ABSTRACT
A retrospective summary of this book in one or two paragraphs may help the reader who has persevered this far to see how its parts fit into a general pattern. We began, in Chapters 1 and 2, with the question ‘what is special about the language of poetry?’, and in particular, ‘what does it mean to use language creatively?’. From there, in Chapters 3 and 4, we turned to the subject of poetic licence, and to the even broader concept of linguistic foregrounding, or ‘artistic obtrusion’, and saw the interpretation of poetry mainly as making sense of foregrounded aspects of language. The remaining chapters dealt with various kinds of foregrounding: Chapters 5 and 6 with repetitions of words and sounds; Chapter 7 with the conventional foregrounding of patterns in verse; Chapters 8, 9, and 10 with special modes of meaning, and the part which literal absurdity plays in their operation; Chapter 11 with the foregrounding of situation; and Chapter 12 with the foregrounding of ambiguity in puns and other uses of multiple meaning.
