> >
> > > Ray Evans Harrell wrote:
> > > >
> > > > I may be dumb about this but to me all of your descriptions are
> > connotative.
> > > > How about a good denotative definition or two?
> > > [snip]
> > Brad answered:
> > > I would argue that there is no such thing as a denotative definition
> > > simpliciter.
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > So much for that attempt at some kind of clarity. Also 400 years of
> > poetry
> > just went down the drain. Here is something that came to me today.
>
> How curious. I would have thought my hypothesis would
> be very *pro*-poetry, since it seems to me that poetry
> really "pushes" words to their limits, so that the "spectrum" between
> denotation and connotation becomes instead a 2-dimensional space,
> and it is not just the case that some words get used in
> more emotional and others in more factual ways, but also
> that some words get used [in poetry] in ways that are
> both more factual and more emotional.
>
Everyone has to be a Romantic or a Classicist but
in the real world there are structural rules that make understanding possible
and education not a futile gesture. Like the Medical systems
of the body that do not really exist but are helpful if a Doctor is going to
operate on you. Denotative and Connotative are Poetic Diction
terms that are used in performance to make poetry clear to an
audience. The creative types, like yourself, often have to
rely on the likes of us poor performance types to make you
understood. But that is OK since we do know there is a difference
between the meaning and interpretive stress of a simple poetic
sentence. We also know, that the meaning is many layers deep
and practice those layers as our games instead of being involved in fruitless
math exercises that are compared to Beethoven symphonies.
Cheers,
REH
