If there are some critics who still doubt the competence of linguistics to embrace the field of poetics, I privately believe that the poetic incompetence of some bigoted linguists has been mistaken for an inadequacy of the linguistic science itself. All of us here, however, definitely realize that a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms. Roman Jakobson (1960: 377) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Implicature in English Poetic Language' is an attempt to analyze poetic texts from a linguistic-pragmatic perspective. Poetic language is known to provide meaning by indirection, i.e., the poet says one thing but means something else in addition to what he explicitly states. In this sense Grice's Cooperative Principle (the maxims and the notion of implicature), though was basically intended to function in face-to-face talk exchanges, sounds quite applicable to poetic language.
