ABSTRACT
Formalist linguistic theory, specifically the theory of the poetic function of language as consisting in self-reference—in language’s turning attention back upon itself—bears in this way on Agamben’s thinking of the philosophical significance of verse form. In “La fine del poema,” Agamben defines poetry by the possibility of enjambment that results from the opposition between the syntactical unit of the sentence and the metrical unit of the line. Paradoxically, the last verse of a poem is not a verse in Agamben’s technical sense based on enjambment because sound and sense necessarily end together: nothing further comes that can create a tension of non-coincidence between them—and the verse qua verse depends on just such a discrepancy. The space of the poem is opened and assured only by its refraining from a lasting accord between sound and sense. The poem is a poem only by relating itself in the end to non-poetry.
