(4)  Rhetoric

 

A simpler more naive view of poetry is that it is just rhetoric.   All the poetic devices and so on are  just tried and tested ways of persuading the reader of the truth of what you're saying, or how how feel.   The reason we use the metrical form is to make the words more memorable, or to slow down the delivery so that the reader savours every word.   The rhymes bind the text together more tightly as a whole, and echo the way the ideas themselves are bound together.  

Jakobson, again, pointed out how all the characteristic poetic devices are based on parallelism, that is repetition combined with smaller scale difference.   Repetition of this kind is characteristic of speech making or emotional or persuave language generally.

 

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