ABSTRACT

Russian formalism, with its focus on poetic language, was a natural descendant of the Poetics. As J. Scott points out, Aristotle moved on from Plato's discourse on literary mimesis and poetic inspiration to provide the first categorization and classification of literary discourse, at least as far as the narratology of tragedy and epic were concerned. The reason for discussing a range of examples of the multimodal in action is twofold: both to demonstrate the ubiquity of multimodality in contemporary communication and to make such forms available to poetry and poetics. Conventional literary stylistics/poetics has concentrated on the internal dynamics, rules and features of verbal language: principally in printed, written form, but also, to a lesser extent, in spoken verbal form. The shipping forecast was discussed in the precursor to the present volume, A Prosody of Free Verse: Explorations in Rhythm in terms of its potential and actual use as a free verse poem.