When, in 1916, Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure wrote that, ‘language is a system of signs that expresses ideas’, he significantly helped to generate a century of contentious, diverse, and exhilarating critical, literary, and cultural theory that has shaped how we read poetry today. His legacy is significant in the, generally defined, movements of structuralism (theories that loosely follow Saussure in identifying overarching systems within which complex relationships and hierarchies are formed) and post-structuralism (theories that challenge that position by exposing, interrogating – and dismantling – the regulating dynamics that underpin structuralism, and emphasizing the potency of that which ‘escapes’ systemic account). Both ‘movements’ raise significant challenges to conventionally-conceived ‘authority’, i.e. to the assumed ‘origin’ of meaning as something prior to, or outwith, the linguistic composition of the text, thereby putting all manifestations of authority – from authorial intention through to the existence of God – into question. Instead, such theorists, even those who didn’t respond directly to Saussure’s specific theories of semiotics,  battle on the ground that language is a creative, generative medium, rather than a mere conveyor of information – a proposition with particular significance for poetry which is, of course, a form of communication associated with expression, but made of language. 

In terms of poetic theory in particular, this focus on language was seen especially in the ‘practical’ or ‘new’ criticisms typified by the British academic, I. A. Richards and American John Crowe Ransom in the middle of the twentieth century. Both inaugurated ‘schools’ of poetic theory that advocated close reading as an approach to access meaning in a literary work, especially poetry, through formalism – absolute focus on features such as metre, soundplay, figurative language, and structural arrangement. Seeking an ‘objective’, near-scientific approach to interpreting poetry, theorists of this group rejected things like historical context, ethical or moral codes, and especially authorial intention and the feelings and emotions of the reader as valid references for a poem’s meaning, preferring to focus exclusively on the arrangement of words on the page. William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s respective essays, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ and ‘The Affective Fallacy’, articulated these ideas strikingly, while Cleanth Brooks’ The Well-Wrought Urn, emphasized the structural integrity of poems – seeing their meaning as fused into the very arrangement of the verse and therefore destroyed by paraphrase. New criticism’s influence has been lasting and significant in terms of determining poetry’s cultural association with complex, ornate word arrangement, in determining canon formation (how poems are valued and judged), shaping disciplinary ‘training’ (the notion of learning how to read poems) and – perhaps most generatively – in provoking a wealth of theories to challenge, or even contradict, ‘new critical’ precepts by being open to seeing meaning as forged in a complex and mutable crucible of history, society, and interpersonal relations, including the emotional and bodily response of readers. New criticism’s apparent insistence that formal features required separate attention from historical circumstances served to occlude the historical significance of form, and complicated poetry’s relationship to more historically-inclined, Marxist schools of literary theory, such as New Historicism or Cultural Materialism. The fractures between these schools of thought have been the focus of more recent theories of ‘New Formalism’, itself a contentious grouping that seeks to measure the relationship between historicism and formalism. 

Meanwhile, the twentieth century’s other towering figure of language theory – French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-81) – was beginning his radical reading of Freud, and his abiding interest in the agency of language in the unconscious. This complex, intimate reading of linguistics and the unconscious is interested in language’s manifestation, including in ‘slips’ – the very stuff of poetry, one might suggest¬ – of psychological or unconscious phenomena. The field is difficult and paradoxical – overlapping with Lacan’s other theories of ‘the Imaginary, ‘the Real’, and ‘the Symbolic’ – but the centrality of language as agent, together with the aforementioned association, via Shelleyan poetics and expressive theory, of poetry with revelation and overflow offers a compelling conjunction of ideas that makes poetry available to psychoanalytic theory, both in terms of content and mode. A reader such as Isobel Armstrong seeks to track and test these potential connections, noting (as often is the case) poetry’s simultaneous, oxymoronic challenge and denial of psychoanalytic representation in the theory of someone like Julia Kristeva (see Armstrong, pp. 111-113). More broadly, poetry has been invigoratingly invoked in the French feminist theory (écriture féminine) that responded to Lacanian precepts, with it standing, as so often, for a counter-cultural spirit, this time of pleasure. 

Alongside this intense focus on language and the unconscious came sustained attention to what might be seen as its opposite – language and the manifest conditions of everyday life, as viewed by the ‘ordinary language philosophy’ of those such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and J. L. Austin (1911-60). In this purview, language is understood as effective (i.e. it brings things into effect, into being). Associated especially with ‘speech-acts’, whereby language literally makes things happen, this school of linguistic philosophy seeks to account for language’s ‘real world’ efficacy. Poetry’s relationship to this view of language is intriguing – on the one hand, the legacy of new criticism might suggest poetry as a category of communication forcefully associated with bringing things into being – namely the ‘meaning’ of the poem. And yet, poetry provokes fascinating exceptions, qualifications or even challenges in these theoretical fields, and in the field of ‘deconstruction’, which developed partly in response to Austin and others. Deconstruction’s leading figure, Jacques Derrida, in his notable 1972 essay, ‘Signature, Event, Context’, picked up on how Austin apparently overlooked (or deliberately excluded) particular instances of language – poetic and fictional especially – in his theories of speech-acts. In a characteristically ‘deconstructionist’ move, Derrida asks if such excluded instances are actually the positive conditions of language: ‘this outside its inside?’ (p. 102). Such debates intimate the complexity of poetry’s position within twentieth-century (and more recent) structuralist and post-structuralist theory – is it continuous with other forms of language use, or distinct from them; typical, or atypical? The discussion gained more complexity and intrigue when, in a late essay, Derrida answered the question, ‘what thing is poetry?’ by contemplating what is learnt by heart (poetry returns to the body…). Several times describing poetry as ‘close to the earth’, Derrida’s idiosyncratic motif for the poem emerges as the ‘hérrison’ (hedgehog): ‘rolled up in a ball, prickly with spines, vulnerable and dangerous, calculating and ill-adapted’ (p. 233). And yet this mutable, contradictory phenomenon has a potent capacity for fusion: ‘in a single cipher, the poem (the learning by heart, learn it by heart) seals together the meaning and the letter, like a rhythm spacing out time’ (ibid.). In this phrasing, poetry intriguingly ‘embodies’ Derrida’s energetic, complex, deconstructionist readings of language, meaning and temporality more broadly; the trace of poetry as a ‘special case’ lingers. 

If anything typifies the linguistic turn, it is debate regarding the mechanics and significance of the ‘sign’, by which is meant the relationship between the signified (what is meant) and the signifier (what ‘points to’ that meaning, in this case words). Put simply, this debate asks us to consider how (or if) language indicates (‘points to’) something other than itself, its ‘real’ meaning. Much of what I’ve covered here engages at some level the question – a legacy of Saussure – of whether meaning exists independently, or is derived only from the system of differentiation that language comprises, but I’ll finish with the case of what might be seen as a kind of ‘dream’ of pure language poetry – poetry explicitly generated by language alone, apparently indifferent to its ‘real world’ referents. As Calum Gardner considers, so called ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’ poetry – works associated with the American avant-garde magazine of that name, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein and published in the late 1970s – can be seen fruitfully in conjunction with the work of leading structuralist/post-structuralist theorist, Roland Barthes. ‘Language poetry’ in fact is often considered to encompass works from across the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries; essentially this names poetry that deliberately suppresses (or at least challenges) the notion of poetry as the expression of authorial feeling, instead presenting poems as entities that emerge from creative, idiosyncratic, or even mechanical juxtapositioning of words alone; a creation of language. These techniques are addressed in The Poetry Toolkit’s entry on concrete poetry, and here on the website in the think pieces on poetry and media, but in terms of theory, as Gardner states, these poets engage the ‘modern poetics’ of which Barthes speaks: 

'in classical art, a ready-made thought generates an utterance which ‘expresses’ or ‘translates’ it. […] In modern poetics, on the contrary, words produce a kind of formal continuum from which there gradually emanates an intellectual or emotional density which would have been impossible without them; speech is then the solidified time of a more spiritual gestation, during the ‘thought’ is prepared, installed little by little by the contingency of words.' (Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, qtd. Gardner, p. 7)

Meaning, then, is contingent not on feeling, but on linguistic arrangement or positioning, which becomes the crucible for generating ‘thought’. If one ever thought that poetry stood ‘outside’ theory – that it is irreducibly attached to the authority of feeling and therefore theoretically unsophisticated – then, Gardner suggests, ‘language poetry’ successfully challenges that idea by making poetry the mode par excellence for twentieth-century literary theory: ‘we can say that these poets’ “words” have “abolished” fixed connections, but they generate instead multiple “possible” connections’ (p. 15)

For a compelling, warm, intuitive meditation on all the considerations that I have (only very partially) touched on here in ‘language theory’ and poetry – indeed, for an entirely different, affective exploration of these questions – see Barbara Guest’s ‘Invisible Architecture’. If nothing else, Guest’s piece reminds us that ‘the unstableness of the poem is important’. As such, she characterizes the poem as something encountered – seen, heard, read. I consider these aspects in the think piece ‘Reader, Audience’.