ABSTRACT
Until relatively recently critics and scholars have demonstrated a surprising resistance to the importance of punctuation as a literary resource. It has only been with the work of Malcolm Parkes and John Lennard2 that punctuation has been considered as a crucial feature of ‘the pragmatics of the written medium in transmitting semantic intent’ (Parkes, p. 114). The role of punctuation in illuminating and embodying meaning is, according to Parkes:
even greater in poetry than in prose, because the rôle of language is itself heightened. … Layout, rhyme and punctuation are the principal features of a written poem, which fi rst arouse in readers the expectations that will govern their perception of its ‘poetic’ nature, stimulate close reading, and cause them to initiate the special processes of interpretation required by the form. (p. 114)
John Lennard would agree with Parkes’s statement that ‘the difference between the signifi cance of punctuation in verse and in other kinds of written discourse is simply one of degree rather than one of kind’ (p. 114), and his own study of parentheses and lunulae (round brackets) focuses on their exploitation in English printed verse across the centuries.
