Gesturing while Writing: An Alternate Perspective on Mimetic Prosody

The paper looks at the idea that poetic lines mime out in their music key features of the things they describe. Critics have persistently attacked it. From Samuel Johnson, I.A. Richards and Derek Attridge through to Thomas H. Ford, one finds the ‘mimetic effect’ treated as a kind of gullible delusion. What the reader is really hearing in a line’s supposedly mimetic prosody is their own projection of the conventional meanings of the words comprising it. Noting that poets in these same traditions have regularly described their compositional practice as an embodied performance of their subject matter, the paper questions the either/or thinking in the critical tradition just sketched. Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of the simultaneous presence of iconic, indexical and conventional elements within any signification is invoked and exemplified through an initially strange parallel: the mimetic gestures people make with their hands as they speak, even as the much more arbitrarily-determined meanings of those words seem uppermost in their minds. The small but cogent linguistic literature analysing this everyday phenomenon is drawn on to suggest how a poet’s lines might combine gestural with conventional communications at one and the same time and be read as such. The upshot is that poems in verse convey more of the body’s speech than our critical traditions have allowed.