ABSTRACT
To the chronically literal-minded, poetry is a variety of nonsense; the difference between gibberish and metaphorical truth may depend on the leap the imagination is prepared to take in order to render meaningful what is apparently absurd. There are different kinds of absurdity, which rhetoric and logic distinguish by such labels as paradox and oxymoron. In illustrating the most important kinds of semantic oddity, he shall restrict myself to simple relations of meaning between small groups of English words. In noting the applications of the various kinds of semantic redundancy in poetry, we may start with devices of lesser importance those involving redundancy. The semantic parallelism characteristic of the Psalms is also a form of pleonasm. For hints on the function of this kind of redundancy, we may return to the discussion of repetitiveness. Like pleonasm, tautology is a device of limited usefulness in literature. Periphrasis is far more common in poetry than pleonasm and tautology.
