presence of a projected
clause and a named Sayer) irrespectively of their functional and contex-
tual appropriateness. Readers are not invited to follow an involved train
of thought, but rather to test for themselves the relationship among
its juxtaposed sequences. Fellonosa’s credo that ‘relations are more real
and more important than the things which they relate’ (cited in Nadel
2007: 21) seems to have been converted into a stylistic procedure. The
conceptual montage of Pound’s extract and the ideational oddities of
Stevens’s or Crane’s poems exemplify well Perloff’s distinction, which
she borrows from Wassily Kandinsky, between a ‘constructivist’ and
‘expressivist’ pole in modernist aesthetics, respectively (1985: 22; see
also Sect. 5.1.2).
Another contribution is the solution the model offers to the criti-
cal controversy that credits Pound with complexity (Steiner, Nadel) or
293
simplicity (Carne-Ross). One side of the argument lays emphasis on the

thwarting of ‘basic’ understanding (i.e. activation and integration): it
is on these grounds that the Cantos engender a ‘blurred apprehension’
(Steiner 1978: 24) and are ‘difficult to follow’ (Nadel 2007: 63) or even
‘virtually indecipherable’ (Mellors 2005: 68). The other side of the argu-
ment is interested in Pound’s writing bafflingly defusing certain reading
strategies (i.e. higher-order processes such as thematic inferences geared
to significance) allied with the poetics of Romanticism. It thus posits
not the universal reader as a processor of language, but a historically
contingent literary reader. The controversy is more apparent than real,
however; both bottom-up cognitive processes and genre-specific reading
strategies are involved when facing a poem or any other literary work.
The model thus allows a re-mapping of critical claims onto a wider pic-
ture for difficulty, so that discrepancies can be seen as stemming from
different, albeit not mutually exclusive, assumptions on difficulty itself.
Finally, the most obvious advantage is the level of accuracy and com-
prehensiveness enabled by the model. Rephrasing long-standing critical
observations on Pound’s difficulty in semantic and cognitive terms is
not a trendy refashioning of critical language, but it truly allows for a
better grasp of the underlying mechanisms of difficulty. So, for instance,
we can pin the meaning of the broad expression ‘cultural allusion’ down
to proper nouns with homophoric referents, prompting schematic
(unsatisfactory) activation but posing no issues in terms of decoding.
Or, we can interpret difficulty of structure in terms of a specific LID
(shifting of deictic reference—see Sect. 4.2.8.2) that to my knowledge
has received little attention by Pound scholars.
As customary, I conclude with a diagrammatic representation of the
extract’s difficulty (Fig. 8.1).
8.1.2 Susan Howe’s ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’

and an Extract from Gertrude Stein’s
Patriarchal Poetry
Like Pound’s extract, the two poems analysed in this section signal their
lack of autonomy, as if they were taken away from the flux of everyday
discourse and then further de-structured, made almost unrecognisable
294
D. Castiglione
Fig. 8.1 Extract from Canto LXXXI: breakdown of difficulty (text effects and
LIDs)
as discourse. They push traditional significance outside themselves, tex-

tually enacting a kind of formal symbolism which nonetheless requires
contextual knowledge to be triggered. Unlike Pound’s extract, though,
they also pose unusually high demands on readability: Howe’s ‘A Small
Swatch Bluish-Green’ and Stein’s extract from Patriarchal Poetry both
assault syntactic well-formedness to the point that parsing impairments
become central, even indispensable to the reading experience. They do
so in different ways, though: Howe’s poem by internally de-structuring
syntactic constituency through ambiguous embedding at phrase level;
Stein’s extract by dispensing with major lexical word classes (nouns,
adjectives, finite verbs), thus abolishing sentence structure altogether.
This effect may be aesthetically described as ‘literal resistance’: the text
is a tangible barrier without a landscape behind, or better an object that
signifies only itself. Not content to make hermeneutics inappropriate or
useless, Howe’s poem and Stein’s extract also question some cognitive
fundamentals of reading. In order to have a more accurate idea of how
extreme these operations are, in the interim summary (Sect. 8.1.2.5)
295
I will tangentially consider Cummings’s ‘What a Proud Dreamhorse’

(deemed a difficult poem by Yaron 2002) and show how, by compari-
son, its asyntacticity is easily amendable since it preserves an underlying
clausal template.
1 A small swatch bluish-green

2 woollen slight grain in the
3 weft watered and figured
4 right fustian should hold
5 altogether warp and woof
6 Is the cloven rock misled
7 Does morning lie what prize
8 What pine tree wildeyed boy
from Patriarchal Poetry
Never which when where to be sent to be sent to be sent to be never

which when where never to be sent to be sent to be sent never which
when where to be sent never to be sent never to be sent never which
when where to be sent never to be sent never to be sent which when
where never to be sent which when where never which when where
never which to be sent never which when where to be sent never which
when where to be sent which when where to be sent never to be sent
never which when where to be sent never which when which when
where to be sent never which when where never which when where
which when where never to be sent which when where
Howe’s poem comes from the collection Bed Hangings (2001; repub-
lished in The Midnight 2003), whose title is taken ‘from a drab lit-
tle book she [Howe] found in a gift shop called A Treatise on Fabrics
and Styles in the Curtaining of Beds, 1650–1850 ’ (Perloff 2003: 341).
Howe’s poetics of citation and collage, inferable from Perloff’s quote,
underpins her practice of ‘debunking or deconstructing the assump-
tions underlying and/or the circumstances giving rise to the words
quoted’ (Quartermain 1992: 182). ‘Deconstructing’ is a key word
here, as it implies a relationship between deconstruction and poetic
technique that my analysis will shed light upon. Poised between
296
D. Castiglione
standalone text and fragment of a longer sequence, the ontological

status of Howe’s poem escapes clear-cut, Aristotelic classification. In
McHale’s words:
All Howe’s poems are made of disparate parts, but it is seldom clear
whether, in her own view, these parts add up to a “whole,” and if they do,
what exactly the scope and character of that “whole” might be. This, in
turn, affects how we read these texts: as single, integral poems? as poetic
sequences in something like Rosenthal’s and Gall’s sense? as collections of
separate poems? or as none or all of the above? (2004: 209)
This undecidability destabilises our approach from the start: a multiplic-

ity of possibilities opens up, including to an extent—for reasons that
will become clear later—the ‘elaborate utterance’ category proposed in
Chapter 7. It is not just a question of tight text–macrotext relationship
as it was true of Hill’s Speech! Speech!, where each stanza is partly
dependent on the adjacent ones; rather, the text–macrotext relation-
ship between Howe’s poem and its hosting collection is indeterminate,
for Howe’s poetics challenges the very notion of hierarchy. In McHale’s
words, Howe ‘simultaneously lays claim to the long-poem tradition,
with all its high ambitions and prestige, and distance herself from it;
she positions herself simultaneously inside and outside the privileged
enclosure’ (2004: 209).
A similar, but more upfront anti-hierarchical stance pervades Stein’s
Patriarchal Poetry (1927), a forty-page prose poem which was found
‘unreadable’ even by ‘Stein’s more agile readers’ (Neel 1999: 38). The
extract I focus on is an illustrative sample of the whole work, entirely
composed of unpunctuated paragraphs combining asyntacticity with
obsessive lexical repetition. According to Neel, Patriarchal Poetry is
‘difficult to read’ because it ‘stages an alternative to Patriarchal Poetry ’s
demands for legibility and symbolic correspondence’ (1999: 95).
In this work, we indeed find an antithetic relation between title and
(lack of ) textual structure. The operation is ironic, but the irony rests
on a reversal of structural expectations (in the vein of Duchamp’s 1917
297
‘Fountain’, whose title ironically ennobles the urinal) rather than on

structural imitation as in Hill’s echoic irony (see Sect. 7.3.3).
As a result, Stein here ‘demands our relationship with an almost over-
whelming degree of confusion, discomfort, and fatigue in the act of
reading itself’ (Neel 1999: 90). These text effects echo those Diepeveen
documented in his reception-oriented work on modernist difficulty (2003:
45; see Sect. 2.1.3). How they are textually encapsulated in Stein’s
extract will be revealed in the sections that follow. Specifically, like in
Howe’s poem, ‘confusion’ and ‘fatigue’ result from the impairment of
parsing (an intrinsically analytic skill), affecting readability through
the syntactic incompleteness LID (see Sect. 4.2.7.1); ‘discomfort’ is
instead located in the dimension of accessibility, triggered by the neg-
ative semantic prosody of never and by the half-suppressed subjectivity
brought by the interrogative mood of the wh-pronouns.
Finally, and more generally, both analyses seek to remedy the typi-
cal shortcomings of literary criticism when it sidesteps the rigour of sty-
listics: Neel, albeit he mentions the relationship between difficulty and
the ‘linguistic innovations’ of Patriarchal Poetry, never quite pinpoints
where and how the difficulty is instantiated4; Middleton likewise con-
tents himself with noticing Howe’s ‘incomplete statements’ (2010: 637)
without showing how such incompleteness is linguistically realised in
the first place.
8.1.2.1 Reduced Accessibility and Readability in Howe’s

‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’: Blurred
Constituency and Ideational Shifts
Accessibility and readability in the Howe poem are so tightly inter-

locked that it would be foolish to treat them under separate headings.
After reporting the empirical data for both dimensions, I therefore
proceed to explain them with reference to three key LIDs—ill-formed
syntax, local semantic incongruity and global lack of ideational
coherence.
298
D. Castiglione

for responses to
Nature 4.00
Q3—Howe’s ‘A Small
Boy 3.00
Swatch Bluish-Green’
Morning 2.00
In terms of accessibility, Howe’s poem received an average comprehen-

sion score of 4.1 out of 5 (were 0=very easy to understand))—even more
than Pound’s extract (see Sect. 8.1.1). This RID signals that the poem is
perceived as opaque, and that basic meaning-making strategies that work
through generalisation (e.g. deriving a global situation model, formu-
lating a theme that accounts for the whole text) are mostly ineffective.
As Participant 3 puts it: ‘I don’t quite ‘see’ what is being described’. The
‘topic intersubjective agreement’ RID corroborates this point (Table 8.2).
Although intersubjective agreement for ‘nature’ is slightly higher
than that for ‘politics’ in Pound’s extract (4 versus 3), the RID profile
of the two texts is similar: very few words attain a modest topical rel-
evance. The relative saliency of ‘nature’ is attributable to its semantic
associates grain (l. 2), cloven rock (l. 6) and pine tree (l. 8). These are
arguably interpreted metonymically, made to exemplify the element
of earth, itself part of nature; the compound adjective wildeyed most
likely partakes in the same schema. Although instantiated once only
in the text, ‘Boy’ is salient for different reasons: the end-focus princi-
ple, placing more meaningful (i.e. informative) elements at the end of
a clause; an attention-catching modifier (wildeyed boy ); the empathetic
recognisability of its referent, which makes it a good attractor (Stockwell
2009: 25); and finally, its interpersonal saliency, brought by the inter-
rogative mood of the last clause, which makes us subvocalise boy with
the intonation reserved for a direct addressee.
Contrary to expectations, the strongly instantiated ‘fabric’ seman-
tic field (i.e. swatch-woollen-weft-fustian-warp-woof ) was not verbalised
as a topic. Two non-mutually exclusive hypotheses can be proposed
in this regard. First, following the convention of significance, readers
may have placed more emphasis on topics perceived as more meaning-
ful than fabrics, which indeed ‘hardly sounds like a promising subject’
(Perloff 2003: 341). Second, some of the ‘fabric’ words were admittedly
299
unknown to the participants, with the result that the semantic field as
a whole was not activated: ‘words I don’t understand as single words:
‘swatch’, ‘weft’, ‘fustian’’ (Participant 5); ‘if asked by a friend I would
probably think it wasn’t a word’ (Participant 8, referring to ‘weft’); ‘don’t
know what this means’ (Participant 10, referring to ‘fustian’).
Some of the responses scale up the impairment of comprehension
from the lexical to the textual level: ‘I actually don’t know’ (Participant
3); ‘I can’t figure out any overall meaning’ (Participant 8); ‘it seems
senseless, as though the poet is just rambling’ (Participant 9). But
even when they do try to grasp the aboutness of Howe’s poem, partic-
ipants rely on hedges as the interrogative mood or the modal ‘might’:
‘A scared boy in the mountains?’ (Participant 5); ‘the poem might be
about the sunrise and the beginning of a new day’ (Participant 6).
These strong hedges are common in responses to Howe and Pound,
but tellingly absent in responses to Strand, Stevens and Hill. Overall,
the RIDs discussed so far underscore the lack of accessibility of Howe’s
poem. As for readability, the poem elicited a reading speed of 90.41 ms/
char—30% slower than Strand or Pound and nearly 20% slower than
Stevens and Hill. Line 3 was read the slowest, at the astonishing figure
of 107.58 ms/char.
The LID chiefly responsible for the RIDs surveyed so far (especially
the slow reading speed RID) is de-structured syntax. Lines 1–4 read
as a string of nouns and adjectives holding ambivalent relationships
between each other. Is bluish-green (l. 1) a predicative adjective post-
modifying swatch or is it an attributive adjective pre-modifying grain
(l. 2)? In the former case, we would need to posit an ellipsis of relational
‘be’ and recall the possibility, in old poetic diction, for adjectives to fol-
low nouns; in the latter case, we would invoke the syntax of Standard
English whereby adjectives precede nouns. Yet the order of the adjec-
tives (bluish-green—woollen—slight = COLOUR—MATERIAL—
QUANTITY) reverses standard usage, where COLOUR follows
QUANTITY and MATERIAL. Flexible Head–Modifier relation-
ships deautomatise parsing; scrambled adjective order deautomatises
integration.
The embedded prepositional phrase that follows (in the/Weft
watered and figured/Right fustian ) features an even more remarkable
300
D. Castiglione
Table 8.3 Head–modifier parsing possibilities in the first prepositional phrase of

‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’
Head Modifier
1st possibility Weft Watered and figured
Fustian –
2nd possibility Weft Watered
Fustian Figured
3rd possibility Weft –
Fustian Watered and figured
Head–Modifier ambivalence, giving rise to the three alternative parsing

routes shown in Table 8.3.
Not only can the participial adjectives watered and figured refer to
either weft or to fustian; but they can do it disjunctively (2nd possibility)
or conjunctively (1st and 3rd possibility), given that and simultaneously
links the two adjectives and the phrases hosting them. These systemic
structural ambivalences pile up multiple garden path effects which
engender coexistent semantic representations. Moreover, while reading,
the Heads grain, weft, fustian seem to shade into each other due to their
semantic relatedness and their being nested at different levels of phrasal
embedding ({A small swatch [bluish-green Woollen slight grain in the
Weft (watered and figured Right fustian)]}). The lack of punctuation
further invites us to read each line holistically, merging these tentative
phrases into an undifferentiated, parsing-proof whole—an unstable ref-
erent, rich in sensory information and with a cloud of attributes grav-
itating around it. What Dillon remarked about Faulkner’s prose is a
fortiori true of Howe’s poem: ‘when both rhetorical and syntactic struc-
tures break down, passages dissolve into “things” and “events” loosely
associated but indeterminately related’ (1978: 132). One gets the sim-
ilar impression that content words in Howe’s poem float isolated, so to
speak, drifting away from the tenuous syntactic grid hosting them.
Only at this point does the reader encounter the main verb should
hold (l. 4) which provisionally restores a clausal template. Stylisticians
discussing verb phrase delay have typically pointed out the climax of
expectation it elicits in readers (Jeffries 1993). Verb delay in the Howe
poem, however, is unlikely to enhance expectation as would happen
in syntactically well-formed poems: such is the parsing overload and
301
uncertainty of the preceding string of nouns and adjectives that a verb

should come as an unhoped-for relief, not as an inevitable fulfilment
that has merely been postponed. As one participant noticed, ‘there also
don’t appear to be many verbs, which makes the meaning hard to get’.
Verb phrase delay indeed requires considerable processing effort (San
2005). But the sense of relief we may get from the verb is itself precari-
ous and, in the end, ill-founded. This is because hold is located in end-
line position, so its intransitive use is temporarily foregrounded over the
(otherwise dominant) transitive use: if something ‘holds’, it does not fall
apart—incidentally, for all their syntactic instability, ll. 1–4 themselves
‘hold’ as constituency is hinted at rather than renounced. Readers are
thus pushed in two opposite directions: backward, if the verb is read
intransitively; forward, if the verb is read transitively. In the former sce-
nario, lines 1–4 form a S + V clause and line 5 will be parsed with line 6
as an identifying clause (altogether warp and woof/Is the cloven rock mis-
led ). In the latter scenario, warp and woof is the direct object of hold and
line 6 (Is the cloven rock misled ) will be parsed as a graphically unmarked
question. The interrogative mood of line 7 (Does morning lie what prize )
should retroactively prime this parsing route. By exploiting the struc-
tural ambivalence LID to the full, Howe’s poem becomes a maze of
reading paths, refusing to guide the reader in a predetermined direction.
If the latter parsing option is pursued, then ll. 1–5 can be marked as
a self-contained unit: syntactically, they form an SVO clause; semanti-
cally, they construe a figure revolving around fabric-related words. These
include the idiom warp and woof (l. 5), which refers to the threads in
a woven fabric and further betrays Howe’s reliance on the treatise on
fabrics mentioned in Perloff’s review. Line 6 initiates a strong ideational
shift (replacing the fabric context with one hinting at a natural, wild
landscape) as well as an interpersonal one (from the declarative mood
of ll. 1–5 to the interrogative mood of ll. 6–8). Cloven rock, though not
referentially opaque (a quick online search yields the image of a split
rock), is no doubt an unusual word combination, since ‘cloven’ almost
invariably collocates with ‘hoof ’ (source: COCA). So strong is the bond
between ‘cloven’ and ‘hoof ’ that the latter word, although absent from
the text of the poem, has still good chances to be primed in reading—
especially upon hitting the quasi-homophone woof in the previous line.
302
D. Castiglione
This semantic incongruity doubles with the past participle misled, a verb
that typically goes with conscious agents rather than with inanimate
ones as rock. If ll. 1–4 are the hardest to parse, l. 6 is the one defying
semantic integration most fiercely: its clustering of unpredictable word
combinations aligns with Fabb’s thought-provoking argument that in
verse writing—contrary to everyday communication—‘word-choice can
be driven by any characteristic of the word, and meaning may emerge by
accident ’ (Fabb 2010: 1222; emphasis added).
The ultimate coherence-threatening juxtaposition is that between a
figure based on human goods (ll. 1–5) and a series of nature-related fig-
ures (ll. 6–8). Incidentally, this abrupt transition is stylistically accom-
panied not only by a shift of mood, but also by one of rhythm. The
neat, phrase-breaking enjambments of the former part push the reading
forward as to restore continuity (and to iconically mimic the smooth
movements of a hand that knits and weaves); the end-stopped lines of
the latter, by contrast, create a ‘jagged’ rhythm, perhaps more suited to
mirror the untamed setting alluded to.
8.1.2.2 Deferred Interpretability in ‘A Small Swatch

Bluish-Green’: Formal Symbolism, Intertextuality
In the previous section, I almost felt compelled to trace form-meaning

parallels, that is, to point out instances of formal symbolism: the rela-
tionship between frames of reference and the rhythm created through
segmentation (weaving → continuity; wilderness → discontinuity); or
between the intransitive sense of ‘hold’ and the preservation of a pro-
to-syntactic grid. An even more noteworthy instance of formal symbol-
ism is the use of misled (l. 6), which reflects the reader’s experience of
wandering tentatively through the text, of falling into the danger (or
temptation) of following deceitful cues: one only has to think of the
idiom ‘to be led down the garden path’ (i.e. to be deceived or misled)
to realise that the textuality of ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’, with its
multiple garden paths, is an iconic re-enactment of this proposition.
Like Pound’s extract, Howe’s poem is a formally contrived tromp l’oeil
and its purpose appears to lie in its own performance. Lexical mean-
ing is at best ancillary: a discourse field such as that of fabrics is a poor
303
trigger of thematic inferences, arguably because it is not meaningful in

Culler’s sense of the word (see Sect. 8.1.2), hence its failure to show up
in the participants’ protocols. Topic choice is far from marginal, though,
for it undermines thematic significance, and therefore traditional exege-
sis; it also makes formal symbolism possible by ‘justifying’ the stylistic
performance of the text. I will develop each of these arguments in turn.
That Howe’s poem eschews thematic significance is shown also by the
lack of a perceivable speaker/narrator. While there are some faint traces
of subjectivity (the auxiliary should poised between epistemic and deon-
tic modality, signalling as it does either hypothesis or obligation; the
interrogative mood of ll. 6–8), the deconstruction of discourse makes it
impossible to reconstruct a coherent speaker.5 We are left with an utter-
ance (‘X should hold Y’) the relevance of which is elusive by literary
and everyday communication standards alike. Its source is to be found
in Ephraim Chambers’ 1741 Cyclopaedia (Francesco Cellerino, personal
communication). In this technical dictionary, below the entry word
‘fustian’ we read the following: ‘Right Fustians: should be made alto-
gether of cotton thread, both woof, and warp’. Accessing this recondite
intertext would make the interpretation of should the likelier one, since
the text-type of the source (a dictionary) implies authoritative, non-
dubitative knowledge. In standard reading practice, however, the
chances of spontaneously calling to mind such an intertext are virtu-
ally null; as a consequence, the deontic and epistemic interpretations of
should will coexist, both primed by the text.
‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’ indeed invites open, flexible, even
erratic reading strategies. As a matter of illustration, the reader will
recall how, faced with Hill’s stanza, respondent 10 performed an exe-
getic interpretation in which stylistic evidence was recruited to develop
the perceived theme (see Fig. 7.5, Sect.7.3.3). But faced with Howe’s
poem, the same respondent—missing the support of a meaningful
theme—derived one that lies outside the text (Fig. 8.2).
Howe’s poem as a whole is interpreted as a simple replacement met-
aphor, it is made to stand for a discrete referent (‘the brain’) never men-
tioned in the text. Lexical cues from the text are forced into a ‘brain
schema’—sometimes ingeniously so. Interestingly, there is no room for
neither the ‘nature’ nor for the ‘boy’ topic identified in the protocols, as
304
D. Castiglione
O O
O - O OO
O l - OO
OO O
O O

Fig. 8.2 ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’: an interpretive comment by a

participant
these would conflict with the interpretive superimposition of ‘brain’. Such

an eccentric reading can be considered as an eisegetical interpretation:
In eisegetical interpretations, we often find that the reader has used contexts
which are unintended, unforeseen, or unforeseeable from the writer’s point
of view. While such interpretations may well have a richness, consistency and
unity comparable to the best of exegetical interpretations, to the extent that
they could not have been intended by a writer aiming at optimal relevance,
they are entirely the reader’s responsibility. (Furlong 1995; emphasis added)
I believe eisegetical interpretation works as a repair strategy once the reader

realises that the intended meaning of exegetic alternatives is out of reach. As
the respondent hastened to add a bit later, ‘even though I found it hard to
grasp the meaning that the poet intended, I enjoyed the connections that I
made myself because of the language’. Responsibility shifts from author to
reader, in line with Furlong’s quotation and, more generally, with a post-
modern poetics of deconstruction emphasising freedom over authority:
Deconstruction may be nothing more or less than the response necessi-

tated by the text; it may be nothing, more or less, than taking responsibil-
ity for the act of reading, rather than seeking to avoid that responsibility
in the name of some institutionally approved method of interpretation
(Wolfreys 1998: 15; emphasis added)
The idea that the semantic, stylistic and structural configuration of texts
can preferentially prompt either an exegetic (Hill) or eisegetical (Howe)
interpretation in the same reader is an intriguing possibility. If corrobo-
rated (e.g. by a specifically designed experiment) it would amount to a
serious argument against conventionalist positions laying emphasis on
predetermined interpretive behaviour (Fish 1980).
305
As for my second proposal, that topic choice ‘makes formal sym-

bolism possible by “justifying” the stylistic performance of the text’,
it is worth considering again the word fustian (l. 4)—the definition of
which in the aforementioned Cyclopedia provided an intertext for the
poem. This may have been motivated by a metalinguistic sense of the
word harking back to the end of the sixteenth century—more or less
the time of the sermons quoted in the book by Perloff’s account. Also a
scholar with a strong interest in history, Howe is probably aware of such
a sense, which Adamson discusses as follows:
Though terminological distinctions are never consistently applied, bom-

bast refers to the excessive or unwarranted use of Latinisms, fustian to
their playful or anarchic use. Both words gained their metalinguistic
senses in the last decades of the sixteenth century, developing, in line with
the STYLE = CLOTHING metaphor of the time, from terms for mate-
rial: bombast, the cotton wool padding used for false enlargement (OED
2), fustian, the cotton velvet which imitates the finery of the real thing
(OED 1a/c). (Adamson 1998: 576)
Although not engaging with the issue of Latinate vs. native styles, the
presence of textile elements in the poem reflects Howe’s attempt to imi-
tate ‘the finery of the real thing’ through an appropriately convoluted
handling of the syntax-line interface. Just like it is impossible to tease
out the threads in a piece of fabric, it is also impossible to find a unique
path in the dense texture of the poem. The sensorial materiality of the
poem, from which abstract words are banned, further invites readers to
linger on the poem’s surface, on its literalness, thus eradicating the pos-
sibility for obscurity to arise.
For thematic significance to emerge it is instead necessary, like for
Pound’s extract, to step outside the text and take an intertextual approach.
Beside the aforementioned ‘fustian’ entry in Chambers’ Cyclopedia, the
poem pervasively borrows from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem Woodnotes
II, which contains the phrases pine trees (l. 7), cloven rock (l. 9), what prizes
(l. 30, ‘what prizes the town and the tower’) and wild-eyed boy (l. 34). In
Emerson’s poem, the personification of the pine trees through the use
of direct speech stylistically embodies an animistic sensibility. In Howe’s
poem, by contrast, this empathetic effect is reversed by making the pine
306
D. Castiglione
tree the content of a potential utterance (i.e. a verbiage), thus depriving

it of the role of Sayer it had in Emerson. Emerson’s discursivity and tight
rhyme patterning are also dispensed with. Howe’s poem thus preserves
the ‘genetic’ traces of a previous literary text in a totally different stylistic
environment. These borrowings displace most of the significance from the
semantics of the text-as-utterance to a complex dialectics between text and
intertext, hinging on an uneasy cohabitation of lexical inheritance and
structural separateness. Emerson’s intertext also unlocks the subtle permu-
tation game at the basis of the most semantically deviant line of the poem:
‘Is the cloven rock misled’ (l. 6). This line seems to merge Emerson’s ‘My
garden is the cloven rock’ (l. 9) and the idiomatic expression ‘lead down
the garden path’ (= to deceive, to mislead), where ‘garden’ is the shared
element, significantly left implicit in Howe’s poem. Consider also the fol-
lowing passage, contemporaneous with Howe’s poem:
But religion is more than rite and ritual. There is what the rite and ritual
stand for. Here too I am a Hindu. The universe makes sense to me through
Hindu eyes. There is Brahman, the world soul, the sustaining frame upon
which is woven, warp and weft, the cloth of being, with all its decorative
elements of space and time. (Martel 2001: 48; emphasis added)
This passage is from Yann Martel’s best-selling novel Life of Pi, pub-
lished in the same year as Bed Hangings. Interestingly, the two works
draw on the same ‘raw’ conceptual material: the idiomatic expression
warp and weft, which Martel glosses through apposition (sustaining
frame ), is found, delinearised, in Howe (but warp and woof has a similar
meaning). There may also be an underlying etymological wordplay on
religion (‘religio’ = ‘bond’, possibly from ‘religere’ = ‘to bind together’;
whence the fabric imagery) which in Howe’s poem finds a parallel in the
intransitive sense of hold. Again, intertextuality allows to envisage the
symbolic order—as well as the meaningfulness associated with it—ques-
tioned or displaced at the level of grammar and textuality.
Assuming no intertext was found, the significance in Howe’s poem
would have entirely rested on inferences about writing itself, that is, on
formal symbolism of a metalinguistic sort. Importantly, self-reflexivity
and difficulty (whether this leads to obscurity or not) seem to implicate
307
each other: not only is self-reflexivity prominent in postmodernist

poetry (McHale 2004: 5); it also pervades modernist poems from the
20s to the 40s like those analysed in Chapter 7. Whether this mutual
implication can be turned into a measurable correlation is of course a
different question—one in need of a quantitative, large-scale investiga-
tion that falls outside the remit of this work.
8.1.2.3 Reduced Accessibility in Stein’s Extract

from Patriarchal Poetry: Ideational Incompleteness
and Semantic Prosodies
The LID instantiated throughout Stein’s extract from Patriarchal Poetry

is ill-formed syntax: the word classes typically filling a subject role—
nouns and personal pronouns—are completely renounced; the only
verbs present are non-finite (to be and to be sent, the latter of which
repeated 21 times only in this extract); wh-pronouns follow each other
chaotically, without commas in between, and their grammatical status
(relative or interrogative?) needs to be inferred pragmatically: relative, if
we assume an antecedent removed from previous text (e.g. Patriarchal
Poetry itself, occurring two paragraphs earlier: ‘Patriarchal Poetry or
indeed an explanation’); interrogative, if we accept the possibility of ill-
formed questions coupling wh-pronoun and an infinitive in the passive,
without any question mark to provide an intonation cue.
Deprived of nouns and main verbs, one can hardly speak of clauses.
True, everyday language abounds with non-finite clauses (e.g. ‘to be
honest’) or minor clauses (e.g. ‘goodnight!’) lacking explicit subject or
verb. But having become conventionalised, they make perfect sense as
adverbials (first example) or greetings (second example). Stein’s extract,
by contrast, cannot be parsed in clauses, not even in minor or non-finite
ones: while its words are extremely common, their syntagmatic arrange-
ment is idiosyncratic to the utmost degree. It is written not as a text,
but as a string of repeated phrases whose order is constantly altered (see
next section). If Howe’s poem undermines syntax internally, preserv-
ing the illusion of it, Stein’s extract destroys it externally, cancelling the
memory of it.
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D. Castiglione
This has obvious consequences on the semantic dimension of accessi-

bility. With its participant + process configuration, the clause is ‘the cen-
tral processing unit of lexicogrammar’ (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004:
10). Stein’s extract has no such configuration: it features no participant;
its impersonal, non-finite processes provide almost no anchorage point
for experience. What is more, adverbs like ‘never’ and wh-pronouns
are low in imageability: the MRC database gives values between 231
(‘when’) and 351 (‘never’) for them. In short, while activation of lexical
meanings is not impeded, their combination beyond phrasal level is. As
a consequence, the situation model for Stein’s extract deflects not only
any schema imposed top-down, but also any bottom-up meaning con-
struction. One is not dealing with ideational impenetrability here, but
rather with ideational rarefaction.
A more promising way into Stein’s extract is through the interper-
sonal metafunction. Although ideationally the extract has no partic-
ipant, it can be interpersonally looked at as an ill-formed yet highly
expressive utterance: the obsessively repeated wh-words are likely to
evoke, by virtue of their typical function in discourse, an interroga-
tive intonation throughout, and earlier in the text there is a long list of
commands (e.g. ‘Let her be. / Let her be shy’). This should help recover
the speaker’s emotional stance (say, her questioning anxiety), along-
side her bitterness as inferable from the negative semantic prosody of
the adverb never. Defined as ‘an aura of meaning with which a word
or phrase is imbued by its collocates’ (Milojkovic 2013), semantic pros-
ody can be retrieved by looking at the typical contexts in which a word
or grammatical construction occurs. The quasi-propositional variable
‘never to be’ in the COCA corpus delivers hundreds of contexts, a sam-
ple of which is given in Fig. 8.3.
Of the twenty sampled contexts, the overwhelming majority carry
negative overtones (the exceptions being, arguably, 4, 12 and 15).
Sometimes words with negative connotations are found in the imme-
diate co-text (e.g. alone, gone, tragically lost, kidnapped ); more often,
the lingering pessimism requires wider encyclopaedic knowledge to be
sensed: for instance, processes negated by never tend to carry positive
connotations (e.g. bridged, recovered, resumed, filled, born, found ).
309
l
l
l
l
l l
ll
ll l l
-- ll ll
l ll
ll l
l l
l l
l l
ll
l l l
l
l
l ll l l l
l
l
l
l l l
l ll l
l l l
l l l
l
Fig. 8.3 ‘Never to be’ in discourse: data from COCA
My ensuing hypothesis is that never to be sent could elicit a negative

semantic prosody precisely because of readers’ previous exposure to sim-
ilar adverbial phrases and to their typical contexts of occurrence. This
might in turn prompt inferences about the psychological state of the
speaker, such as the attribution of bitterness or desperation. No matter
how incomplete and ungrammatical the (non)text of the extract, these
inferences would enable to mind-model a speaker and perhaps estab-
lish some degree of empathy with her. This would bring some subjec-
tivity back to Stein’s extract, toning down the interpersonal difficulty
310
D. Castiglione
associated with emotional detachment while leaving ideational diffi-

culty intact. It is worth stressing, though, that this is just a possibility,
and quite a remote one in normal reading practice: the overt syntac-
tic incompleteness and semantic inconsistency are most likely to over-
shadow these subjectivity cues, deferring or impeding the construction
of a speaker.
8.1.2.4 Deferred Interpretability in Stein’s Extract

from Patriarchal Poetry: Lack of Informativity, Formal
Symbolism and the Title as Cue
The scantiness of lexical words and the lack of main clauses make it
intrinsically impossible to infer a theme from the semantics of Stein’s
extract, although elsewhere in Patriarchal Poetry a handful of well-
formed clauses appear that may act as interpretive anchors (e.g. ‘There
is no difference between having been born in Brittany and having been
born in Algeria’). Commenting on another Stein poem, ‘Lifting Belly’,
Quartermain elaborates on such impossibility as follows:
the poem assaults the standard interpretive notion of meaning as an

“essence” that must be extracted just as it assaults the standard interpre-
tive practice of peeling away “layers” of signification through abstracting
and then explication “key” words and phrases which will “unlock” the
text. (1992: 29)
Significance must therefore lie elsewhere, in formal symbolism. The

compositional strategy underpinning Stein’s chosen extract from
Patriarchal Poetry is indeed formalist: familiar words are emptied of their
discursive function through obsessive iteration coupled with continuous
variations in their juxtapositional order. Words are, as a result, treated as
‘primitive’ signs and the page as a canvas, in what looks like more a pic-
torial than a writerly performance. As a possible parallel, one may think
of Piet Mondrian’s coeval compositions where primary colours fill in
geometric shapes, confining artistic mastery and intuition to the arrange-
ment of the elements. This analogy is made contextually plausible by the
311
fact that Stein established herself as an important art collector, whose

studio was visited by renowned artists. This argument also adds a tessera
to the representational problem outlined in Chapter 2.
Let us now consider the style of the extract more closely. First,
informativity as measured by type/token ratio stands at an incredibly
low 5.15%: through systemic repetitions, just seven types (never, which,
when, where, to, be and sent ) amount to as many as 136 tokens. This
reflects an unmatched anti-communicative stance which turns upside
down the informativity of ‘elaborate utterance’ poems such as Hill’s
Stanza 33 (whose type/token ratio is over 90%) while also keeping
well away from the medium 60% figure of an ideally accessible poem
like Strand’s ‘The Late Hour’. Lexical density is likewise low (30.15%)
as function words counted in tokens vastly outnumber lexical words.6
Pragmatically, these two techniques (systemic repetition and a prev-
alence of function words) amount to a twofold violation of Grice’s
maxim of quantity: first, very little is said, since function words are not
communicatively salient; second, this very little is paradoxically redun-
dant: it is endlessly repeated as if it were highly salient, as if it were
worth being inculcated in someone’s mind.
All this points, of course, to an ironic de-structuring of discursiv-
ity that Stein’s extract shares with Howe’s poem. Here is where Stein’s
title comes in, since formal symbolism always needs to rest on lexical
anchoring. Stein completely reverses the notions of poetry and patriar-
chy, to which her ‘non-text’ stands as a specular opposite: whence the
ironic and metalinguistic character of the operation. As for the former
aspect, Stein’s extract opposes the discursivity and trustworthy ‘author-
itativeness’ of the modernist poem as represented by a male-dominated
literary scene (i.e. Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens; see Quartermain 1992:
41). At the same time, it sharply differs from the nineteenth-century
poème en prose (e.g. Rimbaud’s Illuminations ) in that, besides lineation,
it renounces syntactic well-formedness and the presence of discernible
thematic nuclei. As for the latter aspect, critics have often discussed
Stein’s feminism, reverberating in an ‘anti-patriarchal cubism as opposed
to masculine control over form’ (Lopez 2006: 14).
The implicit assumption is that discourse, with its intrinsic hierarchy,
utilitarian scope and responsibility in shaping and perpetuating dominant
312
D. Castiglione
ideologies, is an instrument of power that one needs to challenge, sabo-

tage and deconstruct ante-litteram. Syntax and semanticity are central to
language as it has evolved over hundreds of millennia: without these dis-
tinctive features, communication and the rise of civilisation itself would
have proved impossible. In the extract from Patriarchal Poetry, these
dimensions are replaced by the marginalised, holistic and affective one of
prosody as a carrier of expressive, ritual meaning. In Neel’s words, ‘rhyth-
mic variation challenges semantic coherence and authority, not only
wishing and praying for but instantiating its transcendence’ (1999: 97).
In perhaps a utopian vein, Stein’s extract appears to simulate an ontoge-
netic regression of language to its pre-civilised state, a protolanguage
with rudimentary semanticity and no proper syntax which formed 1.6
millions of years ago according to Bickerton (cited in Harley 2008: 52).
8.1.2.5 Summary
In their highly idiosyncratic ways, Howe’s ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’

and Stein’s extract from Patriarchal Poetry deconstruct discursivity by
questioning syntactic well-formedness: Howe’s poem does it by excess,
through a blurring of constituency and a resulting parsing undecidabil-
ity; Stein’s extract does it by defect, by omitting main constituents and
thus suppressing ideational representation from the outset. Obvious
parsing hurdles led to an extremely slow reading for Howe’s poem;
although no such data are available for Stein’s extract, I would like to
propose that its nearly null readability would result, paradoxically, in
incredibly fast reading times—probably less than 50 ms/char. Because
syntax is abolished, readers would immediately suspend all parsing oper-
ations, processing Stein’s extract as a string of words requiring activation
and integration only. Now, activation itself poses no challenges as the
words are extremely common and recognisable; but integration would
prove impossible, at least until metalinguistic inferences are drawn
between (lack of ) structure and title. Once (and if ) this happens, Stein’s
extract acquires a motivation, a purpose, a meaning outside lexical
and textual semantics; but one still needs some specialised knowledge
(e.g. Feminist thought and an awareness of literary genres) for such for-
mal symbolism to emerge. In summary, ill-formed syntax is a powerful
313
LID in Howe’s poem and in the Stein extract: it shapes the reading
experience more forcefully than any other LID, questioning basic cogni-
tive operations in the pursuit of aesthetic and ideological ends.
Yet ill-formed syntax can also be comparatively innocuous. I am
thinking of Cummings, whose deviations (morphological, semantic, syn-
tactic, and orthographic) have often been characterised as radical. It is
my contention, though, that Cummings’s syntactic deviations typically
defer rather than thwart parsing: far from being questioned, syntactic
rules are added; all that is required from readers is to expand their pars-
ing ‘toolbox’. Take the ungrammatical clauses ‘he danced his did’ and
‘with up so floating many bells down’ analysed by Fowler (1971). The
stylistician traces them back to well-formed counterparts through a chain
of transformations. The former example is unproblematic to parse: did
unequivocally functions as noun even though it is, lexically, a verb. The
latter example appears closer to Stein’s and Howe’s parsing-proof strings,
or what Levin (1977: 14) describes as syntactic deviance in nature. Yet
it suffices to reshuffle a couple of words to recover a syntactically well-
formed (and metaphorically plausible) prepositional phrase: ‘with so
many bells floating up [and] down’. Well-formed counterparts there-
fore become a helpful processing template in a way that does not apply
to Howe’s poem or Stein’s extract. This tendency can be appreciated by
looking at the opening of Cummings’s ‘What a Proud Dreamhorse’:
1 what a proud dreamhorse pulling (smoothloomingly) through

2 (stepp) this (ing)crazily seething of this
3 raving city screamingly street wonderful
Syntactic ill-formedness here comes in the guise of derivational substitu-

tions affecting the word class of the ‘misused’ word. Adverbs are used as
adjectives (e.g. screamingly, l. 3, or in (ing)crazily, l. 2, where the inflec-
tional suffix–ing is moved to a prefix position); adjectives conversely act
as adverbs (‘happens/only and beautiful’, ll. 8–9) or even as nouns (e.g.
‘are a […] squirm-of-frightened shy’, ll. 6–7; ‘there is a ragged’, l. 10;
‘to have tasted beautiful’, l. 12); the relative pronouns whats (l. 6) and
whichs (l. 7) behave as countable nouns as they do in such expressions
as ‘the whys and hows’ (source: COCA); verbs can follow prepositions,
that is occupy a noun slot (‘hungry of Is’; ‘thirsty for happens’, l. 8).
314
D. Castiglione
In short, Cummings’s ‘What a Proud Dreamhorse’ widens the set of

matches between form and function conventionally allowed by grammar.
Unlike Howe’s ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’, however, it does not break
the functions themselves: one can univocally assign the ‘misused’ words
a syntactic slot. There are, of course, a few local exceptions: wishes, for
instance (‘piercing clothes thoughts kiss/-ing wishes bodies’, ll. 6–7), can be
either a countable noun, primed by clothes and thoughts, or the main verb
of a subordinate clause which could be parsed thus: ‘piercing clothes [and]
thoughts [and] kissing, wishes bodies’. Or, skip dance kids hop point at
(l. 13), which at first may read as a string of nouns, is best parsed a series of
commands where a determiner has been omitted and an addressed referent
interposed (e.g. ‘skip [the/your] dance, kids, hop, point at…’).
These instances, while they call for less straightforward parsing deci-
sions, are still a far cry from the structural indeterminacy of Howe’s
poem or the abolition of syntax in Stein’s extract. Aesthetically speak-
ing, no deconstruction of discourse occurs in Cummings, but rather a
reconfiguration of it: using a political analogy, one could describe this
operation as progressive rather than revolutionary, affecting forms rather
than functions. The barrier it poses to reading is, for all its idiosyncrasy,
one of surface; below it lies a clausal structure that eases processing,
alongside lexical facilitators of accessibility: emotive adjectives (proud,
raving, startled, frightened ), proximal demonstratives (this × 2, these ),
material verbs (e.g. pulling, paints and touches ) and concrete nouns
(e.g. city, street, flowers and hands ). These choices should favour a feel-
ing of empathy compensating for the temporary deferral of parsing and
local problems of integration. This type of pay-off is, by contrast, harder
to envisage in Howe’s poem and in Stein’s extract, which do away with
both thematic significance and subject relatability. As I have demon-
strated, Cummings’s poem is not that prototype of poetic difficulty
Yaron would lead us to believe.
It is time to conclude this macro-section with our usual diagram-
matic representations of difficulty for Howe’s poem and Stein’s extract
(not for Cummings’s poem though, as only one of its LIDs has been
analysed) (Figs. 8.4 and 8.5).
315
Fig. 8.4 ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’: breakdown of difficulty (text effects

and LIDs)
Fig. 8.5 Extract from Patriarchal Poetry: breakdown of difficulty (text effects

and LIDs)
316
D. Castiglione
8.2 Difficulty as Persuasive Nonsense:

Semantic Deviance and Argumentation
The third and last type of poetic difficulty is a hybrid between the two
examined so far—the ‘elaborate utterances’ poems leading to obscurity
and those iconic of disorder. Like the first type, the poems in this sec-
tion embody a discursivity signalling a loquacious speaker or a narrator
in control of his output. Like the second, they undermine thematic sig-
nificance so conspicuously as to bar most routes to obscurity. These two
aspects work against each other, generating nonsense. As the relation-
ship between nonsense and difficulty appeared elusive in the criticism
surveyed in Chapter 2, this notion was not discussed alongside ambigu-
ity and obscurity. It is time to briefly remedy this gap.7
Teasing nonsense apart from obscurity, Riffaterre argues that what the
former does is ‘symbolizing artifice’ thus ‘cancelling utilitarian communi-
cation’ (1984 [1978]: 150). This account would seem to befit the poems
analysed in this chapter—Pound’s, Howe’s and Stein’s. Yet I believe that sin-
gle-voiced discursivity should be thrown into the equation as well: after all,
nonsense still feeds on the listener’s (frustrated) expectation that what they
are going to attend to will be meaningful, that is, contextually relevant and
adherent to a shared system of reference. This unfulfilled expectation may
account for Leech’s unusually judgemental stance in dismissing nonsense
as a ‘simple aberration’ that has nothing to do with ‘meaningful deviation’
(2008: 16). In nonsense, we witness a ‘stylisation of semantic deviance’
(Adamson 1999: 612): deviation becomes the new internal norm and
therefore loses its differential impact, as foregrounding theory reminds us.
There are two interrelated objections to consider at this point. First,
in the light of Adamson’s quote, why did I choose not to discuss those
poems belonging to the obscurity type (Chapter 7) in terms of nonsense,
despite their (sometimes heavy) reliance on semantic deviance? And
second, how can thematic significance be opposed if discursivity is pre-
served? This claim seems to contradict a key assumption of the model,
namely that discursivity engenders obscurity while fragmentation, mon-
tage and polyphony do not. Let us address each objection in turn.
As for the former, semantic deviance in the obscurity type seldom
is so extreme that it results in incongruity: those phrases or clauses
317
instantiating this LID are generally interpretable as metaphors or as

standing in apposition, that is, common ground or a shared referent
can be inferred. Moreover, these semantic deviances are regulated by a
coherent discursivity, that is, the obscure poem is perceived as a trust-
worthy whole thanks to certain stylistic characteristics (e.g. homogene-
ous register, the enactment of thematic significance via generic sentences
or textual schemas). In short, semantic deviance in them is, although
widespread, not stylised—or not obviously so.
As for the latter, my point is that the relationship between discursivity
and semantic deviance is reversed: while both are present, the former is
instrumental to the latter, not vice versa. This means that discursivity, while
it presupposes thematic significance, does not by itself suffice to guarantee
it: in nonsense discourse is staged only to be exposed as meaningless, it is
semantically undermined but formally preserved (incidentally, were it not
for its multi-voiced architecture, Pound’s extract would fit this type too).
Interestingly, given that nonsensicality pervades the speaker’s discourse,
there is no room for irony as a distancing device: there is nothing in the
poems analysed in this section resembling Hill’s stanza, where passages of
apparently nonsensical headlinese are marked off as quoted material (see
Sect. 7.3.3) that exalts, rather than infiltrating, the density and integrity of
the speaker’s own utterances. Textually, the outcome resembles a parody of
the obscure poem type: an eccentric re-appropriation of it rather than its
denial. Ideationally, one does not get an impersonal mimesis of external dis-
order, like in the ‘literally resistant’ poems in Sect. 8.1, but rather a mimesis
of inner instability, of deranged or abnormal subjectivities. Interpersonally,
the perception of an extravagant speaker should tone down those difficulty
effects linked to impersonality, detachment and lack of empathy. These the-
oretical points are illustrated with reference to two cases studies: Stein’s ‘A
box’ and Bernstein’s first stanza from ‘Safe Methods of Business’.
8.2.1 Gertrude Stein’s ‘A Box’ and an Extract

from Charles Bernstein’s ‘Safe Methods
of Business’
‘A Box’ was published in 1914, when avant-garde writing was in its

infancy; ‘Safe Methods of Business’ about seventy years later, in 1987,
318
D. Castiglione
when postmodernism was in full swing. Yet a red thread seems to unite
them, exemplifying what critics have written with regard to Stein’s influ-
ence on the Language Poets movement of which Bernstein is a key rep-
resentative (Perloff 1991: 79; Lopez 2006: 14). Their common trait is
a conflation of nonsense-like content and argumentative discourse.
Argumentative discourse boosts logical cohesion and, coupled with a
syntactic preference for coordination over subordination in ‘A Box’ and
in ‘Safe Methods of Business’, has a positive impact on readability; con-
versely, nonsense content undermines ideational coherence and has a
negative impact on accessibility:
‘A Box’
Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same
question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cat-
tle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something
suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to
be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a
green point not to red but to point again.
Safe Methods of Business (first stanza)
1 The Sleepy impertinence of winsome actuarial

2 Lambs me to accrue mixed beltings – or,
3 Surreptitiously apodictic, impedes erstwhile.
4 Pumice, for instance, has bowdlerized the steam
5 As amulets of oddments cedar coatfins
6 Or rake about shoals. The pig is stabbed
7 Through the belly (horse grippings are not essences).
8 For choice is rivulets. The chase of
9 Carolinas cries in the gorge – not so
10 Much ranting as astringent. And therefore
11 I have mailed the teas and come, an
12 Old man with a wet mouth, when invited.
A tension as of a force pulling towards opposite directions is thus cre-

ated: interpersonally, ‘A Box’ and the first stanza of ‘Safe Methods of
Business’ imply an audience willing to be persuaded of the value of
319
their statements; but ideationally, the statements are so far-fetched

that, differently from the conceits of metaphysical poetry (e.g. Donne’s
analogy between the lovers and the legs of a compass in ‘Valediction:
Forbidding Mourning’), they betray less wit than expose downright
absurdism. The next sections chart how this dialectics is enacted at the
level of LIDs.
8.2.1.1 Pretended Readability: The Underlying Argumentative

Schema
With its four opening unmodalised declarative clauses in the present

tense, ‘A Box’ is reminiscent of scientific writing: it outlines a state of
affairs through seemingly irrefutable propositions. The ‘out of X comes
Y’ syntactic template in which they are cast is illustrative of Stein’s
‘procedural syntax’ (Lopez 2006: 13) and invites us to interpret the
clauses as related, this being a well-established function of parallelism
(Leech 2008: 114). This fosters the illusion of reasoning stringency
articulated by an axiomatic speaker. After the first sentence, she teases
out the implications of the preceding utterances, marking her pen-
chant for reasoning through the cluster of causal conjunctions so then.
The effect of detached objectivity is grounded in a non-participant
third-person perspective, in the use of relational clauses, both iden-
tifying (‘a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin’)
and attributive (e.g. ‘it is so rudimentary to be analysed’), as well as in
the profusion of inanimate referents, occasionally concrete (pin, sub-
stance ), more frequently abstract (kindness, redness, rudeness, research,
selection, way ).
In terms of discourse mode, then, ‘A Box’ relies on the textual schema of
the scientific treatise, or perhaps of the experimental report. This reliance is
of course bolstered by words belonging to the semantic field of the experi-
mental sciences (cattle, selection, research, analysed, substance ). But ‘listening’
to ‘A Box’ more attentively, it becomes evident that the putatively objective
mode of scientific discourse is infiltrated by the subjective mode of personal
confession all along. This effect is achieved through nouns denoting behav-
ioural traits (kindness, rudeness ), but especially through subjectivity markers
320
D. Castiglione
such as emotive/evaluative adjectives (painful, disappointing, rudimentary )

and adverbs (strangely, earnest, the intensifier so ). Like in the later Patriarchal
Poetry, though via different stylistic means, Stein’s writing preserves a resid-
uum of subjectivity that, beyond hybridising and destabilising the dominant
scientific schema, also provides an empathetic point of access into the poem.
An equally strong argumentative gradient is found in ‘Safe Methods of
Business’, owing to its conjunctions serving purposes of elaboration: from
the expression of alternative views or scenarios (or, ll. 2 and 6) to causal
explanation (for, l. 8, followed by an identifying clause, and therefore,
l. 10) and clarification (for instance, l. 4). The parenthetical in l. 7 (‘horse
grippings are not essences’) is yet another strategy of clarification, with its
(negated) identifying clause that whimsically strives to define the speak-
er’s ‘topic’ just as we have seen happening in ‘A Box’ (‘a white way of being
round is something suggesting a pin’). The comparative adverbial in ll. 9–10
(‘not so / much ranting as astringent’) likewise signals a speaker pedantically
concerned with delimiting the slippery referents of his discourse (this struc-
ture returns no less bafflingly later in the poem: ‘several indissoluble espla-
nades / less arbitrary than lived in’ and ‘less metonymic than / inimitable’,
probably referred to flesh, an antecedent found two lines earlier). The title
of the hosting collection, The Sophist, chimes well with such acrobatic argu-
mentativeness, and later on in the poem, it is congruently and humorously
claimed that ‘Everybody wants to be a philosopher’. In summary, all these
features—conjunctions, identifying clauses, comparative adverbials—cue a
pretence to rationality which acts as a counterpoint to the blatant incongru-
ities and topic shifts found at the ideational level (see next section).
The overall effect is one of polarisation rather than of compromise
between the two stances, the rationalist and the absurdist: it is the
speaker’s hopeless attempt to endow his erratic utterances with a coating
of reasoning stringency that which further exposes the incoherence of
what he states in a matter-of-fact, ‘surreptitiously apodictic’ manner.
8.2.1.2 Reduced Accessibility: Semantic Incongruities,

Ideational Shifts
The local semantic incongruity LID was typical of an obscure poem such
as Crane’s ‘At Melville’s Tomb’: my transitivity analysis (see Sect. 7.2.1)
321
put in relief the personification of inanimate referents, concrete (e.g. ‘the

dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath / an embassy’, ll. 2–3) and
abstract (e.g. ‘their numbers as he watched, / beat on the dusty shore’,
ll. 3–4), alongside a dominance of behavioural and material processes.
The same LID is typical, even systemic, in ‘A Box’ and in ‘Safe Methods
of Business’ too, yet does not lead to obscurity proper. Where is, then,
the line between obscurity and nonsensicality to be drawn? Let us first
consider transitivity patterns in ‘A Box’ and in ‘Safe Methods of Business’
order to attempt an answer.
Processes in ‘A Box’ are almost invariably relational (i.e. have, the six
tokens of the verb to be—but ‘it is not’ could well be existential), for
the verb of movement come is used in the non-deictic, logical sense of
‘follow’ or ‘ensue’, reinforcing the argumentative stance just analysed.
The exceptions—the perception verb to see, the cognitive verb to be ana-
lysed and the material verb to point at—are implicitly carried out by (or
exerted upon) human referents. The infinitive mode, however, confers
on them the generalising stance of scientific-philosophical discourse in
which all sense of situational anchoring is suspended.
Incidentally, this suspension of referentiality is also indexed by the
semi-determiner same in the second sentence, presupposing an ante-
cedent never supplied by the text nor easily inferable from the situation
alluded to: we sense that same question should be interpreted exophori-
cally; however, no clue is provided in this respect (this strategy resem-
bles the other way in Stevens’s poem: see Sect. 7.1.1).
Participants and circumstances belong, overwhelmingly, to the
SEMIOTIC: ABSTRACTION (kindness, rudeness, order, the syn-
esthetic genitive metaphor a white way of being round ) and to the
SEMIOTIC: MATERIAL category (redness, question, research, selection ),
the exception being cattle (MATERIAL: ANIMAL). No matter how
tenuously related, most of them belong to the same ontological plane—
that of semiosis rather than of material reality. Even more crucially, they
obey principles of free word associations that resonate with the psycho-
analytic method burgeoning in the years when ‘A Box’ was written. It
is in fact possible to posit elaborative inferences of cause–effect (e.g.
redness, cueing anger or embarrassment, is an effect of kindness), asso-
ciations based on sound similarity or anagrammatic inclusion (redness-
rudeness, pin-disap p o in ting ), referential similarity (round → pin ), or an
322
D. Castiglione
indirect oxymoric relation between participant (to be analysed, that is,

the process of analysis) and attribute (rudimentary ).
This stream-of-consciousness technique points to the speaker’s lack of
control over her own verbal output: at textword level, the utterances are
devoid of intentionality, for they are cunningly extorted or inadvertently
released rather than consciously produced. This is a fundamental point:
lacking direction and purport, that is, lacking illocutionary force, ‘A Box’
should resist the exegesis so indissolubly tied to obscurity, and in this way
resist thematic significance in spite of its recognisable semantic fields. Not
only patients on a psychoanalyst’s couch, also aphasics with brain damage
fit the profile we may ascribe to the speaker: as Watson brilliantly notices,
‘Stein’s writing often reads as if she had Wernicke’s aphasia’ (2005: 38).
Wernicke’s aphasia is a speech disorder caused by a damage to the epony-
mous brain area and leading to fluent but semantically incoherent verbal
output, exemplified by the following: ‘I felt worse because I can no longer
keep in mind from the mind of the minds to keep me from mind and
up to the ear which can be to find among ourselves’ (anonymous patient,
quoted in Fromkin et al. 2014: 465). In this authentic sample, one can
easily retrace the subjectivity (‘I felt worse’), the argumentative attempt
(because ) and iterative structure (‘in mind from the mind of the minds’)
characterising ‘A Box’. Paradigmatic replacements—both semantic and
phonetic—are another trait that Stein’s writing shares with the verbal out-
put of those affected by Wernicke’s aphasia. This affinity is probably no
accident, for Watson (2005: 49–88) shows that Stein was familiar with
William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890) where the author intro-
duces and discusses the ‘stream of consciousness’ metaphor.
From a transitivity analysis standpoint, the first stanza of ‘Safe
Methods of Business’ is as uniform as ‘A Box’. Material processes are
dominant (lambs, accrue, bowdlerized, is stabbed, I have mailed—also
impedes to the extent that its metaphorical usage derives from the idea
of physical obstacle); cries is behavioural if parsed as a verb; the two
tokens of the relational verb ‘to be’ in ll. 6–7 serve purposes of baf-
fling clarification (see previous section). Participants and circumstances
are from disparate ontological levels: SEMIOTIC: ABSTRACTION
(the noun-modifier metaphor Sleepy impertinence ), SEMIOTIC:
MATERIAL (horse grippings, chase ), MATERIAL: SUBSTANCE
323
(pumice ), MATERIAL: ANIMAL (pig ), HUMAN (me, I, old man ) or

OBJECT (the teas ). Such shifting compresence of abstraction and con-
cretion, as well as the emphasis on material processes, may bring ‘Safe
Methods of Business’ closer to Thomas’s ‘Once the Twilight Locks No
Longer’ and Crane’s ‘At Melville’s Tomb’ than ‘A Box’. Perloff has a
point then in singling out Crane as one of Bernstein’s most likely prede-
cessors (1991: 186). One has to borne in mind, however, that the rest of
Bernstein’s poem is so heterogeneous in terms of genre and style (rang-
ing from plain diary writing in quasi-prose form to tercets in free verse,
from lyrical statements to free direct speech) that no generalisations
should or even could be made in this regard.
Still, the genealogical hypothesis above calls into question the divide
between obscurity and nonsensicality, making the reader wonder why
I neatly categorised Crane’s poem as obscure but find nonsensicality a
more suitable descriptor for Bernstein’s. Perloff herself appears acutely
aware of this tenuous divide: against the frequent and harmful allega-
tions of nonsensicality levelled at Bernstein’s poetry (1991: 174), she
contends that in ‘Safe Methods of Business’ ‘signification is obscure
but by no means impossible’ (1991: 185). The critic proves her point
by retracing the poem’s web of intertextual allusions (see next section),
possibly to legitimate Bernstein’s work in the eyes of sceptical critics. In
doing so, however, she tones down its ideational fragmentation (and
the ensuing perception of randomness) achieved through the semantic
incongruity LID, responsible for those allegations of nonsensicality that
the model should be able to account for.
In what follows, I show that—differently from Crane’s poem—the
semantic distance, between (1) Heads and modifiers (phrasal level); (2)
participants, processes and circumstances (clausal level); and (3) fig-
ures (textual level), is so great that the possibility of establishing cov-
ert links—a prerequisite for obscurity to emerge—is overshadowed by a
comic yet unsettling feeling of random arbitrariness.
The opening noun phrase The Sleepy impertinence of winsome actuar-
ial features two restricted collocations which are in turn joined by an
of-construction with possessive value. Different ontological planes con-
flate both at the lower level of the embedded phrases and at the higher
level of the complex noun phrase. At the lower level, a SEMIOTIC:
324
D. Castiglione
ABSTRACTION noun (impertinence ) is premodified by a descriptive

adjective (sleepy ) typically used with MATERIAL: ANIMAL/HUMAN
nouns; another descriptive adjective (winsome ) premodifies actuarial,
derived from the MATERIAL: HUMAN profession noun ‘actuary’ (a
person who compiles and analyses statistics and uses them to calculate
insurance risks and premiums, OED ).
Now, had Bernstein used ‘actuary’ there would be no semantic
incongruity (only a pragmatic inappropriateness), for ‘winsome’ is often
employed to describe people (source: COCA). But instead he enacts
a word class conversion very much like those of Cummings’s ‘What
a Proud Dreamhorse’, so what is formally an adjective functionally
becomes a noun. Differently from Cummings, however, the conver-
sion is effected on a word that is not part of the core vocabulary. Not
only does this temporarily deautomatise parsing; it also blurs the refer-
ent on the ideational level: a nominalised adjective, actuarial denotes
everything we may associate actuaries with. Just like ‘the beautiful’ is
shorthand for ‘all that has beauty’, ‘actuarial’ is shorthand for ‘all that is
to do with actuaries’. But again, having an ‘actuary’ schema is a preserve
of the few: since most of us will only have the vaguest idea of what
actuaries do and who they are, the semantic construal will necessarily
be sketchy. This clashes with the fact that actuarial, being the Head of
the complex noun phrase, is grammatically the main carrier of infor-
mation. And yet all we can gather is that actuarial has some human
characteristics (sleepy, winsome, impertinence) bearing conflicting
connotations.
The density of the opening noun phrase alone has required two par-
agraphs to be satisfactorily analysed. This already shows that Bernstein’s
poem is eccentric by means of excess, not of defect: freed from the com-
municative concerns of an organising consciousness like that perceivable
in the obscure poems from Chapter 7, semantic deviance feeds on itself,
generating an increasingly dazzling and centrifugal textworld. It is as if
the onus of textual composition shifted from a subjective consciousness
to the system of structural semantics itself—a combinatorial game that
would be inappropriate to interpret as mimesis of associative thought as
done for ‘A Box’. In the light of this, ‘Safe Methods of Business’ seems a
textual realisation of Bernstein’s own contention that ‘facts in poetry are
325
primarily factitious’ (1992: 9). Let us now see how the rest of the poem
develops in terms of logogenesis, that is, of meaning unfolding.
The elusive actuarial is endowed with causative force, for it ‘lambs’
the poetic persona ‘to accrue mixed beltings’ (l. 2). Now, accrue typically
collocates with ‘interests’8 or other nouns of semiotic abstraction such
as ‘costs’, ‘status’, ‘gains’, ‘debt’, ‘seniority’ (source: COCA). As a con-
sequence, the MATERIAL: ABSTRACTION collocate noun beltings
is semantically incongruous. Such incongruity may generate a surface
effect of comicity, but an element of social accusation lingers behind it:
beltings works as a replacement metaphor stylistically turning finance-re-
lated abstractions into concrete physical pain.
And indeed violence-related things and processes start surfacing in
the text: impedes (l. 2), has bowdlerized (l. 4), is stabbed (l. 6), chase (l.
8), gorge (l. 9). This semantic thread connects otherwise unrelated fig-
ures: ll. 4–6 revolve around MATERIAL: SUBSTANCE/OBJECT
nouns, but shoal (l. 6) paves the way for a transition to MATERIAL:
ANIMAL nouns (pig, horse, ll. 6–7). The next figure shifts to geogra-
phy and geology combining a noun of SEMIOTIC: ABSTRACTION
(Carolinas ) and one of MATERIAL: OBJECT (gorge ). The last transi-
tion features the MATERIAL: OBJECT teas, arguably foreshadowed
by astringent (l. 10) and more generally by the semantic field of liquids
(rivulets, cries ).
In this last figure, the agency of the lyric subject that was reduced to
a pronoun in object position in l. 2 (me ) is parodically restored (‘I have
mailed the teas and come’). The causal link (i.e. therefore, l. 10) between
such trivial resolution and the unrelated figures surveyed so far is so
tenuous as to appear arbitrary, being located in that grey area where
unfathomable obscurity and plain nonsensicality coexist. The ‘pieces
of the puzzle’ analogy proposed by Perloff to describe the poem (1991:
197) points not only to its register variety, but more fundamentally
to this all-pervasive ideational fragmentation. In cognitive terms, this
means that the common ground across the figures is so minimal that
it will probably be missed or rejected as a basis for plausible bridging
inferencing: an acknowledgment of unbridgeable unrelatedness is likely
to triumph over any attempt to ‘connect the dots’, to put the pieces of
the puzzle back together.
326
D. Castiglione
8.2.1.3 Deferred Interpretability: Parody, Intertextuality,

Formal Symbolism
My analysis has shown that poems verging on nonsensicality increase

the concentration and severity of certain LIDs (semantic incongru-
ity and ideational shift, primarily) that were already systemic in high
modernist obscure poems. This intensification may strike as caricatu-
ral, whence my earlier proposal to read ‘A Box’ and ‘Safe Methods of
Business’ as parodies of obscure poems. The increased semantic distance
between referents standing in clear grammatical relations with respect
to each other—within and across phrases and clauses—thins out the
chances of envisaging a gestalt behind the floating ideational fragments.
Nonsensicality reigns at the level of discourse semantics because bridg-
ing inferences are impaired, and elaborative inferences fail to account
for the totality of the text. This notwithstanding, interpretability—
intended as the cogency of the underlying aesthetic operation—is pre-
served in a deferred form, not unlike the poems in Sect. 8.1.
In particular, I have interpreted reduced accessibility in ‘A Box’ both
as a parody of scientific discourse, with its imperative of clarity, and as
mimesis of unintentional, clinically induced or cognitively compro-
mised verbal output. In more playful fashion, the unlikely associations
underpinning ‘A Box’ may also be argued to mimic certain tricks of
magic: like the magician who pulls a rabbit out of a hat, Stein pulls a
gamut of referents out of the box that titles her text. ‘A Box’ can thus
be seen as enacting a coherent derivation of its title-matrix, as Riffaterre
would put it. These three form-meaning inferences are all ways into
formal symbolism and, rather than cancelling each other out, comple-
ment each other: the hypothesis that ‘A Box’ imitates impaired verbal
output emphasises Stein’s affinity with coeval modernist innovations of
consciousness representation; the hypothesis that scientific, rational dis-
course is her parodic target resonates with her often quoted antagonist,
feminist poetics; and finally, her title-derived formal symbolism antici-
pates postmodernist poetics, with its underlying playfulness and reliance
upon procedural techniques.
Likewise, ‘Safe Methods of Business’ enacts formal symbolism in the
match between the assumptions behind the title of the hosting collection
327
(The Sophist ) and an in-built argumentative stance that clutches at straws

by juxtaposing elements from disparate domains of experience. With a
postmodernist penchant for parodic contrast, ideational chaos is encoded
in an orderly structure where, as Perloff notices, all lines carry five main
stresses (1991: 189). The pentameters of Bernstein’s poem allude to a
distinguished blank verse literary tradition, from Milton’s Paradise Lost
(1667) to Stevens’s ‘Sunday Morning’ (1923). Literary tradition is also
recruited through almost verbatim intertextual references, many of which
carefully traced by Perloff (1991: 191): Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (‘And
therefore I have sailed the seas and come / to the holy city of Byzantium’,
stanza II, ll. 15–16); Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’ (‘Here I am, an old man in a dry
month’, l. 1); and a more mediated allusion to Whitman’s ‘Two Rivulets’.
An even more indirect (as well as cross-medial) allusion is ‘The pig is
stabbed / through the belly’, which turns out to be a ciphered ekphra-
sis of a detail from Peter Brueghel the Elder’s 1559 painting ‘The Dutch
Proverbs’ (Bernstein, personal communication).
Paradigmatic substitutions based on phonetic similarity underpin
the scrambling of Yeats’s and Eliot’s intertexts: ‘sailed’ and ‘seas’ are
replaced by the rhyming ‘mailed’ and ‘teas’ (but ‘sailed’ strategically
appears in the penultimate line of Bernstein’s poem: ‘the only true boats
the ones / that have never sailed, nor been wet / by these kept oceans’);
‘month’ and ‘mouth’ are minimal pairs. The effect of these replacements
is either localised nonsense via violation of noun-verb collocational hab-
its (teas are not normally mailed!) or by contrast a surprising contextual
appropriateness: the ‘wet mouth’ implies salivation reflexes at the pros-
pect of being invited, say, to a banquet, which in turn may evoke ‘the
classical image of the parasite’ (Perloff 1991: 191).
Since explicit intertextuality is a clear manifestation of authorial
design (see also my analysis of Hill’s stanza, especially Sect. 7.3.3), pos-
sible hypotheses on intention shift from the speaker (who has no real
control over his utterances) to the author (who exhibits his liter-
ary awareness and formal control over his composition). Such blatant
form-content discrepancy amounts to an exhortation, since it calls for
the readerly adoption of a dual simultaneous focus: the chaotic and
the mundane thrive; but nested in them, the literary survives, albeit in
the guise of parody.
328
D. Castiglione
This is a form of deferred significance not unlike the intertextual

traces found in Pound’s extract and in Howe’s poem: what is rejected is
not significance per se, but rather its pretended autonomy, its confine-
ment within the boundaries of a verbal construct severed from all dis-
courses. Had Hill’s stanza or Crane’s poem not relied on intertextuality,
their significance would have diminished without disappearing, given
that some more or less ‘immanent’ features (e.g. deictic consistency, tex-
tual schemas, generic sentences) ensured the enactment of a text-con-
structed kind of significance; in Pound’s extract, Howe’s poem, Stein’s
‘A box’ and her extract from Patriarchal Poetry, and in Bernstein’s ‘Safe
Methods of Business’, significance is, by contrast, largely at the mercy of
external forces—be it intertextuality or a top-down reliance on assump-
tions derived, say, from psychoanalysis or deconstruction.
The first stanza of ‘Safe Methods of Business’ does not completely
renounce a traditional kind of thematic significance, though. First, it
contains a generic sentence which is also an equative metaphor (‘For
choice is rivulets’, l. 8). Its gnomic resonance should prompt inferences
regarding the truth and significance of what is stated; the semantic dis-
tance between source and target domains, on the other hand, calls for
hard inferential labour giving rise to local obscurity. Second, it is possi-
ble to draw a ‘finance is violence’ inference (matrix, in Riffaterre’s terms)
by putting in relation, as I did in the previous section, the lexical field
of violence with that of finance. The paradigmatic substitution of ‘inter-
ests’ (the most likely collocate of the verb accrue ) with beltings is argu-
ably the most compelling example. A possible thematic interpretation
may thus run as follows: the hidden, inscrutable mechanisms of finance
(actuarial ) manifest through observable effects in the physical world,
which ‘Safe Methods of Business’ exemplifies through beltings, imped-
iment, the bowdlerisation of steam, the stabbing of a pig and the guest’s
hunger inferable from the ‘wet mouth’ meronymy.
Such higher-level inferencing (e.g. X, Y and Z all derive from A)
restores a coherence that was resolutely denied at the ideational level.
In this way, ‘Safe Methods of Business’ is obscure and nonsensical at
the same time. Obscure, because at the textual level, one generic sen-
tence and paradigmatic substitutions are likely to prompt elaborative
329
inferences that are inherently meaningful—tapping as they do into

thematic primitives like those of violence and economy. Nonsensical,
because there is no monolithic consciousness governing the discourse:
no amount of bridging inferences can satisfactorily connect the shift-
ing frames of Bernstein’s textworld, nor can such fragmentation be
explained in terms of subjective expressivity (e.g. the psychological or
physiological schemas of dream report, analogic thought, madness, hal-
lucinatory states). Cultural, rather than psychological schemas underpin
the ideational fragmentation: ‘Safe Methods of Business’ has in fact been
interpreted ‘as a satiric version of video-scanning, of switching channels
and catching unrelated bits that turn out to be very much related, being
part of the culture cum business world’ (Perloff 1991: 193).
What Bernstein’s poem requires of its readers, in conclusion, is not
to act as recipients of an interlocutor’s trustworthy if oblique utter-
ances (like in the poems from Chapter 7), but to critically reflect on the
pre-existent ‘noise’ of the contemporary world, transmitted by the voice
of a psychologically inconsistent sophist-speaker.
8.2.1.4 Summary
My parallel analysis has shown that ‘A Box’ and ‘Safe Methods of

Business’ formally mimic high modernist poems in which difficulty sub-
sides to obscurity, but functionally resonate with poems such as Pound’s
extract from Canto LXXXI or Howe’s ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-Green’ in
which difficulty has no way out of itself. The LID they share with the
former type is semantic deviance (albeit pushed to an extreme), along-
side traditional literary devices such as parallelism (‘A Box’) or blank
verse (‘Safe Methods of Business’). What they share with the latter type is
instead an intensification of discourse LIDs, especially lack of coherence
and narrativity—the latter supplanted by pseudo-expository modes rem-
iniscent of the wit learned tradition of fictive scholarship (McHale 2004:
4). As a consequence of this, their status is hybrid—neither a synthesis
nor a compromise of the two main typologies. The difficulty profiles of ‘A
Box’ and ‘Safe Methods of Business’ are diagrammed in Figs. 8.6 and 8.7.
330
D. Castiglione
Fig. 8.6 ‘A Box’: breakdown of difficulty (text effects and LIDs)
Fig. 8.7 ‘Safe Methods of Business’ (first stanza): breakdown of difficulty (text

effects and LIDs)
331
One of the most interesting theoretical points—the threshold after

which semantic incongruity in the ‘accessibility’ dimension gener-
ates nonsensicality rather than obscurity—remains somewhat elu-
sive. In Crane’s and Thomas’s poems, semantic incongruity generally
resulted from coupling MATERIAL: INANIMATE participants with
MATERIAL/BEHAVIOURAL processes, with effects of personifica-
tion. At this level of generality, Bernstein’s poem combines the same cat-
egories. The crucial difference, however, is that all its participant roles
except for the speaker in l. 11 (i.e. actuarial, pumice, pig, horse grippings,
and chase ) are lower in empathetic recognisability than those in Crane
(often metonymic of human behaviour or the human body: chapter,
answers, eyes, dice ) or in Thomas (often referring to natural archetypes:
twilight, globe, stars ). So, while Crane, Thomas and Bernstein may use
similarly dynamic verbs, these endow nature or semiotic artefacts with
human-like volition in Crane and Thomas, whereas in Bernstein the
effect is one of impersonal, mechanic, deterministic force.
Ultimately, as far as the perception of difficulty goes, the ontologi-
cal leap between participants, processes and circumstances may matter
less than the extent to which participants are able to prompt or hin-
der empathetic attachment. This would mean that the semantic incon-
gruity LID is ancillary to the (lack of ) subjectivity LID and that, more
generally, the interpersonal metafunction is more determinant than
the ideational one. Of course, this is a hypothesis that awaits corrob-
oration from a specifically designed test—one could, for instance,
manipulate restricted collocations in a given poem in such a way that
participants and circumstances preserve their ontological class (e.g.
ABSTRACTION, MATERIAL, SEMIOTIC…) but change their level
of empathetic recognisability (previously established through independ-
ent ranking and assessment; see also Stockwell 2009: 25). Then, RIDs
such as the number and types of inferences produced, the direction of
interpretation (exegetic vs eiseigetic), interest ratings, and measures of
recall could be examined. More generally, the trade-off between obscu-
rity and nonsensicality could be measured by counting the bridging
and elaborative inferences (obscurity) and the statements of plain rejec-
tion (nonsensicality) elicited in think-aloud protocols by those poems
332
D. Castiglione
that the model would predict as dominantly obscure or nonsensical,

respectively.
8.3 Conclusion
My extensive analysis of five widely different poems in this chapter has
enabled me to outline two typologies that oppose the one in Chapter 7
by undermining text-constructed significance. Such undermining may
take several forms, but these always involve a move away from theme
formulation and the ensuing shrinking of significance into formal sym-
bolism, or its deferral to intertexts. At the level of LIDs, the stylistic
markers distinguishing these two typologies from the first are lack of
coherence, lack of narrativity and lack of informativity; textual sche-
mas in general are either avoided or wilfully employed at parodic and
subversive ends.
In terms of underlying poetics, it is possible to identify two key ten-
ets: (1) a foregrounding of incompleteness: the text is not a complex
ecosystem or gestalt but rather a linguistic (or pseudo-linguistic) object
‘retrieved’ from wider external contexts; and (2) a distrust towards the
‘text-as-utterance’ category: while obscure poems pursue an intensified,
non-ordinary form of communication, poems of literal or nonsensi-
cal difficulty oppose communication itself, replacing attentive listen-
ing with critical inspection. The former tenet appears to partake to a
Marxist and materialist philosophy emphasising interrelations of text
and context (one is reminded of Adorno’s influence: see Sect. 2.2.4)
against the idealistic autonomy of the obscure poem. The latter tenet
springs from the belief that a poem should not be a performance of
subjective expression but a space in which different forces converge
without reaching a synthesis: from the rift between logical opera-
tors and nonsense statements (‘A Box’, ‘Safe Methods of Business’) to
that between the undermining and preservation of syntax (‘A Small
Swatch Bluish-Green’), or the use of conversation markers for non-
dialogic purposes (Canto LXXXI ). In all these cases, the difficulty is not
an experience preliminary to revelation, but an intrinsically permanent
condition.
333
Notes
1. Although in the previous section I have argued that Pound’s extract plays
some parsing tricks, these are so unobtrusive that their effect should
emerge in later reading stages when a more analytic reading method is
adopted; on a first reading, however, the stylistic features just mentioned
are much more salient and their effects more powerfully perceived.
2. Incidentally, this tension between formal imitation and functional sabo-
taging in Pound’s extract—examined with reference to pseudo-dialogism
in Sect. 8.1.1—is arguably what led commentators to describe Pound’s
Cantos as ‘fractured narrative’ (Nadel 2007: 61) that displace a ‘linear
narrative of cause and effect’ (Moen 2010: 296).
3. The same applies to Canto XLV (the ‘Usura’ Canto) where, as Brooke-
Rose’s 1976 extensive analysis has shown, ‘the essential function of
literary discourse is to perform what it says rather than to prove it’
(1976: 67).
4. This is particularly surprising, given that his paper was published in the
journal Style.
5. Even when Howe relies on the first-person pronoun, she turns it into ‘a
found object’, ‘merely ink on a page’, ‘no longer a marker of selfhood’
(McHale 2004: 244).
6. To have an idea of how far Patriarchal Poetry goes in this direction, one
only has to think that lexical density in Crane’s ‘At Melville’s Tomb’ and
Pound’s extract from Canto LXXXI is around 62 and 55%, respectively.
7. For a book-length treatment of nonsense writing, see In Praise of
Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard, Menninghaus (1999).
8. In this respect, Perloff rightly points out the presence of ‘Wall Street-
speak’ (1991: 197).
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9
General Conclusions
Our exploratory voyage around and into poetic d ifficulty provisionally

terminates here. I say ‘provisionally’ because several sideways have
opened up for others to follow, and these will be outlined shortly.
We have nevertheless reached a significant stopover now, one after
which one can critically look back at the miles travelled, at what has
been achieved. Our point of departure was a wild, broad, largely
uncharted territory (Chapter 2); our point of arrival is an in-depth,
fine-grained recognition of three main aesthetic regions: that of diffi-
culty as precondition for obscurity (Chapter 7); of difficulty as paral-
lel with literal resistance or with meaninglessness (Chapter 8). These
general conclusions mirror Chapter 2 in structure, for all the issues
and theoretical problems introduced there are reconsidered in the
light of the advances enabled by the model in subsequent chapters. Of
course, future directions and methodological refinements will also be
outlined.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1_9
338
D. Castiglione
9.1 Integrating the Main Approaches

Chapter 2 started by surveying the three main approaches in the study
of poetic difficulty: the typological, the stylistic and the reception-
oriented. The model developed and applied throughout the book has
fused these together building the typological out of the reception-
oriented and the reception-oriented out of the stylistics, in a nested con-
figuration of increasing abstraction: from the objectively observable (the
stylistic pole, that is, the LIDs) to the subjectively measurable (the read-
erly pole, that is, the RIDs) up to the inferable on the aesthetic level (the
text effect categories of transient and permanent difficulty, of obscurity,
literal resistance and nonsense). Not only have the approaches been fused,
but each of them has also been enhanced and improved. I will begin from
the stylistic to then address the reception-oriented and the typological.
9.1.1 Contribution to Stylistics
Before the model, the stylistics of difficulty was scattered across various
publications (often in several contingently made observations), and so
its holistic workings remained elusive. Priority was accorded, for the
sake of focus and rigour, to specific aspects (e.g. paradigmatic substi-
tutions, deictic shifting, the removal of linking words, noun–verb dis-
placement, the infringement of pragmatic principles and so on) at the
expense of the bigger picture. It was often unclear, for instance, what the
exact contribution of each LID to the overall difficulty effect was, how
LIDs work in synergy and, if any, the hierarchy in terms of influence
between them. Nor was the processing impairment or, by contrast, the
inferential boost brought by certain LIDs described and explained with
reference to psycholinguistic findings and cognitive models of compre-
hension. These shortcomings have been overcome in the actual analy-
ses (Chapters 6–8), as well as in the build-up of the general framework
(Chapter 3) and of the specific model that came out of it (Chapter 4).
In addition, the analyses let emerge a further possible discourse LID,
metalinguistic reflexivity, which was not contemplated in the literature.
9 General Conclusions
339
l
l
l l l l l
l
l l
l l l l
l
ll l l
l
l l l l
l l l
Fig. 9.1 Difficulty: sequential application of the model
Equally important, the stylistics of difficulty included a variety of

approaches that resisted being unified in one standard procedure: each
approach was individually grounded in ever-changing purposes (e.g.
ease access into a text, apply a given framework, examine certain fea-
tures) rather than derived from a theoretical definition. In contrast to
this, the model has been applied through a verifiable and replicable sty-
listic procedure which can be diagrammed as follows (Fig. 9.1).
A preliminary, optional stage not shown in the figure is that of intu-
itive, pre-analytical assessment of difficulty. This stage underpins the
construction of the corpus (Chapter 5) since the model has been used
to diagnose already existing readerly intuitions. But this is far from a
necessity, and the model could also be employed to predict—rather
than simply refute or validate—such intuitions. This is, I think, one of
the most promising and exciting directions that research on difficulty
may take (see next section).
9.1.2 Contribution to Reader-Response Criticism
Advances have been made from the viewpoint of the reception-

oriented tradition too. While the claim that difficulty is a phenomenon
of reception surfaces in its very definition (see Sect. 3.1), the relativism
340
D. Castiglione
and anti-textualism often underlying such tradition have been strongly

opposed. On the one hand, reception theory informs much of this
work: the principle of intersubjectivity, treating critical accounts as fac-
tual evidence for the effects of difficulty in expert readers, guided the
construction of the corpus in Sect. 5.1; and reader-response tests (see
Sect. 5.2) provided insightful data which have integrated the five most
extensive analyses on the axes of accessibility, readability and (occasion-
ally) interpretability. On the other hand, the focus was on shared elements
across the responses (RIDs: see Sect. 4.1), on the norm of a sample pop-
ulation rather than on a single reader. In other words, response variability
across readers mattered less than response variability across poems: tak-
ing a literary, not a psychological perspective, I was primarily interested in
how different poems elicit different RIDs within the same group of read-
ers. Ecological validity has also been prioritised over ease of measurement,
with open formats and leisure reading being favoured over close formats
and research-directed tasks—this in the belief that a rough approximation
to a phenomenon is always preferable to an artificially induced match
between the researcher’s assumptions and the respondents’ performance.
It appears that accessibility RIDs become more and more intense as
we move away from the poems analysed in Chapter 6 to those analysed
in Chapters 7 and 8. For instance, comprehension scores go from 0.8
for the accessible ‘The Late Hour’ to 2.4 and 3.1 for the obscure ‘What
We See Is What We Think’ and Stanza 33, respectively, reaching 3.5 and
4.1 for the ‘literally resistant’ Canto LXXXI and ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-
Green’. Likewise, there is a constant decline in intersubjectivity agree-
ment: topical words are so univocally reported for ‘The Late Hour’ that
one could reconstruct the schema of the forlorn lover just from them; but
such is the wide-ranging disparity of the words reported for the extract
from Canto LXXXI that we have, at best, some thematic traces, none of
which consistent enough to hold the text together. Stevens’s and Hill’s
poems occupy some middle ground: although readers get their gist, they
also realise that much more is left to be accessed. This is an obscurity
effect proper: that of an initial but seldom off-putting opacity.
Answers to the questions ‘Did you enjoy the poem?’ from the pencil-
and-paper questionnaire show a symmetrical pattern to comprehension
scores: the higher the score (that is, the less understood the poem), the
341
Fig. 9.2 Participants’ enjoyment of five poems
lower the degree of enjoyment claimed by readers. This finding, summa-

rised in Fig. 9.2, is consistent with the proposal that processing fluency
boosts aesthetic pleasure, at least for this population of readers (Reber
et al. 2004).
The pedagogical implications of such finding are obvious: if poems
in the ‘literal resistance’ type are likely to be coldly received by most
readers, then the syllabi could reflect this by making students familiarise
with poems in the accessible and in the obscurity type first, before mov-
ing onto poems such as Pound’s, Howe’s or Bernstein’s. Of course, the
kind and distribution of LIDs should help classify all poems in terms of
one or another type.
It is also interesting to consider the type of inferences prompted by
the poems: those for the accessible Strand poem tend to be elaborative
and focus on characters, much in the vein of narrative fiction reading;
those for poems of medium difficulty (Stevens’s and Hill’s) tend to be
thematic: readers carve a general message out of the specifics (both
ideational and textual) of the poem, an act requiring more cognitive
labour than simply expanding a given textworld without working out
higher-level implications; finally, inferences for poems of high difficulty
(Pound’s and Howe’s) attempt to get to topic formulation via form
itself. As a result, meaning-making leaves the ideational level (felt as
too incoherent, absurd or impenetrable an anchorage point) to linger
instead on the textual level (the stylistic idiosyncrasies being themselves
accessible, that is, salient to the eye).
342
D. Castiglione
The reading time RID appears more transversal than the other RIDs,
for Pound’s extract has been read at about the same speed of Strand’s
poem or Ballard’s extract; but leaving Pound aside, reading times do
generally increase from the accessible to the obscurity type-probably as
a result of the latter’s minor reliance on pre-existent schemas, among
other things. This trend continues for the literal resistance type, likely as
a result of the systemically employed ill-formed syntax LID. This quan-
titative increase parallels, on the behavioural level, the aesthetic transfor-
mation of difficulty from a means to an end, from a transient path to a
permanent home. It goes without saying that these claims are in need
of much more data—in terms of participants and poems alike—to be
made generalisable: at present, they represent little more than intrigu-
ing possibilities. One way to test them more precisely would be through
eye-tracking, a method that would allow to chart how our eyes travel
through the thick jungle of the resistant poem: how long words are fix-
ated for, how frequently previous stretches are re-read (technically, the
amount of regressions, or the ‘backward’ jump of the eye) and the over-
all pattern they draw on the surface of the poem.
9.1.3 Contribution to the Typological Tradition
Finally, the overall aim of the model was that of going back to the
roots of difficulty studies and to their ambitious typological agenda
(see Sect. 2.1.1). And indeed two main typologies of difficulty have
been exhaustively worked out, based on their configuration of LIDs
and RIDs: that of difficulty leading to obscurity via meaning excess
(Chapter 7); and that of difficulty leading to either literal resistance or
nonsense via information deficit and decontextualisation (Chapter 8).
Of course, put in this schematic way, the two typologies seem to simply
stand opposite to each other; but as I have shown, boundaries are often
fuzzy, and tracing them depends on what is seen as prototypical within
a given category.
Crucially for a new aesthetics of difficulty, genealogical lines could
tentatively be drawn across the typologies: highly difficult poems
343
subvert (‘literal resistance’) or intensify (‘nonsense’) the premises already

latent in the obscure, medium-difficulty poems of high modernism. In
turn, these obscure poems represent both an intensification of and a
move away from the accessible poem type in Chapter 6—which finds
itself at a remove from the direct communicativeness of expository or
narrative registers. In an evolutionary-like manner, each species sows
the seeds for their literary offspring, giving thus rise to an increasing
diversification.1
I am using ‘typologies’ rather than ‘types’ precisely to highlight the
degree of descriptive detail reached for each aesthetic category. Contrary
to previous classifications, which worked their way top-down from aes-
thetic intuitions to textual exemplifications (notably, Empson 1930
and Steiner 1978), my classification works bottom-up, proposing aes-
thetic categories based on a cohort of previously analysed linguistic
and readerly data: the LIDs and the RIDs. True, a few LIDs have been
hypothesised to be fundamental in drawing the boundaries between the
categories, and this decision may amount to an aesthetic intuition. But
the intuition itself springs from preliminary analysis as well as from an
inductive generalisation on textual effects based on available psycholin-
guistic findings.
Thus, the strategies that mark obscure poems off from accessible ones
are (1) the abandonment of conventional schemas, (2) an increase in
novel metaphor usage and text-motivated incongruities, (3) a decline
in empathetic appeal achieved through a sparser presence of subjec-
tive markers, and (4) a decrease in the use of parallelism devices and
traditional literary form signalling familiarity and working as aids to
memory. Likewise, the LIDs that mark literally resistant poems off
from obscure ones are (1) the replacement of an individual script with
a formal procedure, with the result that form frees itself of function,
but function becomes subordinate to form; (2) an ensuing decrease
of narrativity and coherence, with an optional violation of syntac-
tic rules (whence intensified problems in pronoun resolution, pars-
ing and integration); and (3) a backgrounding of cues to significance,
notably generic sentences and abstract words, with the deployment
of a less metaphorical style. In short, the filiation between the two
344
D. Castiglione
typologies—the obscure and the literal resistance one—is mostly one of

reaction and overthrow. But in other respects, they both continue a tra-
dition of impersonality, which reduces the reader’s scope for easy iden-
tification, as well as one of intertextuality and metalinguistic reflexivity,
requiring the making of specialised inferences. The filiation between
obscure poems and nonsensical ones drawn on different genes of dif-
ficulty: (1) the preservation of a monological voice and of markers of
literariness; (2) a parodic undermining of individual scripts through an
intensification of semantic deviance: this is no longer a form of amend-
able deviation (e.g. novel metaphors, inappropriateness, paradox), but
verges on uninterpretable incongruities; and (3) a foregrounding of
linkers to better expose the nonsensicality of the statements—in obscure
poems, by contrast, linkers are inference-prompters, indicating finesse
of thought, or else their nonsensical misuse is contextualised and thus
implicitly criticised. In short, nonsensical poems are postmodernist
ante-litteram, appearing as a carnivalesque version of obscure poems,
overthrowing the pensive seriousness they inherit from Romanticism
and Symbolism. Table 9.1 charts the LIDs and RIDs of the four typolo-
gies, organising them in terms of linguistic levels (lexis, semantics, syn-
tax and discourse) and readerly dimensions (accessibility, readability and
significance), respectively.
The linguistic and readerly profiles summarised in Table 9.1 argua-
bly represent the point of arrival of the whole work. The grid can be
mapped onto existing poems for purposes of classification or even be
used as a guideline to artificially create new poems, with obvious meth-
odological advantages in terms of experimental testing (a model-based
AI software is not too unlikely a scenario).
Before leaving this section, it is worth considering how this typology
compares with Steiner’s. Contingent difficulty has been demoted to a
specific LID-cognitive impairment link: proper nouns presupposing the
activation of a homophoric referent rich in encyclopaedic information.
Depending on one’s pre-existent familiarity with the referent, the activa-
tion will be more or less detailed: the more defective the activation, the
deeper the spot of ideational opacity in the situation model constructed
by the reader. This literal lacuna is then rationalised by readers as an
Table 9.1 The four typologies: breakdown of difficulty based on LIDs and RIDs
Accessible Obscure Literal resistant Nonsensical
LIDs Ø Semantic Semantic Semantic
(except moderately new Novel and simple replace- Ø Semantic incongruity
metaphors and negation) ment metaphors Lexis Contradictory collocations
Restricted collocations Ø emotive/evaluative lexis Lexis
Lexis Syntax Rare vocabulary
Abstract words Word-class conversion Syntax
Ø emotive/evaluative lexis Syntactic ambiguity Complex noun phrases
Rare vocabulary Blurred constituency Word-class conversion
Impersonal pronouns Incomplete clauses Discourse
Syntax Discourse Lack of coherence
Syntax/line mismatch Lack of coherence Expository register
Syntactic ambiguity Lack of narrativity Shifting pronoun
Apposition Lack of punctuation reference
Discourse Linguistic reflexivity Foregrounding and misuse
Cultural intertexts Addressee identification of linkers
Linguistic reflexivity Low informativity Cultural intertexts
Multiple addressees Cultural intertexts
Lexical density Few subjective markers
Few subjective markers
(continued)
345
Table 9.1 (continued)
Accessible Obscure Literal resistant Nonsensical
RIDs Ø Accessibility Accessibility (Data unavailable but
(except some local Medium comprehension High comprehension likely similar to the
346
interpretive indeter- scores scores ‘literal resistance’ type)a

minacy rationalised as Medium intersubjective Low to null intersubjective
ambiguity) agreement agreement
Local problems of Statements of rejection
D. Castiglione
sense-making High use of hedging

Medium or polarised Low degree of enjoyment
degree of enjoyment Readability
Readability Low reading speed (90 ms/
Reading speed around char) for the prototypically
70 ms/char resistant Howe poem
Interpretability Interpretability
Thematic inferences Eisegetical interpretation
Exegetic interpretation Form-based inferences
aReaderly data are available for a Prynne poem not included in this book but analysed in my PhD dissertation and men-
tioned in Castiglione (2017). This surrealist-absurdist poem (‘Lobster-orange, Shag in Parvo’, from Pearls That Were, 1999)
can be considered an hybrid between the ‘literal resistance’ and the ‘nonsensical’ typology. Its response profile overall
mirrors that of Pound’s extract, except that its low reading speed brings it closer to Howe’s poem
347
incomplete grasp of the poem, which can be overcome as soon as the

source is accessed (incidentally, a task the Internet has made much less
laborious than it must have been in the late 70s).
Modal difficulty can also be recast in terms of LID-cognitive impair-
ment pair, but this time at a global top-down level rather than at local
bottom-up level: it is a mismatch between the schemas the reader asso-
ciates with poetry and the schemas actually traceable in (or absent
from) the poem. The less prototypical the schema displayed (e.g. busi-
ness letter or scientific report as compared to personal narrative or lyr-
ical description), the more radical the work of cognitive readjustment
required to the reader. The abolition of any recognisable schema, as in
Stein’s extract from Patriarchal Poetry or Howe’s ‘A Small Swatch Bluish-
Green’, is of course the most serious disruption at this level, under-
mining a basic structuring principle through which we make sense of
things. From the viewpoint of the model, tactical difficulty would
encompass the totality of LID-cognitive impairment pairs analysed
throughout Chapters 7 and 8. It follows that contingent and modal dif-
ficulty can be seen as two special cases of tactical difficulty.
Finally, ontological difficulty can be pinned down to the LID that
mainly discriminates between accessible and obscure poems, that is,
the replacement of ready-made, culturally shared schemas with subjec-
tive ones. Considered in this light, ontological difficulty is an authorial
precondition for the rise of a readerly experienced modal difficulty: the
types are two sides of the same coin, as the idiom goes. One may com-
plain that Steiner’s types are unduly simplified and even misunderstood
by this remapping: after all, in drawing on LIDs and cognitive processes
I have disregarded the original collocation of the types on different
ontological planes, conflating them all on the plane of the observable
and the describable. But this is precisely the scope of a model on its
way to becoming a real theory of poetic difficulty: to subsume earlier
attempts, to show previously hidden links and to offer more economic
explanations for a seemingly disparate range of phenomena. The explan-
atory power of the model is defended further in the next section, where
I address the side themes outlined in Chapter 2 in the light of the new
findings.
348
D. Castiglione
9.2 Addressing Side Themes

9.2.1 Pluralism
In retrospect and quite ironically, my essentialist attempt at narrowing

difficulty down to a univocal definition (see Sect. 3.1) has enabled more
analytical flexibility than is usually found among those keen on empha-
sising the pluralism of difficulty (see Sect. 2.2.1). Their relativist stance
may well be a by-product of decades of post-structuralist thinking, but
in the end it offered a pretext not to fully dive into the intricacies of so
complex a phenomenon. Many have argued for the difficulty of poems
without weighting the evidence at their disposal, which shows how lib-
eral premises can deteriorate into argumentative closure. Difficulty is
plural not in the sense of overwhelming chaos or unwieldy diversifica-
tion, but as the result of a limited set of ‘genes’ (the LIDs) variously
interacting between them: the combinations of LIDs (in terms of types,
density and order of distribution) are perhaps not fewer than those ena-
bled by a sequence of digits in a safe. As a consequence, the RIDs—the
attempts to unlock the safe, to keep the metaphor going—are various
too, having to do both with the LIDs and with contextual variables
that have been mentioned but not investigated in this work. But this
should not prevent the analyst from uncovering preferred configurations
at some level of generality, from which to work out key typologies as I
have done throughout Chapters 6–8. It is the single poem, then (or a
representative extract from a longer poem) the unit of measure of dif-
ficulty; any further generalisation to collections, authors and literary
movements should start from here.
9.2.2 Elitism
A contextual rather than textual variable, elitism is one of those areas

where the proposed model has offered little insight—but more due to
the selective scope of its application in this book than to any inherent
349
limitation. I foresee no problems, indeed, in theorising elitism from

the standpoint of my model. One could for instance propose that only
those LIDs that emphasise knowledge stored in long-term memory
act as pointers to elitism. This is the case of historical or mythological
proper nouns, specialised vocabulary and explicit intertextuality, but
not of ill-formed syntax or semantic incongruity: while the former
LIDs emphasise long-term memory and acquired knowledge, the latter
emphasise short-term memory and intellectual flexibility. In addition,
poems assigned to the ‘obscure’ type should be more prone to be viewed
in terms of elitism. This is because previous discussions about elitism
(see Sect. 2.2.2) emphasise authority and the imparting of knowledge,
which resonates with the authorial attitude pervading oracular, utter-
ance-like poems such as those in Chapter 7. By contrast, the attack
on order and thematic significance carried out by poems as those in
Chapter 8 implies a subversive attitude that is anti-authoritarian and
thus less at risk of charges of elitism.
Of course, these are only hypotheses awaiting experimental test-
ing: one could for example predict that poems combining the LIDs
above (i.e. historical proper nouns, specialised vocabulary and explicit
intertextuality) with a textual structure suitable to the transmission of
thematic significance would be described as ‘elitist’ more often than
difficult poems with different characteristics. One interesting way
to broach the issue could be to turn the model upside down, starting
from the RIDs rather than from the LIDs: elitism would arise whenever
readers express concern or frustration for lacking adequate pre-existing
knowledge, or perceive the poetic persona as detached or disdainful—in
which case, also impersonality and the breaking of politeness principles
(Leech 1983) may be considered pointers to elitism. The most impor-
tant variables to consider here are arguably literary competence and gen-
eral knowledge, measurable through specifically designed tests. Once
data of this kind are elicited, the researcher may try to find out if there
are correlations between elitism-specific RIDs and elitism-specific LIDs.
Although not addressed in this work, the study of elitism is thus no less
promising than other difficulty-related areas.
350
D. Castiglione
9.2.3 Intentionality
Intentionality is another important area where the model can help shed
some light. My main point is that, although in theory all linguistic
choices are motivated and thus presuppose intention (Sotirova 2014:
137), readers in practice will infer intention more intelligibly from
those features that (1) signal the presence of a reliable speaker (intention
being a psychological construct); and (2) project a Gestalt, that is, a per-
ception of structured unity in the text. Deictic consistency, evaluative
vocabulary, register uniformity, cohesive repetitions, intertextuality, the
non-ironic deployment of textual schemas and an adherence to conver-
sational maxims are all strong candidates in this regard. Readers who
manage to envisage a composition principle that is not purely mechanic
but is modelled after everyday interactional behaviour will more confi-
dently perform an exegetic reading of the poem. In other words, they
will read the poem as a communicative act (no matter how obliquely
encoded) that is inherently meaningful—otherwise it would not have
been performed in the first place. The analyses of Stevens’s poem and
Hill’s stanza touched on intention various times (see esp. Sects. 7.1.3,
7.3.1, and 7.3.3), taking into account precisely some of the features
listed above as well as intent inferences made by readers. My key pro-
posal there was that, like for elitism, the intention attributed to the
poetic persona is indissoluble from obscurity, but not necessarily entan-
gled with difficulty.
There is another facet to the relationship between difficulty and
intention, and this concerns all those cases in which the difficulty per-
ceived is itself seen as deliberate: readers’ intent inferences are no longer
of the kind ‘the poet wants to say X’ but rather ‘the poet is being diffi-
cult on purpose’. While the reader-response data currently at my dis-
posal are insufficient to address this second facet, it may be possible to
run a study—an online survey perhaps—asking participants to react to
poems with a short comment. Once all responses will have been elic-
ited, a software would count how frequently certain expressions cueing
intention (e.g. ‘deliberate’, ‘on purpose’, ‘aims at/wants to’ and so forth)
recur in the protocols, and if they do so significantly more for certain
351
poems than for others. Alternatively, one could attempt to retrace such
expressions in existing online reviews of authors renowned for their dif-
ficulty (e.g. Prynne) as can be found in the Goodreads website. One
should be wary, though, that attributions of intentionality of this kind
might be not very informative, that is, they may have to do less with a
faithful rendition of the reader’s experience and more with a cliché, with
a simple automatism of writing. This makes a rigorous design-perhaps
one combining different types of responses-a methodological imperative
for future research.
9.2.4 Philosophical Roots
Philosophers as various as Heidegger, Adorno and Wittgenstein have

exerted a strong if often indirect influence on difficult poetry, according
to scholars (see Sect. 2.2.4). It is not that aesthetic artefacts are necessar-
ily written in response to, or in accordance with, complex philosophical
systems, but rather that certain proposals have appealed to, and so taken
root in, the poetics and practice of some authors: Heidegger’s formu-
lation of ‘radical alterity’ and critique of Western rationality; Adorno’s
observed rift between the production and consumption of art; and
Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, have indicated poets different
paths to explore the aesthetic potential of difficulty. It would be foolish,
of course, to argue for a direct relationship between stylistic configura-
tions and philosophical notions, all the more so because this endeavour
was not prioritised in this work.
Still, the weakening or even the abolition of underlying textual sche-
mas in obscure and literally resistant poems could be read as a symp-
tom of alterity, of a progressive detachment from shared cognitive
gestalts. Likewise, the semantic distance between target and source
domains in metaphors highlights the workings of a fiercely individual
imagination, one that is unwilling to meet the reader halfway through
the reading process. The difficult poem aims thus to become less and
less recognisable as a poem, severing its links from the repertoire of texts
that have been shaping the reception habits of a given community. This
characterisation suits Heidegger’s and Adorno’s proposals alike—the
352
D. Castiglione
former perhaps acting more like an inner drive for poets, the latter more
like a verification and perpetuation of a given state-of-affairs.
Wittgenstein’s influence appears a corollary as well as a radicalisation
of these premises: not only is poetic language expected to veer away
from the dominant state-of-affairs (a credo which gives rise to elitism);
it should renounce to represent a coherent world altogether, including
the poetic persona’s inner world. Whence the emphasis on writing as a
force field seemingly beyond control, on de-functionalised formal pro-
cedures that stand out as the only structuring principles and guaran-
tors of a deferred, ‘emptied’ kind of significance. The poems analysed
in Chapter 8 have shown this trait over and over with their deploy-
ment of formal templates: the imitation of conversation in Pound’s
extract (=language turned into an illusionary exchange); the blurring
of phrases in Howe’s poem (=language turned into a maze); the erad-
ication of main lexical word classes in Stein’s extract from Patriarchal
Poetry (=language turned into pure intonation cut-off from referential-
ity); and the clashing foregrounding of connectives and ideational dis-
ruptions in Stein’s ‘A Box’ and Bernstein’s ‘Safe Methods of Business’
(=language turned into a rhetorical weapon exposing its own power
mechanisms).
Some of the analyses themselves suggested Derrida, or rather decon-
struction in general, as another key philosophical influence. While
scholars had previously argued for the influence of deconstruction on
postmodernist poetry (e.g. McHale 2004), I have shown how Western
logocentric thought is undermined at the micro-level end of the scale,
either by translating Derrida’s notion of undecidability into system-
atic structural ambiguity (Howe) or by treating all words as equals, in
asyntactic fashion, thus denying the hierarchic and patriarchal order
of language (Stein). In the case of Howe, I have also shown that the
kind of interpretation favoured by the textuality of ‘A Small Swatch
Bluish-Green’ (eisegetical rather than exegetical) chimes with the reader
empowerment advocated by post-structuralist theorists as Barthes
(1973) and Derrida himself. Of course, these are just scratches over an
immense surface: the influence of philosophical ideas on the textuality
and texture of difficulty (its LIDs, the RIDs these elicit) is an exciting
path for literary theorists who have now a map (the model) at their
353
disposal to test out their intuitions in this regard. They may find out
if, and how, poets draw on philosophy not just as a repertoire of motifs
and imagery, but more interestingly as spurs to explore new composi-
tional procedures.
9.2.5 The Representational Problem
Among the themes gravitating around difficulty, this is perhaps the one
to which the model has contributed the most. Before it, difficult poems
were paired to abstract art en masse, without the attempt of seeing how
stylistic devices could echo painterly techniques. I have proposed that
abstraction is attained at the level of ideation, charged with representing
experience: entities, qualities, states, events (Halliday and Matthiessen
1999). In this regard, opacity is one of the key effects following the
manipulation of ideation and the ensuing diminution of accessibility.
The opaque poem is like an out-of-focus picture in which shapes
can perhaps be identified but involve a lack of resolution, of detail: this
simplification is the first step towards abstraction. Opacity is stylisti-
cally achieved in various ways. The most obvious is the use of abstract
nouns with low imageability ratings. This is especially true of Hill’s
stanza, featuring nouns of semiotic abstraction such as amnesty or def-
amation. Their referents do not evoke a well-defined picture but a
blurred conceptual space, giving rise to ideational opacity. Unfamiliar
proper nouns which may not be accessed as full encyclopaedic
entries (for instance, Possum and Cole in Pound’s extract) also activate
schematic referents, creating indeterminacy. Another key technique

is the use of pronouns and semi-determiners emptied of reference: for
instance, in Stevens’s poem the reference of the other way (l. 3) is hard
to pin down, because our long-term memory lacks any ready-made
opposite of a novel metaphorical event like the one the poem con-
strues in the previous lines. The same is true of erstwhile in Bernstein’s
poem (l. 3), the processing of which creates a blind spot in the situation
model. The most radical example of this trend comes from Patriarchal
Poetry, whose wh-pronouns are intrinsically open-ended in reference, and
where the avoidance of nouns, finite verbs and adjectives undermines
354
D. Castiglione
the very fundamentals of ideation. Stein’s extract could be paired to

a monochrome painting, a Rothko (or a Mondrian, as I suggested in
Sect. 8.2.1.2): only the prosodic contour (the colour?) of a few word
classes can be accessed.
Other techniques of opacity operate at phrasal level: in is it disap-
pointing (‘A Box’), it can either have situational reference (‘it’ referring
to the whole situation), anaphoric reference (the pin) or even cataphoric
reference (the fact of being analysed mentioned immediately later in the
text). The pronoun thus explodes with possible referents, none of which
more plausible than the others. Or take Howe’s poem, where Head–
Modifier relationships are fluid and qualities float, so as to speak, along-
side entities that lack the anchorage point of syntax. As a result images
are unstable, somewhat like in optical illusions. The same holds true of
the pyramid with one side in Stevens’s poem (l. 14), the processing of
which needs to be re-negotiated in the next line. We are already moving
away from opacity as Impressionist-like low focus and towards abstrac-
tion as Cubist-like multiple vision.
A different attack on figurative mimesis is carried out by novel met-
aphors and semantic incongruities like those seen in Stevens, Thomas,
Crane, Stein (‘A box’) or Bernstein. The outcome here is the creation of
conceptual blends and disturbing associations in the vein of Surrealism
(e.g. Dalì, Ernst, Magritte; on the language of Surrealism, see Stockwell
2016). Albeit of high resolution, the images are complex, created bot-
tom-up through metaphorical mapping. Vaultiest phrase, tawny life
(Stevens), the portent wound in corridors of shells (Crane), the sea that
sped about my fist (Thomas), a white way of being round (Stein) or Sleepy
impertinence (Bernstein) are all cases in point. For comparable cases
(e.g. long worm of my finger, Thomas), Yaron talks about ‘elements that
are not assimilated’ which result ‘in a failure to process them’ (2010). I
believe Yaron’s idea of processing failure is inaccurate here: it is not that
novel metaphors are not processed, but rather that image reconstruction
in the reader occurs bottom-up and leads to perceptual unfamiliarity.
Word to clause-level LIDs is thus deployed for the creation of opac-
ity, multiplicity and distortion or novelty. These LIDs may be thought
of as local painting techniques (e.g. the use of colours, characteristics
of brush strokes, level of detail, the handling of lines and shapes…).
355
When it comes to composition, though, one should look at discourse

LIDs. Renouncing textual schemas (narrative, monologue, report
and so forth) amounts to deprive one’s painting of unity and balance.
Informal art (e.g. Pollock’s action paintings) runs parallel to poems in
Chapter 8 such as Howe’s poem and Stein’s extract from Patriarchal
Poetry, while the distorted deployment of schemas in Pound’s extract,
in Stein’s ‘A Box’ or of the pentameter in Bernstein’s ‘Safe Methods of
Business’ may call to mind Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q (1919), provoca-
tively adding moustaches to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Monna Lisa.
These are just initial proposals, of course, and the path open to
research here is vast. One could envisage a much more sustained
endeavour in which the style of difficult poetry and that of abstract
art as described by art theorists are minutely compared, their similar-
ities and differences carefully assessed. RIDs and viewers’ reactions to
abstract art could also be empirically compared to see if, say, the lack of
discourse LIDs and the abdication to composition patterns in paintings
stir the same response of confusion and disorientation across the two
media. Still, what has been achieved within the boundaries of this work
goes quite a long way towards explaining why the analogy between
abstract art and difficult poetry has much reason to hold sway in critical
discourse.
9.2.6 The Meaningfulness–Meaninglessness Dilemma
From a slippery side issue, the meaningfulness–meaningless dilemma

has become the key idea around which I have organised two main
typologies of difficulty. Formulations of sense and meaning tend to be
sidestepped—or phrased vaguely at the best—in most literary critical
accounts. As a result, it was one’s argumentative force that which estab-
lished the right of a poem to meaningfulness or its conviction to mean-
inglessness. My grounding of meaning in semantics (decoding) and
pragmatics (inferencing), by contrast, has allowed to locate the prob-
lem, to make it visible. First of all, the idea of meaninglessness in the
absolute sense is untenable: even in a severely reduced form, meaning is
unavoidable, for all is needed is one sign (not necessarily a linguistic one)
356
D. Castiglione
and one interpreter (human or AI) to produce a response, and meaning

with it.
Meaninglessness (or nonsensicality, which I use as synonyms,
although the latter term is more aesthetically connoted) should thus be
made gradable, relativised: whenever a critic or reader complains that a
poem does not make any sense, what they probably mean is that it pro-
vides no cues to thematic significance. In other words, it encapsulates
no traditional ‘take-home’ message, it affords no wisdom; there appears
to be no ‘beyond’ beyond its denotation, with inferencing being inhib-
ited at the advantage of decoding (activating, parsing, integrating) and
the ‘physicality’ of reading prevailing over the ramifications of offline
elaboration. Thematic significance can be thwarted by various means:
(1) renouncing metaphors; (2) suppressing evaluation, connotation and
subjectivity; (3) selecting concrete rather than abstract, inanimate rather
than animate, culturally peripheral rather than central referents (e.g.
‘toothpick’ rather than ‘death’); (4) avoiding proverbial truths, often cast
as identifying clauses with indefinite pronouns marked for absoluteness
(e.g. ‘nothing’, ‘everyone’); (5) renouncing framing elements (e.g. titles,
citations); and (6) doing without textual schemas as these, for the very
fact of being schemas, point to previous interactions between speakers
of a community.
What is left at this point is semantic rather than semiotic meaning:
the meaning of the poem would fully reside in its ideation base, that
is, in the arranged totality of its referents plus the logical relationships
across them (assuming these are preserved, which is not always the case:
see Stein’s extract from Patriarchal Poetry ). This is a fictional exaggera-
tion, of course, for even poems defying thematic significance relentlessly
pursue a deferred significance of their own. They do so by foreground-
ing form so as to trigger inferences of a self-reflexive sort, as abundantly
shown in Chapter 8. Meaning of a higher, inferential order is not any
longer situated in a horizon of underlying shared values, but is instead
left in the hands of individual readers who either draw such form-based
inferences or else dismiss the poem as meaningless. As argued elsewhere,
it is not altogether easy to establish when the deployment of the strat-
egies (1) to (6) above induce rejection or acceptance, attributions of
meaninglessness or meaningfulness: that is why empirical studies like
357
those outlined in the previous chapter (see Sect. 8.2.1.4) could profita-
bly be carried out.
Unlike meaninglessness, meaningfulness is in no need of legitima-
tion. The assumption that poetry explores all the possible strategies to
maximise meaning is so uncontroversial as to look like a fundamental
law: not even allegedly nonsensical poems seem to be able to escape it.
But if meaningfulness is also graded, then it must be admitted that it is
not an absolute value of poetry. According to the model, meaningful-
ness in the traditional sense is the experience of producing elaborative
inferences about topics that appear both generally relevant (i.e. close
to human concerns) and thematically reflected in the text. This kind
of response is less the reader’s responsibility than a set of instructions
inscribed in the textuality of the poem: meaningful poems are a neg-
ative of putatively meaningless ones. As a consequence, the strategies
mentioned earlier apply to them as well, provided they are reverted (e.g.
‘avoiding proverbial truths’ → ‘not avoiding proverbial truths’). It may
well be that meaningfulness is ultimately on a par with complexity and
order (see Sect. 4.1): after all a dense network of interrelations between
the parts of the poem (word, phrases, structural and thematic patterns)
allow inferences to be held within the world of the poem, feeding its
own significance, rather than signalling the poem’s incompleteness.
9.2.7 The Production Side
This has arguably been the least developed thread in the current work.
One reason for this is adamant, even tautological: difficulty has been
defined as a response phenomenon and not one of production, so the
whole approach has followed from this tenet. The production of dif-
ficulty is certainly fascinating, but it can theoretically be tackled only
after the reality of difficulty has been verified at the readerly end of the
spectrum. Times are now ripe for this. Once the difficulty of a poem/
author X has been described in terms of LIDs and RIDs, the analyst can
examine what the author has said about his or her difficulty, and see to
what extent their claims fit the objective picture already derived from
the application of the model. There is even a sense in which production
358
D. Castiglione
is the end-point of reception: the difficult poet is also the first reader
of his own work, so his or her claims are evidence of reception (RIDs)
like those of his or her critics and readers. This does not imply that they
all should be weighted equally: on the one hand, the producer of diffi-
culty is necessarily the least impartial in this regard; on the other, he/she
may afford undeniable insights derived from the privilege of witnessing
the rise of difficulty since the moment of its very inception. Whether
the author is conscious about his or her difficulty or not (or is just a
pretence?) is another interesting yet hard-to-solve issue, one intertwined
with intentionality.
For production to be studied on its own terms, the most fruitful
path remains the study of authorial drafts chronologically ordered (see
also Sect. 2.2.3). After identifying all the changes and variants, the sty-
listician may proceed to isolate those that can be described in terms of
LIDs: a deliberate pursuit of difficulty could be argued for whenever the
amount and severity of LIDs increase progressively from one draft to
the next. Of course, LIDs may be introduced for countless different aes-
thetic motivations, so difficulty would often become a side effect rather
than a prioritised aim. For instance, rapid and barely marked shifts in
viewpoint (part of the lack of coherence LID) in modernist fiction arise
from writers’ attempt to capture a fluid conception of selfhood (Sotirova
2013); but in no way does this lessen the cognitive demands imposed
on readers (=the attested RIDs).
9.2.8 Conceptual Boundaries: Difficulty and Obscurity
Back in Chapter 2, the difficulty/obscurity divide appeared very tenu-

ous as both terms had been used interchangeably by many critics. The
oppositional pairs I derived from the state of the current debate (e.g.
process-oriented vs. goal-oriented, resistance vs. concealment) did some-
thing to relieve the indistinguishability of the two concepts, but did not
suffice to settle the issue. I was seeking substantial differences without
questioning the fundamental assumption that difficulty and obscurity
exist on the same level of experience: either they were synonymic (ear-
lier views) or alternative (pre-analytical view proposed in Chapter 2).
359
The application of the model enabled a more radical intuition: difficulty

and obscurity are still distinct but not yet mutually exclusive; they are
simply located at distinct levels of the reading process.
More specifically, difficulty is an impairment affecting early process-
ing stages (activation, parsing and integration—the whole of decoding
and linguistic comprehension, in short); obscurity is a solution of such
impairment afforded by the poem and affecting later processing stage
(the offline formulation of special inferences). Difficulty is the here-
and-now of altered, puzzled perception; obscurity is a long-term, dis-
placed guarantee that the initial impediment will eventually be rewarded.
While all LIDs contribute to difficulty, only some point to obscurity.
For instance, lack of coherence certainly contributes to difficulty; but
if the shifts happen to be perceived as mysteriously related beyond the
surface fragmentation, then obscurity follows (see my outline of textual
typologies at the beginning of the Conclusions for a systematic over-
view). Obscurity is then a possible outcome of (moderate) difficulty (see
Chapter 7).
The alternative to obscurity is nonsensicality or meaninglessness,
which can take two different forms: (1) a mimesis of chaos that com-
bines literalness (the undermining of thematic significance) and textual
incoherence up to the extreme of syntactic breakdown (see Sect. 8.1);
and (2) a parodic allusion to (and concomitant undermining of ) signif-
icance, which originates a ‘reversed’ obscurity: obscurity made to deny
its delayed nature and thus degraded into a short-term text effect, a
deceiving appeal to depths that are exposed as inconsistent immediately
after. In both cases, what becomes permanent is difficulty itself, the
experience of visiting a dead-end street again and again.
9.2.9 Re-reading Difficulty
The analogy concluding the previous section is the ideal starting point
of the current one: if difficulty is initially experienced in terms of
confusion and impasse, what motivates some readers to return to its
ambassadors—the poems—all the same? Could it be the hope of final
disclosure (the experience of obscurity) or is it perhaps the renewal of
360
D. Castiglione
the initial impairment, a nostalgia for the conflicting feelings sparked

during our first encounter with the difficult poem? Or perhaps both
possibilities at once? Or yet something else of which difficulty is just an
accidental residuum? And how does the experience of reading difficulty
change over time, assuming it does? This barrage of interrogatives points
to the centrality of re-reading in the transition from difficulty to obscu-
rity or, alternatively, in one’s reconciliation with permanent difficulty.
There are contingent considerations that explain why so important a
route has not been taken in the course of this work. Studying the over-
coming (or reappraisal) of difficulty over time necessarily hinges on a
preliminary phase—the initial impact of the phenomenon—which
has been painstakingly explored in the present work. Even so, some of
the RIDs available already point to specific lines of enquire. It is for
instance noteworthy that only when facing Stevens’s and Hill’s poems
(as opposed to Strand’s, Pound’s and Howe’s) did reader express a desire
for re-reading. There is the possibility that such desire arises only when
the perceived difficulty is neither too low (in which case one reading
would be deemed enough, as for Strand’s poem) nor too high (in which
case the poem would be rejected as meaningless: see Sect. 9.2.6). It is
most likely the lack of discourse-level LIDs and the presence of signif-
icance cues that which tone down the perception of difficulty, contain-
ing it within tolerable limits. Such cues are probably what motivates the
committed reader to come back to the text and derive more meaning
from it.
In terms of methodological practice, a ‘re-reading paradigm’ (Dixon
et al. 1993: 17) could be adopted in which participants keep a diary
over a few months and annotate their impressions whenever they return
to a poem that they deemed difficult in the first place. In this way, the
development of response types (especially the kind and quality of with-
in-subject inferences) could be longitudinally charted for specific textual
typologies: the accessible, the obscure and the permanently difficult in
its two variants (the chaotic and the nonsensical). The data thus elic-
ited would illustrate how (and if ) readers overcome difficulty, as well
as the influence of the textual typology on their response in the long
run. A more controlled experiment could instead test the assumption
that certain LIDs (e.g. complex addressee attribution, the associative
361
range of register-mixing and restricted collocations) should become sali-

ent on re-reading. For instance, readers could be asked to think-aloud in
two conditions: after one reading and after two (or multiple) readings.
Comparing the protocols, it should turn out that the aforementioned
LIDs are verbalised more frequently in the second condition.
9.2.10 Extending the Application of the Model

to Other Poets and Textual Forms
The explanatory power of a model can be gauged by the amount and

diversity of data it can successfully deal with. Although in Chapters 6–8
I have analysed a range of diverse poems, these are but a drop in the
ocean of poetic difficulty. A more selective application of the model
would enable, for instance, to focus on a single LID in the entire oeuvre
of a poet or across oeuvres by different poets. This is especially true for
those LIDs that can be detected by a corpus linguistic tool—a case in
point being novel metaphors identified by the criteria outlined in
Sect. 4.2.6.3: syntactic structure, directionality of domain mapping, and
semantic distance between source and target domains.
A poet I regret not having tackled here is Prynne, whose ‘uncom-
promising textuality’ enacts a readerly experience typical ‘of any diffi-
cult literary work’ (Mellors 2005: 167). Indeed, from the ‘still violently
unfamiliar sequence of poems’ in the 1979 collection Down where
changed (Sutherland 2010: 769) up to the present, the number of puz-
zling poems Prynne has written is simply astonishing (see his 2005
anthology). In fairness I did analyse one of his poems in an earlier draft
of this work, but then I have decided that a separate publication would
do better justice to this typical trait of his. Prynne’s poems are often
written in uniform sequences characterised by ‘robotic verse movement’
(Wilkinson 2007: 28) and the LIDs that I perceive as particularly sali-
ent are (1) complex noun phrases leading to information overload, (2)
technical vocabulary (noticed by many commentators), (3) pronoun
shifting, (4) impersonality, and (5) lexical and syntactic ambiguity.
Other poets worth analysing in the Anglo-American tradition include
Charles Olson, John Ashbery, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and
362
D. Castiglione
Bruce Andrews: in short, those in the avant-garde, objectivist or post-

modernist tradition located on the Stein-Pound-Howe-Bernstein axis of
permanent difficulty analysed in Chapter 8.
Although the model has grown out of a modernist notion of diffi-
culty, it could be profitably applied to earlier poets who are generally
considered demanding: Hopkins at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, for instance, or the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets (e.g.
Donne, Marvell, Crashaw). My hunch is that the most radical discourse
LIDs will be missing from them and that their overall difficulty profile
would fit the ‘obscurity’ rather than the ‘literal resistant’ or ‘nonsensi-
cal’ type. This would retroactively support the preference for obscurity
on the part of critics who mainly deal with pre-modernist poetry (see
Sect. 2.2.8). Hopkins would score high on the dimension of resistance
(readability) due to his intensive use of alliteration, compounding and
syntax/line mismatch. These three LIDs can be sampled in the opening
of ‘The Windhover’: ‘I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-/
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding’.2
The Metaphysical would mostly owe their difficulty to their deploy-
ment of conceit, which the model would locate in the novel metaphor
LID: conceits, after all, are extended metaphors the source and target
domains of which are semantically distant while still related. The con-
ceit would require text-driven elaborative inferences to be understood,
which would temporarily delay access to the poem’s significance in
exegetic terms.
Finally, the remit of the model could be extended to poetry from
other linguistic traditions and even to genres other than poetry. Some
caution should be exercised for each of these directions, though.
Concerning the former, the list of potential LIDs will slightly vary
according to the typological structure of the source language. Word-
class ambiguity (within the syntactic ambiguity LID), for example,
would necessarily be less widespread in poems written in synthetic
languages in which morpho-syntactic information is marked more

explicitly than in English. Even so, I expect most LIDs to be available
to poets writing in languages other than English, since the principles
underlying the LIDs are cognitive and hence shared among all us
humans. Large-scale, cross-comparative studies could be conducted to
363
find out if difficulty has recognisably national characteristics or if it is a

more internationally uniform phenomenon.
As for the latter point, adjusting the model to other genres would
require more radical measures. First, with the likely exception of exper-
imental fiction and continental philosophy, non-poetic difficult texts
would systematically show only a handful of LIDs, not the full gamut
of them. For instance, legal discourse (e.g. contracts, laws) is often
made notoriously hard by its complex syntax and technical vocabu-
lary that requires to be interpreted univocally, giving a stable and well-
defined denotatum to each word. This would result an enhanced sense
of resistance (online fatigue), decreased accessibility and a vigilant mon-
itoring of inferencing during reading. Still, no reader will ever puzzle
over morphological or semantic deviation LIDs when facing such texts.
Likewise, the burden of understanding analytic philosophical discourse
will lie in filtering out irrelevant inferences, preserving logical ones (e.g.
entailment) after having correctly decoded (i.e. assigned the intended
referent or function to) indefinite pronouns and conjunctions. If these
strategies are not effectively enacted, a sentence like the following will
be felt forbiddingly enigmatic: ‘Any one can either be the case or not
be the case, and everything else remain the same’ (Wittgenstein 1922,
proposition 1.21).
These examples additionally show that while difficulty in these dis-
course types can still be discussed in terms of accessibility and resist-
ance, the dimension of interpretability will have to be renounced or
radically refashioned. Analytical philosophy would preserve the prin-
ciple of significance but would funnel it into strict exegesis, thus
encapsulating the purest form of obscurity: there is only one correct
interpretation, but this must be arrived at through disciplined infer-
ences allowed for a monosemic metalanguage (i.e. logic) that one must
have prior command of. The discourse of law, while also striving for
univocal interpretation, would do away with significance altogether:
the message should be located at the level of accessibility only. This
implies that, beyond such universal, basic processes such as decoding
and parsing, inferences should be limited to the bridging type necessary
to maintain coherence and construct an accurate textbase and situation
model.
364
D. Castiglione
9.3 Envoy
Everything started about seven years ago, one day when I was lazily
leafing through a poetry collection and had a first intuition about how
frames of reference (i.e. ideational segments) were continuously (and
intriguingly) shifting before my eyes. I wanted to know more. Now that
the voyage is finally over, everything will have to start again. For such
is the essence of research that its object of study, once we think its core
has been grasped, does not exhaust its potential, but rather expands it
almost indefinitely. So now from the core of difficulty, from the main
square of this fictional metropolis, countless avenues radiate towards
new peripheries. And these peripheries will become, thanks to the
efforts of all those who wish to embark on this collective and interdis-
ciplinary enterprise, new centres of intellectual curiosity, new propellers
of discovery.
Notes
1. For an evolutionary perspective on literary tradition, see Martindale
(1991).
2. See Neary (2014) for a cognitive stylistic analysis of this poem.
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Author Index
A B
Adams, Hazard 26, 170 Bäckström, Per 169
Adamson, Sylvia 25, 26, 28, 38, Baicchi, Annalisa 74
41, 47, 104, 127, 128, 139, Baker, Alan 18, 175
142–144, 150, 151, 176, 179, Bakhtin, Mikhail 262
206, 231, 232, 234, 258, 259, Ballard, James Graham 185, 197,
263, 274, 287, 304, 316 209, 210, 288, 289, 342
Adorno, Theodor 44, 45, 56, 59, Barthes, Roland 352
332, 351 Bateson, Frederick Wilse 174
Alonso, Pilar 149 Bergson, Henri 43, 234
Altieri, Charles 42, 52, 156, 181, Bernstein, Charles 6, 7, 30–32, 38,
238 52, 53, 134, 155, 170, 173,
Anderson, Richard 115, 117, 151 175, 177, 280, 317, 323, 324,
Andrews, Bruce 362 327–329, 331, 341, 352, 353,
Antin, David 80 355
Ashbery, John 6, 17, 52, 53, 80, 124, Betjeman, John 6, 171, 173, 179,
149, 150, 153, 175, 245, 361 180, 197, 211, 213–215, 217,
Attridge, Derek 21, 104 224, 236, 250, 251, 260, 272
Auden, Wystan Hugh 19, 130 Biber, Douglas 73, 148, 154, 201,
Austin, Timothy 141 287, 289
Bickerton, Derek 312
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 367

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1
368
Author Index
Bloom, Harold 124, 226 292, 320, 323, 328, 331, 333,
Bowie, Malcolm 39–41, 43, 46, 60, 354
144, 150 Crashaw, Richard 362
Brennan, Matthew C. 198 Cremer, Marjolein 115
Bromwich, David 255 Croft, William 123, 130
Brooke-Rose, Christina 83, 121, Cruse, Alan D. 123, 124, 129, 130
133, 231, 252, 333 Culler, Jonathan 17, 207, 257, 303
Broom, Sarah 45, 48 Cummings, Edward Estlin 5, 33–35, 109,
Brueghel, Peter the Elder 327 111, 139, 142, 149, 150, 169, 173,
Buber, Martin 43 174, 178, 180, 295, 313, 314, 324
Burke, Michael 174, 180 Culler, Jonathan 17, 80, 82, 90, 207,
257, 303
Cureton, Richard 109, 111, 174, 180
C
Caink, Andrew 147
Carne-Ross, D.S. 174, 281, 291, 293 D
Carney, James 153, 251 Dalì, Salvador 354
Carroll, Gareth 112 Daumier, Honoré 263
Carter, Ron 130, 149, 150, 158 Davies, Mark 117
Castiglione, Davide 67, 106, 154, Davison, Alice 115, 117, 151
182, 185, 210, 211, 288, 346 Da Vinci, Leonardo 355
Celan, Paul 25, 40, 44, 48, 123 de Man, Paul 55
Chafe, Wallace 23, 135, 142, 154 Derrida, Jacques 40, 41, 48, 82, 120,
Chambers, Ephraim 303 121, 140, 256, 352
Chatman, Seymour Benjamin 23, 47 Derzhavin, Gavrila 18
Chaucer, Geoffrey 19 Diepeveen, Leonard 30–32, 36, 38,
Clark, Blly 87 43, 50, 52, 55, 59, 75, 170,
Claus, Berry 153 175, 179, 229, 238, 297
Cohen, Leonard 69, 113 Dillon, George 22
Cohen, Louise 68 Donne, John 16, 100, 190, 319, 362
Collins, Billy 31 Dörnyei, Zoltan 74, 184
Coltheart, Max 119 Douthwaite, John 70, 71, 106
Conklin, Kathy 130 Duchamp, Marcel 296, 355
Conrad, Susan 154, 201, 289 Durant, Alan 71
Cook, Eleanor 228
Coolidge, Clark 45
Crane, Hart 5–7, 173, 175, 224, E
241–243, 245–247, 249–254, Eagleton, Terry 96
258, 260, 261, 271–273, 290, Eberhart, Richard 181
Author Index
369
Eco, Umberto 83 Gavins, Joanna 203

Eliot, Thomas Stearns 6, 24, 25, 38, Giora, Rachael 152
50–53, 57, 128, 129, 150, Glickson, Joseph 98, 100, 118, 131
155, 159, 170, 180, 181, 190, Goatly, Andrew 74, 133
206, 238, 256, 284, 311, 327 Golding, William 71
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 305 Gómez-Jiménez, Eva Maria 174, 180
Emmott, Catherine 78, 79, 84, 106, Goodblatt, Chanita 98, 100, 118, 131
107, 141, 209, 260 Graesser, Arthur C. 152, 185, 288
Empson, William 14–16, 19–21, 23, Graham, William Sydney 2, 44, 52
48, 55, 57, 100, 204, 343 Green, Keith 47, 127, 214
Ernst, Max 354 Groeben, N. 155
Eva-Wood, Amy L. 98, 99 Grossman, Alan 175, 243, 246
Guest, Barbara 47
F
Fabb, Nigel 20, 71, 82, 97, 112, H
204, 215, 248, 302 Hakemulder, Frank 182
Faulkner, William 22, 300 Halden-Sullivan, Judith 31, 36, 59
Faust, Miriam 49, 131, 132 Halliday, M.A.K. 103, 118, 119,
Fellonosa, Ernest Francisco 292 122, 124, 144, 147, 149, 202,
Fink, Thomas 31, 32, 36, 59 209, 230, 246, 308, 353
Fish, Stanley 27, 29, 31, 32, 81, 304 Hanauer, David Ian 80, 81, 85, 98,
Fisher, Allen 37 100, 148, 179, 180, 182, 185
Fletcher, John Gould 43, 229, 238 Hansson, Gunnar 184
Fois-Kaschel, Gabriele 25, 28, 41, Harley, Trevor A. 74–76, 103, 104,
123 118, 121, 128, 142, 148, 312
Fowler, Roger 71, 139, 174, 180, Harrison, Chloe 71
237, 312 Hasan, Ruqaiya 81, 82, 124, 147,
Frazier, Lynn 136, 140, 141 149, 158
Freeman, Margaret 83, 290 Hassan, Ann 255
Fromkin, Victoria 322 Heaney, Seamus 190, 191
Frost, Robert 99 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm 45
Furlong, Anne 80, 304 Heidegger, Martin 43–45, 56, 351
Herman, David 42, 263
Hidalgo Downing, Raquel 206
G Hill, Geoffrey 5, 7, 18, 23, 24,
Garavelli, Bice Mortara 20 51–53, 60, 115, 117, 129,
Gardner, Kevin J. 213 150, 151, 173, 175, 176, 180,
Garner, Dee 117 181, 183, 190, 210, 224, 255,
370
Author Index
256, 258, 259, 261, 263–272, Kelter, Stephanie 153

274, 279, 281, 282, 285, 290, Kintsch, Walter 75–78, 121, 132,
292, 296–297, 299, 303, 304, 141, 146, 151, 152, 191, 246
311, 317, 327, 328, 340, 341, Kövecses, Zoltán 134, 205
350, 353, 360 Kuiken, Don 112, 185
Hölderlin, Friedrich 25, 44, 123
Hopkins, Manley Gerald 18, 19
Houston, Libby 99 L
Howe, Susan 6, 7, 104–106, 140, Lakoff, George 54, 131
153, 173, 176, 180, 181, 183, Lamarque, Peter 29, 32, 39, 115
190, 192, 210, 212, 280, 288, Lattig, Sharon 55
293–307, 311–314, 316, 328, Lawrence, D.H. 80
329, 333, 341, 347, 352, 354, Lazer, Hank 31, 59
360 Leech, Geoffrey 21–26, 28, 46, 59,
Hughes, Ted 144 70, 71, 75, 82, 89, 104, 106,
Hühn, Peter 152, 153, 199, 252 120, 130, 174, 180, 209, 259,
Hynds, Susan 29, 30, 32 260, 290, 316, 319, 349
Leggett, B.J. 172, 225
Levin, Samuel R. 130, 235, 266,
I 313
Irvin, Sherri 41 Linnaeus, Carl 14
Isgrò, Emilio 106 Loftus, Elizabeth F. 128
Lopez, Tony 43, 44, 46, 53, 146,
311, 318, 319
J Lyons, John 123
Jacobs, Arthur M. 85
Jakobson, Roman 19, 21, 32, 290
James, Henry 22, 23, 47, 142, 154 M
James, William 322 Madigan, Stephen A. 119
Jeffries, Lesley 67, 74, 81, 83, 86, Magliano, Joseph P. 77, 82
127–129, 150, 158, 180, 300 Magritte, René 354
Johnson, Mark 54 Mangalath, Praful 78
Jones, David 25, 256 Mallarmé, Stephane 18, 39, 40, 43,
Joyce, James 80, 104, 109, 110 46, 57, 115, 120, 140, 144,
150, 252
Martel, Yann 306
K Martindale, Colin 148, 246, 364
Kandinsky, Wassily 292 Marvell, Andrew 20, 362
Keats, John 190 Mashal, Nira 49, 131, 132
Author Index
371
Matthiessen, Christiam M.I.M. 71, 177, 181, 188, 192, 229, 238,
103, 118, 119, 353 281, 292, 295, 298, 301, 305,
Mayer, Bernadette 55 306, 318, 323, 325, 327, 329,
McGuckian, Mebdh 128 333
Mellors, Anthony 40, 41, 43, 44, 48, Peskin, Joan 98, 99, 274
174, 181, 263, 293, 361 Pilkington, Adrian 86, 112, 124, 147
Miall, David S. 67, 112, 185 Plath, Sylvia 152
Milojkovic, Marija 308 Plato 228
Milton, John 22, 140, 141, 327 Popper, Karl 3, 59, 67, 73, 169
Moen, H.S. 153 Pound, Ezra 2, 5, 7, 25, 37, 38, 45,
Mondrian, Piet 310, 354 59, 83, 105, 122, 123, 144,
Monroe, Harriet 175, 243, 245, 252 153, 173, 174, 176, 178, 180,
Moore, Marianne 2, 6 181, 183, 190, 192, 209, 212,
Mottram, Eric 37 238, 267, 274, 280–293, 298,
Mueller, Lisa 99 299, 302, 305, 311, 316, 317,
Mukařovský, Jan 70, 71 328, 329, 333, 341, 346, 352,
Mutter, Matthew 235, 239 353, 355, 360
Press, John 16, 40, 244
Prynne, Jeremy Halvard 6, 18, 44,
N 52–54, 86, 115, 116, 151,
Nadel, Ira B. 153, 174, 281, 286, 245, 346, 351, 361
292, 333 Purves, Alan 29, 30, 32, 36
Nahajec, Lisa 135, 136 Pushkin, Alexander 18, 159
Neel, Eric 116, 172, 296, 297, 312
Nowottny, Winifred 20, 23, 25, 180
Q
Quartermain, Peter 48, 59, 104,
O 106, 140, 172, 176, 295, 310,
Olson, Charles 6, 26, 142, 361 311
Oppen, George 122, 361
O’ Sullivan, Maggie 37
R
Raine, Crag 131
P Raworth, Tom 45
Paivio, Allan 119 Reber, R. 100, 212, 341
Paterson, Don 37, 39 Riffaterre, Michael 28, 32, 40, 82,
Perloff, Marjorie 2, 45, 46, 57, 82, 89, 101, 124, 130, 169, 230,
122–124, 127, 140, 174, 175, 252, 268, 316, 326, 328
372
Author Index
Rilke, Rainer Maria 44 296, 297, 307–314, 316–

Rives, Rochelle 156 320, 322, 326, 328, 347,
Robinson, Fred Miller 231 352, 354–356
Romero, Esther 131 Stevens, Wallace 5–7, 22, 43, 124,
Rosenblatt, Louise M. 27 171–173, 175, 181, 183, 190,
192, 210, 224–230, 232, 234,
235, 237–239, 241, 242, 245,
S 248–252, 254, 256, 258, 260,
Samson, Peter 128 261, 264–266, 269–273, 282,
San, Debra 301 283, 290, 292, 299, 311, 327,
Sanford, Anthony J. 79, 84, 112, 340, 341, 350, 353, 360
141 Stockwell, Peter 71, 84, 99, 102,
Schmauder, Anna 148 133, 140, 144, 155, 178, 298,
Schmidt, S.J. 155 331, 354
Schmitt, Norbert 117, 130 Strand, Mark 6, 7, 33, 34, 171,
Sell, Roger David 23–25, 38, 86, 173, 178, 180, 183, 185, 190,
180 197, 201, 204, 206–208, 210,
Semino, Elena 150, 152, 188 212, 213, 215, 217, 224–227,
Serio, John N. 172, 225 229, 232, 236, 237, 250, 251,
Shakespeare, William 19, 176, 205 260, 264, 268, 269, 272, 283,
Shaw, Bernard 104 287, 288, 299, 311, 341, 342,
Shelley, Percy Bisshe 19, 141 360
Shklovsky, Viktor 18 Stubbs, Michael 117, 146, 148
Short, Mick 89, 104, 142, 259 Styles, Elizabeth 231
Simpson, Paul 70, 131, 155 Sutherland, Keith 30, 32, 45, 361
Sinding, Michael 235 Swift, Jonathan 104
Sklar, Howard 218
Smith, Carlota S. 185
Soria, Belén 131 T
Sotirova, Violeta 42, 43, 147, 350, Tartakovsky, Roi 112, 142, 150, 180,
358 287
Spenser, Edmund 22 Tate, Allen 143
Spiro, J. 98, 99 Testa, Enrico 143, 218
Steiner, George 16–19, 23, 28, 29, Thomas, Dylan 5, 6, 19, 118, 134,
31, 36, 38, 43, 54, 57, 59, 75, 173, 175, 180, 224, 241–243,
80, 122, 172, 174, 225, 250, 245–247, 249–252, 258, 260,
283, 291, 292, 343, 344, 347 261, 271–273, 290, 323, 331,
Stein, Gertrude 7, 48, 116, 147, 354
172–174, 280, 293–294,
Author Index
373
Toolan, Michael 2, 23, 24, 41, 42, White, Allon 40, 54

69, 70, 89, 96, 97, 129, 147, Wilkinson, John 46, 116, 151, 361
151, 153, 154, 176, 201, 204, Wittgenstein, Ludwig 45, 56, 351,
289 363
Trakl, Georg 25, 44, 123 Woods, Nicola 270
Tsur, Reuven 82, 85, 235 Woolf, Virginia 42, 101
Tuma, Keith 36, 37, 39, 44, 45, 59, Wordsworth, William 89, 124, 128,
174 198
Wright, G. 202
V
Valéry, Paul 238 Y
van Dijk, Teun 75, 77, 89, 121, 132, Yaron, Iris 32–35, 41, 46, 47, 49,
141, 150, 152, 191 54, 59, 66, 69, 75, 97, 98,
van Doren, Mark 175 139, 170, 174, 175, 177, 178,
van Peer, Willie 67, 70, 89, 107, 180, 182, 185, 191, 198, 207,
182, 186, 190, 191 247, 273, 295, 314, 354
van ‘t Jagt, Ruth Koops 208, 235 Yeats, William Butler 311, 327
Vendler, Helen 232 Yuille, John C. 119
W Z
Wales, Katie 117, 130, 149, 262 Zanni, Guido 128
Walker, Kathy 149 Zanzotto, Andrea 53, 115
Wallot, S. 188, 288 Zukofsky, Louis 59, 361
Walsh, Catherine 48 Zwaan, Rolf A. 78, 80, 81, 83, 100,
Watson, Dana Cairns 322 150, 179, 185, 186
Werth, Paul 135, 203 Zyngier, Sonia 98–100, 183
Wharton, Edith 23, 142
Concept Index
A Adverbials 141, 154, 201, 205, 206,

Abstraction 16, 17, 23, 38, 119, 155, 211, 218, 230, 247, 249, 265,
228, 229, 234, 321, 322, 325, 272, 285, 289, 307, 309, 320
331, 338, 354 Affix 109, 111
abstract art 8, 46, 47, 218, 353, Alliteration 112–114, 199, 362
355 Ambiguity
Accessibility 6, 7, 158, 180, 183, full 140, 141
191, 198, 199, 201, 204, 208, lexical 75, 115, 120, 121, 224,
211, 212, 214, 217, 218, 225, 266, 273, 361
226, 231, 239, 241, 242, 245– of syntactic functions 5
247, 252, 253, 256, 259, 263, of word classes 20, 266
265, 267, 268, 270, 272, 279, structural 144, 228, 233, 352
282, 287, 289, 292, 297–299, Anadiplosis 249
307, 308, 314, 318, 320, 326, Anagrammatic inclusion 261, 321
331, 340, 344, 346, 353, 363 Analepsis 152
Actor 202 Anaphora 208
Adjacency pair 259, 286 resolution 201
Adjective order 299 Anomaly 49, 130–132, 135, 140
Adjunct 139, 141, 244 Antonym 129, 234
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 375

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1
376
Concept Index
Apposition 133, 135, 143, 145, 226, Cognitive poetics 47

228, 232–234, 249, 306, 317, Cohesion/coherence 9, 23, 35, 42,
345 48, 49, 53, 76–78, 101, 102,
Archaisms 25 116, 126, 137, 139, 142, 146,
Argumentative discourse 318 147, 149–151, 154, 158, 172,
Assumption 5, 13, 19, 33–35, 51, 174, 186, 199, 211, 214, 218,
59, 82–84, 87, 90, 136, 147, 219, 224, 229, 239, 243, 245,
159, 170, 175, 181, 185, 224, 260, 267, 268, 280, 285, 302,
259, 293, 295, 311, 316, 326, 312, 318, 328, 329, 343, 363
328, 340, 357, 358, 360 lack of 147, 149, 157, 177, 256,
Asyndeton 209 258, 283, 284–285, 288, 297,
Asyntacticism 70, 106, 116, 140, 332, 345, 358, 359
352 Coinage. See Neologism
Attractors 84, 298 Collocation 130, 138, 175, 199,
Author recognition test 188, 190 230, 244, 246, 260, 262, 264,
Autotelism 260, 290 272, 347
anomalous 23
restricted 129, 137, 229, 232,
B 251, 273, 291, 323, 331, 345,
Base 109 361
Basic processing 56, 107 Collocational contradiction 129
Behaver 202 Combination 13, 18, 34, 50, 111,
Behavioural response 35, 95, 99, 184 120, 129, 130, 136, 137, 172,
Between-subject, design 184 246, 265, 301, 302, 307, 348
Blending 109, 291 mechanisms of 32
theory 74 Commands 72, 264, 308, 314, 363
Comparative clause 233
Comparative quantifier 233
C Complexity 18, 50–52, 57, 68, 69,
Calligram 106 98–101, 103, 115, 132, 141,
Causal conjunction 319 142, 144, 145, 171, 183, 185,
Circumstances 51, 54, 77, 103, 141, 209, 215, 224, 225, 247, 249,
198, 206, 211, 218, 243, 248, 265, 270, 273, 281, 291, 292,
252, 265, 295, 321–323, 331 357
Cleft sentence 139 Compound/compounding 109, 110,
Clipping 109 129, 133, 158, 298, 362
Cognitive grammar (CG) 71 subordinate 109
Cognitive linguistics 35, 74, 78 Comprehension
Concept Index
377
construction-integration model Degree complement 233

76 Deixis
construction phase 106, 115, 233 deictic shifts 42, 128, 137
embodied 78 discourse 127
integration phase 147 distal 127
judgements 100 opacity 26, 207
literary 79, 83 person 127, 128, 155, 199, 214
Conceit 55, 319, 362 proximal 127
Confirmation bias 169, 170, 191 social 127
Connectives 26, 209, 352 space 127, 274
lack of 151, 157 time 127, 274
Connotation 2, 21, 39, 50, 52, 155, Deletion 108, 113, 152
261, 308, 324, 356 Delinearised reading 33, 34, 177
Construction grammar 74 Denotation 96, 155, 356
Content words 133, 148, 157, 300 Denotatum 65, 363
Control system 80, 81, 179 Derivation 109–111, 217, 326
Conventionalism/conventionalist 29, Determinism 29, 42, 67, 73
41, 43, 81, 304 Deviation/deviance
Conversion 109–111, 140, 266, 324, external 70, 174
345 internal 70, 209
Cooperative principle 24 linguistic 22, 34, 75
Cross-domain mapping 100 morphological 25, 33, 104, 107,
Cultural criticism 72 109–111, 146, 199, 229, 312,
363
orthographic 103, 105, 106, 109,
D 146, 199
Deautomatisation 78, 104, 111, 177, semantic 22, 28, 33, 130, 137,
235, 267, 291, 299, 324 174, 205, 279, 316, 324, 329,
Declarative mood 301 344, 363
Decoding 74–77, 79, 96, 103–108, Diegesis 46
110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 121, Difficulty
124–126, 129, 130, 138–140, as aesthetic construct 30
146, 148, 157, 174, 175, 178, as response phenomenon 30,
188, 218, 239, 272, 273, 288, 357
289, 292, 293, 355, 359, 363 contingent 4, 17, 18, 54, 122,
Deductive approach 171 174, 344, 347
Defamiliarisation 78, 83–85, 228 definition of 4, 27, 35, 41, 55, 65,
Definite determiner 261 66, 74, 171, 174, 182
378
Concept Index
linguistic indicators of 5, 87, 89, 95 Expansion 5, 145, 209

modal 17, 18, 29, 59, 347 Extended analogy 100
ontological 17, 51, 250, 347 Extension 120, 209
permanent 7, 9, 338, 360, 362 Eye-dialect 25, 104
pluralism of 4, 8, 36, 223, 348 Eye-tracking 342
readerly indicators of 5, 89, 95
tactical 17, 18, 28, 54, 172, 347
theory of 3, 347 F
transient 7–9, 338 Familiarity 17, 116, 188, 198, 204,
Dispositio 291 343, 344
Domain mapping Focaliser 200, 207
direction of 132–134, 138, 205, 361 Foregrounding 4, 33, 42, 59, 70,
Dramatic monologue 176 71, 73, 84, 99, 101, 106, 115,
125, 135, 137, 155, 156, 174,
185, 186, 202, 215, 232, 251,
E 253, 316, 332, 344, 345, 352,
Eclecticism 72, 74 356
Eisegesis/eisegetical 8, 80, 304, 346, cohesion of 70
352 phonological 111–114, 199
Elitism 4, 8, 28, 36, 37, 39–41, 43, Formalist linguistics 71
45, 52, 57–59, 274, 348–350, Formal symbolism 7, 82, 83, 101,
352 107, 116, 147, 191, 217, 236,
Elocutio 203, 291 269, 270, 280, 283, 290, 291,
Embedding 102, 139, 294, 300 294, 302, 303, 305, 306,
syntax 23 310–312, 326, 332
Empathetic recognisability 146, 155 Frankfurt school 44
Empiricism 66, 97 Free direct thought 214, 265
Enjambment 34, 209, 235, 236, Free indirect style 147
266, 269, 302 Free modifier 144, 145, 231
Epistemology 40, 43, 59, 66, 73, 97, Fronting 139, 141
182, 236, 270 Functional linguistics 71
Epizeuxis 147 Function words 119, 148, 157, 219,
Essentialism 18, 36 274, 311
Etymological wordplay 306
Exclamatives 214, 232
Exegesis/exegetic 3, 7, 25, 27, 68, G
80, 157, 177, 251, 267, 269, Garden path effect 300
280, 289, 303, 304, 322, 331, Generalisation 84, 127, 148, 152,
346, 350, 362, 363 298, 323, 343, 348
Concept Index
379
Generic sentences 9, 84, 172, 225, Imageability 48, 115, 117, 119, 120,
236, 237, 239, 273, 290, 316, 125, 154, 199, 201, 203, 214,
328, 343 217, 218, 258, 273, 274, 308, 353
Gestalt 42, 101, 103, 235, 245, 289, Imagery 78, 79, 116, 131, 306, 353
326, 332, 350, 351 Imperative mood 263, 266, 274
Graphological deviation/deviance Impersonality 156, 159, 226, 232,
106–108, 113, 256, 260 237, 272, 273, 317, 344, 349,
Graphology 56, 102, 106, 107 361
Inanimate referents 319, 320
Inappropriateness 129, 137, 324,
H 344
Head 109, 127, 142, 144, 231, 299, Incongruity 129, 130, 138, 177,
300, 323, 324, 354 229, 297, 302, 316, 320,
Headlinese 260, 261, 267, 285, 317 323–326, 331, 345, 349
Heterodiegetic speaker 214 Indeterminacy 7, 21, 55, 73, 123,
Heteroglossia 176, 262 144, 199, 204, 205, 207, 211,
Heuristics 34, 82, 96, 118, 223, 246, 214, 215, 217, 248, 273, 314,
254, 289 346, 353
Homodiegetic speaker 214, 247 Inductive approach 171
Homograph 266 Inference/inferencing
Homonymy 21, 115, 120, 121, 125 bridging 76, 77, 88, 89, 157, 175,
Homophone 301 177, 229, 234, 260, 325, 326,
Homophoric reference 292, 293, 329, 331
344 elaborative 76, 77, 79, 81, 88, 89,
Honorifics 127 177, 234, 321, 326, 328, 331,
Humour 150 357, 362
Hyperbole 177 logical 76, 89
thematic 77, 82, 83, 207, 218,
224, 257, 269, 293, 303, 346
I Inflection 107, 117, 257
Iconic argument 51, 52 Informativity 147, 148, 157, 199,
Iconic enjambment 236, 302 208, 260, 264, 265, 311, 345
Iconic grammar. See Formal lack of 9, 146, 280, 310, 332
symbolism Instantiation 7, 21, 23, 70, 72, 73,
Iconicity 205, 208, 290 88, 89, 102, 103, 141, 153,
Ideational unfamiliarity 228, 231, 171, 174, 271, 289, 290
243, 247 Intention/intentionality 4, 8, 14, 17,
Idiolect 267 31, 36, 41–43, 49, 52, 56–58,
Illocution 41, 270, 322 60, 80, 155, 157, 175, 207,
380
Concept Index
224, 238, 263, 267, 268, 270, Lexical bundle 259, 260
274, 283, 322, 327, 350, 358 Lexical density 146, 148, 157, 264,
Intentionalism 311, 333, 345
actual 41 Lexical field/set. See Semantic field
hypothetical 41–43, 238 Lexicogrammar 72, 99, 103, 159,
modest 41 246, 308
Interpretability 6, 7, 183, 191, 199, Lexicon 74, 104, 109, 117
204, 205, 208, 212, 215, 217, Linguistics 15, 19, 24, 45, 60, 71,
223, 224, 226, 236, 239, 250, 74, 89, 102, 118, 159
267, 270, 289, 292, 302, 310, systemic-functional 4, 71
326, 340, 346, 363 List 77, 87, 88, 102, 117, 134,
Interpretation 6, 8, 20, 21, 24, 27, 143–145, 154, 188, 219, 228,
37, 68, 79–83, 85, 89, 90, 98, 233, 308, 362
100, 105, 108, 109, 114, 125, Literariness 28, 70, 179, 205, 215,
137, 145, 157, 158, 210, 229, 217, 344
230, 238, 240, 250, 251, 267, Literary competence/expertise 17,
283, 290, 303, 304, 328, 331, 28, 29, 40, 80, 81, 96, 101,
346, 352, 363 181, 185, 190, 349
Interpretive communities 81 Literary pragmatics 24, 86
Interrogative mood 297–299, 301, 303 Logogenesis 325
Intersubjective topic agreement 6, 256 Lyric present 202
Intersubjectivity 65, 170, 179, 191,
340
Intertextuality 8, 267, 268, 270, M
272, 274, 302, 306, 326–328, Marxism/marxist 44, 45, 59, 332
344, 349, 350 Masculine rhyme 215
Inventio 203, 291 Maxim 38, 84, 206, 228, 236, 286,
Inversion 139, 213, 217 311, 350
Irony of manner 24
echoic 176, 271, 297 of quality 24, 268
Meaningfulness-meaninglessness
dilemma 4, 9, 36, 48, 58, 72,
K 87, 115, 123, 177, 223, 355
Kernel sentence 139, 211 Memory 33, 77, 99, 101, 106, 113,
128, 141, 201, 216, 247, 248,
265, 307, 343
L long-term 8, 78, 130, 229, 259,
Language potential 73 285, 349, 353
Latent semantic analysis (LSA) 78 short-term 8, 139, 142, 184, 349
Concept Index
381
Mental representation 34, 35, 47, 139, 143, 144, 150, 151, 156,
59, 76, 84 170, 176, 181, 207, 232, 241,
Meronym 134, 203, 230 256, 263, 270, 280, 284, 292,
Metafunction 297, 307, 311, 326, 329, 343,
ideational 72, 77, 79, 97, 114, 358, 362
172, 291, 292 Morphological deviation/deviance
interpersonal 72, 292, 308, 331 25, 33, 104, 107, 109–111,
textual 72, 97, 191, 283, 291, 146, 199, 229, 313, 363
292 MRC database 203, 308
Metalanguage 48, 363
Metaphor 27
appositive 133, 135 N
blend 133, 354 Narrativity 5, 6, 146, 152–154, 157,
common ground 49, 131, 135, 199, 201, 204, 211, 214, 217,
214, 280, 317 218, 237, 251, 272, 280, 287,
compound 133 329, 332, 343, 345
copula 133 Negation 23, 111, 135, 136, 199,
genitive 133, 199, 203, 205, 243, 206, 345
321 double 136, 138, 199
noun premodifier 133, 215, 243, subworld 206
322 Neologism 22, 25, 33, 35, 109–111
novel 5, 7, 8, 49, 50, 131, 132, Neurocognitive model of literary
134, 136, 138, 199, 215, 343, reading 85
345, 353, 354, 361, 362 Nominalisation 23, 47, 102, 154,
source domain 131, 134, 203, 155, 157
205, 351 Nominal style 143, 145, 204
target domain 131, 134, 135, Nonsense 28, 87, 174, 177, 178,
205, 362 191, 228, 238, 280, 316–318,
unit 133 327, 332, 333, 338, 342
Metaphysical poetry 170, 319 Non-sequitur 261, 267, 285
Mimesis 46, 47, 247, 259, 317, 324, Non-word 104, 105, 124
326, 354, 359 Nouns
of spoken language 26 abstract/abstraction 9, 82, 117,
Minimal pair 140, 327 118, 125, 154, 155, 199, 204,
Minor clauses 307 261, 270, 273, 324, 353
Modality 155–157, 232, 270 animal 118, 324, 325
deontic 303 concrete 117, 119, 199, 218, 261,
epistemic 303 314
Modernism/modernist 25, 30, institution 118
39–41, 43–45, 47, 55–57, 80, material 118, 228, 324
382
Concept Index
object 118, 325 Parody 188, 255, 317, 326, 327

semiotic 118, 119, 229, 323, 325, 353 Parsing 75–77, 79, 106–108, 110,
substance 118, 325 139–141, 143–145, 172,
Numeral 234 174–176, 178, 191, 218, 231,
233, 239, 265, 286, 288, 294,
297, 299–301, 311–314, 324,
O 333, 343, 356, 359, 363
Objectivism 156 Participants 33–35, 77, 98, 99,
Obscurity/obscure 2–4, 7, 8, 13, 103, 128, 170, 183–186, 188,
14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 24–26, 28, 190, 191, 200, 202, 204, 214,
32, 36, 40, 44, 48, 54–57, 59, 227, 237, 243–247, 256–258,
60, 77, 78, 80–82, 87, 88, 97, 268, 269, 280, 282–284, 290,
99, 116, 136, 170, 172, 174, 298, 299, 301, 303, 304, 308,
175, 177–179, 182, 191, 225, 321–323, 331, 341, 342, 350,
226, 229, 239, 241, 245, 248, 360
250–252, 256, 257, 261, 263, Passive constructions 23, 155, 157
266–268, 271–274, 279, 281, Pentameter 213, 215, 282, 287, 290,
289, 305, 306, 316, 317, 320, 291, 327, 355
322–326, 328, 329, 331, 332, Periphrasis 22, 231
337, 340–344, 347, 349–351, Perlocution 263
358–360, 362, 363 Phonological mediation 75, 111,
Onset 112, 215, 271 112
Ontology 16, 17, 30, 43, 59, 66, Pleonasm 22
263, 296, 321, 323, 331, 347 Poetry text processing (PTP) model
Organic form 42, 43, 289 81, 85
Ornatus difficilis 20 Politeness 154, 349
Ornatus facilis 20 Polyptoton 285
Orthography 5, 103, 106, 107, 176 Polysemy 21, 115, 120, 121, 125,
Oxymoron 22, 129, 138 205, 230, 270
Polysyndeton 209
Polyvalence 204, 205, 207, 215, 217,
P 266, 273, 291
Parable schema 236, 238, 239 Portmanteau words 104
Paradigmatic axis 72 Postmodernism/postmodernist
Paradox 20, 22, 26, 37, 44, 78, 126, 45–47, 56, 57, 80, 150, 170,
129, 130, 138, 231, 344 175, 181, 207, 256, 263,
Paratext 151 270, 307, 318, 326, 344,
Parentheticals 26, 34, 142, 145, 216, 352, 362
249, 284, 287, 289, 320 Post-modification 59, 205, 206, 265
Concept Index
383
Pragmatics 24, 45, 74, 86, 127, 224, Pseudoword 104, 105, 109, 228
355 Pun 15, 21, 24, 125
Primary cognition 246, 247 Punctuation 34, 106, 112, 176, 199,
Priming 235, 300, 345
phonetic 214 dense 112–114
Principle of end-focus 248, 249
Processes
behavioural 321, 331 Q
existential 273 Quasi-propositional variable 308
material 228, 243, 321–323, 331
relational 273
verbal 272 R
Processing 2, 4–6, 22, 32–34, 49, Readability 6, 7, 158, 191, 198, 199,
53, 74, 79, 80, 85, 86, 88, 208, 209–212, 215, 217, 218,
98, 99, 101, 103, 107, 109, 223, 225, 226, 239, 241, 247,
111, 112, 117, 118, 121, 124, 249, 252, 259, 279, 287–289,
130, 131, 133–135, 139, 140, 292, 294, 297, 299, 312, 318,
143, 145, 147, 150, 152–154, 340, 344, 346, 362
156–158, 176, 181, 182, 185, Reader-oriented
191, 201, 204, 205, 208, 209, approach/tradition 3
212, 215, 217, 224, 233, 246, Reading times 5–7, 98, 100, 102,
261, 263, 265, 268, 270, 281, 105, 108, 110, 112–114,
283, 284, 286, 289, 301, 308, 125, 126, 132, 136–138,
312–314, 338, 341, 353, 354, 145, 148, 154, 157, 182,
359 185–188, 210, 211, 264,
deep 84, 97, 108, 113, 132, 148, 288, 289, 312, 342
178, 260 Recall 1, 34, 99, 117, 191, 225, 255,
depth of 84, 106 299, 303, 331
shallow 84, 141, 178, 288 task 33, 98, 178, 198
Prolepsis 152 Reductionism/reductionist 37, 46,
Pronouns 8, 116, 122, 127, 135, 68, 82
154, 286–287, 307, 308, 313, Reference 8, 16, 18, 21, 26, 46–48,
345, 353, 356, 363 58, 65, 73, 74, 104, 110, 123,
Proper names 121–123, 126, 129, 124, 126–129, 144, 149–151,
201, 282 157, 204, 207, 228, 231, 232,
decontextualised 23, 25 234, 237, 252, 262, 263, 268,
Protolanguage 312 270, 274, 283, 284, 286, 288,
Pro-verb 140 293, 297, 302, 316, 317, 327,
Pseudo-morpheme 284 333, 338, 345, 353, 364
384
Concept Index
endophoric 155 Secondary cognition 246, 272

exophoric/situational 124, 354 Segmentation 178, 199, 208, 210,
Reflexivity 338, 345 231, 247, 288, 302
metalinguistic/metaliterary 267, Selection 5, 22, 32, 101, 134, 169,
272, 306, 344 171, 179–181, 280, 291, 318
Register mixing 150, 151, 157, 176, mechanisms of 32
177, 188 Selectional restriction 111, 140
Relativism/relativist 8, 36, 37, 339, Self-paced reading task 185–187
348 Semantic associates 200, 203, 214,
Relevance 24, 41, 47, 48, 84–86, 261, 298
101, 104, 119, 122, 123, 175, Semantic clash. See Semantic
207, 209, 212, 215, 217, 236, deviation/deviance
251, 258, 260, 269, 285, 291, Semantic entailment 76
298, 303, 304 Semantic field/domain 119, 146,
theory 4, 74, 85, 86, 90, 204 151, 157, 228, 234, 245, 251,
Repetition 6, 51, 83, 112, 114, 146, 253, 257, 262, 272, 291, 298,
147, 155, 157, 199, 201, 202, 319, 322, 325
207–209, 211, 215, 237, 264, Semantic incongruence 8, 253
296, 311, 350 Semantic prosody 297, 308, 309
Representation problem 4, 218 Semi-determiner 285, 321, 353
Resolution 78, 137, 154, 204, 286, Semiosis 7, 321
325, 343, 353, 354 Semiotics/semiotic 29, 30, 54, 59,
Rime 215 89, 101, 118, 121, 169, 244,
247, 321, 322, 331, 356
Senser 202
S Sequence 34, 102, 103, 112, 118,
Sarcasm 150 136, 137, 143, 145, 149, 150,
Satire 7, 255 153, 157, 199, 209, 285, 288,
Sayer 287, 292 292, 296, 348, 361
Schemas Shading
articulate 97 neutral 155, 157
cultural 7, 175, 329 Significance 4, 7, 9, 17, 21, 28, 33,
dense descriptive 97 70, 73, 79, 81–83, 101, 106,
textual 7, 279 116, 121, 138, 176, 205, 207,
Scientific method 4, 66, 67 218, 224, 225, 229, 237, 239,
Scientific writing 319 241, 250, 252, 253, 255, 263,
Scrambling 230, 268, 273, 327 267, 268, 270–272, 279, 281,
Scripts 49, 82, 146, 224, 225, 344 283, 289–294, 303, 305, 306,
Concept Index
385
310, 314, 316, 317, 322, 328, 291, 293, 294, 300, 312, 314,
332, 343, 349, 352, 356, 357, 320, 322, 327, 337, 349, 361,
359, 360, 362, 363 362
convention of 82, 172, 177–179, Stylistic
236, 250, 257, 261, 269, 298 approach/tradition 3, 13, 19, 57,
Simple replacement metaphors 231, 69, 70, 339
250, 252, 272, 273, 303, 345 Subjectivity 17, 65, 67, 146, 154–
Simple style 218 157, 201, 214, 218, 232, 253,
Situational associates 34 270, 272, 280, 297, 303, 309,
Situation model 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 310, 319, 322, 331, 356
84, 99, 101, 105, 108, 110, Subordination 139, 141, 142, 145,
113–116, 119, 124–126, 132, 215, 247, 249, 265, 288, 318
136–138, 143, 145, 147, 153, Symbolic iconicity. See Formal
157, 172, 174, 176, 179, 182, symbolism
197, 204, 207, 218, 224, 227, Symbolism 20, 57, 83, 156, 170,
237, 243, 245, 247, 251, 258, 240, 290, 326, 344
261, 269, 273, 284, 298, 308, Sympathy 199, 201–203, 212, 214,
344, 353, 363 217, 232, 246
Speculative Syntactic iconicity. See Formal
approach/tradition 32 symbolism
Speech-act-theory 74 Syntagmatic axis 72, 191
Spelling 174 Syntax/line match 6, 208
non-standard 25, 104 Syntax
Stance 19, 31, 32, 40, 41, 72, 124, complex 142, 143, 199, 216, 223,
146, 155, 157, 287, 296, 308, 249, 265, 363
311, 316, 320, 321, 327, 348 ill-formed 9, 139, 140, 144, 145,
Stratification 72, 102, 103, 124, 258 297, 307, 312, 313, 342, 349
Stream of consciousness 235, 322 phrase-based 25, 142–145, 199,
Stress 34, 47, 112, 156, 176, 327 232, 252, 265
adjacent 112–114, 199 well-formed 139
Structuralism/structuralist 4, 18, 28, System 14, 26, 46, 72, 124, 131,
29, 46, 124 133, 202, 238, 261, 265, 268,
Structure 4, 6, 8, 28, 52, 71–73, 270, 316, 324
77, 80, 102, 106, 116, 124,
133, 134, 139, 140, 142, 145,
152, 153, 156, 176, 179, 208, T
215, 218, 246, 247, 249, 256, Tautology 15, 22, 147
270, 273, 281, 283, 285, 286, Taxonomy 5, 8, 14, 22, 23, 179
386
Concept Index
Tellability 204, 237 157, 172, 186, 208, 235, 237,

Telos 49 241, 254, 255, 264, 265, 281,
Temporal clause 141, 216, 248 283, 311, 314, 316, 317, 329,
Temporal sequencing 152, 157, 201 341–343, 346, 349, 362, 363
Tense shifting 150 Typological
Textbase 77, 81, 83, 84, 143, 172, approach/tradition 3, 8, 14, 19,
204, 247, 261, 363 23, 24, 39, 68, 342
Text effects 5, 86, 87, 95–97,
100–102, 113, 130, 158,
191, 211, 216, 240, 253, U
254, 271, 294, 297, 315, Unreliable narrator 268
330, 338, 359 Utterance 8, 40, 49, 140, 177, 224,
Thematic role 79, 202 225, 232, 240, 251, 254, 255,
Theme 4, 6, 7, 16, 36, 50, 81–83, 259, 262, 264, 268, 271, 283,
89, 101, 107, 148, 172, 286, 288–291, 296, 303, 308,
174–176, 178, 179, 184, 191, 311, 316, 317, 319, 320, 322,
207, 217, 228, 237, 238, 250, 327, 329, 332, 349
252, 257, 269, 279, 280, 283,
290, 298, 303, 310, 332, 347,
353 V
Titles 16, 23, 32, 46, 172, 179, 198, Verbalisation 81–83, 180
326, 356 Verbiage 306
lack of/misuse of 150, 151, 157, Verbless constructions 25
312 Vocabulary 16, 31, 74, 87, 115, 125,
Token 99, 146, 157, 208, 210, 259, 155, 157, 176, 261, 264, 273,
264, 265, 311, 321, 322 288, 345, 350, 361, 363
Topic 6, 23, 82, 83, 89, 133, 151, core 115–118, 120, 146, 178,
178, 199, 214, 219, 227, 251, 199, 324
256, 268, 282, 283, 285, 298, specialised 8, 115–117, 258, 349
303, 305, 320, 341, 357 Vocatives 72
Transitivity patterns 71, 243, 321
Trial-and-error 68
Triangulation 74 W
Trobar clus 21 Within-subject, design 184, 360
Trompe l’oeil effect 231 Word order 16, 70, 139–141, 145,
Trope 15, 20, 22, 122, 130, 133, 176, 286
150, 205, 289, 291 Working memory 78, 113, 215, 247,
Type 6–9, 15, 17, 18, 20, 38, 78, 248, 265
106, 115, 143, 146, 147, 149, World-builders 203, 214

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Davide

“Drawing on a range of scholarship across stylistics, cognitive poetics, and lit-

ISBN 978-3-319-97000-4 ISBN 978-3-319-97001-1 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949314

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

Cover image: © L.Dep illustrations/Alamy Stock Photo

Wallace Stevens’ ‘What We See Is What We Think’ is reprinted by

Part I Theorising Poetic Difficulty

2 Previous Routes to Difficulty in Poetry 13

3 New Coordinates of Difficulty: An Interdisciplinary

3.5 Components of Significance and Literary

4 Genes of Difficulty: The Indicators 95

Part II Analysing Poetic Difficulty

5 Organisms of Difficulty: The Data 169

6 Processing Baseline: The Easy Poem 197

7 Transient Difficulty: Utterances Towards Obscurity 223

7.3 Problematising the Category: Geoffrey Hill’s

8 Permanent Difficulty: Against Thematic Significance 279

9 General Conclusions 337

Author Index 367

Concept Index 375

Fig. 3.1 A definition of difficulty in poetry 66

Fig. 7.4 ‘When Once the Twilight Locks No Longer’: breakdown

Table 2.1 Main conceptual differences between obscurity

Table 7.2 Transitivity analysis of deviant verb–noun collocations

© The Author(s) 2019 1

this particular meeting during which, to my surprise, some members

towards general explanations, with too context dependent a picture of

scientific principle of replication. The skeleton of the model rests on an

in thematic significance: experiencing and re-experiencing the resistance

meaningfulness–meaninglessness dilemma is linked to stylistic strate-

This chapter sets out to provide a full-blown identikit of poetic

2.1 Scholarly Traditions

© The Author(s) 2019 13

The contributions of each tradition are discussed at length, their

2.1.1 Typological Approaches

Typological approaches strive to comprehend literary phenomena by

‘Ambiguity’ itself means an indecision as to what you mean, an intention

Ambiguity is seen as a multifaceted phenomenon, for Empson out-

encompass it. The first two are coloured psychologically (‘indecision’,

No less than three decades later, John Press (1963) contributes a

that is appealing on account of its immediacy of application. His four

Steiner locates its roots in the nineteenth-century disenchantment of

embarking on comparably wide-ranging studies that revolve around

2.1.2 Stylistic Approaches

Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused mes-

form of trobar clus (literally, ‘closed form’) onwards. What is more,

commonplace language of daily speech’ (1963: 11) mentioned earlier.

This procedure is particularly apt to account for Hill’s context-activated

idealised conversational rules can work as a useful baseline against which

connectives and the insertion of parentheticals (syntactic level), opacity

Olson’s topic-skipping may well be the most naturalistic in reproducing

By premodifying ‘difficult’ with the adverb of manner ‘perversely’,

basis to these phenomena. It also points to the possibility that moti-

2.1.3 Reception-Oriented Approaches

The reception-oriented approaches flourishing in the 80s opposed the

Of course, the difficulty is itself a fact – of response; and it suggests, to

According to Stanley Fish, it is misguided or at least unfruitful to pair

A contemporaneous but more theoretically nuanced discussion is

In nonsense, then, formal experimentation plays havoc with semantic

Faithful to his structuralist agenda, Riffaterre distances himself from the

systems’ (150). It is possible to trace a parallel between this conceptual-

it misguidedly minimises the influence of language on the perception,

Fig. 3.1 A definition of difficulty in poetry 66

Fig. 7.4 ‘When Once the Twilight Locks No Longer’: breakdown

Table 2.1 Main conceptual differences between obscurity

Table 7.2 Transitivity analysis of deviant verb–noun collocations

2.1 Scholarly Traditions

2.1.1 Typological Approaches

2.1.2 Stylistic Approaches

2.1.3 Reception-Oriented Approaches

2.2 Side Themes

2.2.1 The Pluralism of Difficulty and the Diachronic

2.2.4 Philosophical Roots

2.2.5 The Representational Problem

2.2.6 The Meaningfulness–Meaninglessness Dilemma

2.2.7 The Production Side—Poets on Their Own

2.2.8 Difficulty or Obscurity?

Table 2.1 Main conceptual differences between obscurity and difficulty

2.3 Summary and Conclusion

3.1 Introduction: Redefining Poetic Difficulty

Fig. 3.1 A definition of difficulty in poetry

3.2 Empiricism and the Scientific Method

Fig. 3.2 Stages in the development of a science (Adapted from Cohen et al.

3.3 Stylistics, Foregrounding

3.4 Language Processing and Comprehension