ABSTRACT
Dillon's article compares the deletions and inversions in English poetry from Spenser to the Victorians with the deletion and inversion transformations which operate in modern English prose. The functions of and hence possible motive for, inversions and deletions can be roughly grouped into three classes: presentational, imitative, and prosodic. By presentation, the author means the ordering of the information in the sentence to focus on a constituent by fronting it, or to establish a parallelism with the patterning of information of previous lines, or to delay a piece of information for climactic effect. By imitative, the author has in mind passages in Milton, Pope, and Wordsworth which represent complex psychological experiences such as confusion, growing apprehension, deceptive or misinterpreted experience. The least-studied motives for inversion have to do with prosodic effects. In general, a poet seems to have a choice between keeping a pronominalized element, which gives him an unstressed syllable, or deleting it, which gives him a 'hole'.
