Abstract:
College instruction in poetry systematically treats, prosody, symbolism, imagery, lexicology, the history of ideas, and critical biography--by no means to exhaust the list. Common sense dictates that it should be possible to include a systematic approach to syntax in the synthesis, but common knowledge denies it. Ideally, students of literature should be able to probe the syntax of a poem in their native language with almost as much facility as its diction. The facts of the matter are, however, that few university undergraduates manage to have acquired an understanding of English grammar adequate to serving them as a tool in the study of poetry, while instructors are hampered, perhaps by a lack of special skills in contemporary methods of linguistic analysis, certainly by a lack of the considerable time it would take to teach almost any of the available descriptive methods of syntactic analysis.
