ABSTRACT
The question of how poetry might be described and defined as a linguistic structure has troubled readers since…well, since we have been able to keep records of what critics have said about literature. Regarding English poetry, this quest can be divided roughly into three stages: the classical sources (Aristotle, Plato, Longinus, etc.); the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries, in which critics both drew upon classical precedent and developed theories to account for the types, methods and objectives of modern English poetry; and the twentieth century, in which literary criticism has become an academic discipline and has found itself encountering, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes not, the non-literary practices of historicism, semiotics, sociology, politics and, most significantly, linguistics.
