This book by R.A. York mentioned earlier here (Poem as Utterance), surveys various 20th-cent poets - evaluates the discourse, the communicative gesture, in their poems, in terms of what shared assumptions or shared experience or knowledge - shared with the reader - it reflects.

Looking at poems for what is left unstated, what can remain implicit, or what can be included "informally", conversationally, because it's assumed to be general knowledge, shared experience. How the conveyance of shared experience builds confidence or a sense of authority granted.

Frost wrote somewhere that good poems don't instruct the reader about what they don't know; they express gracefully what the reader knows already.

Are poems a kind of discourse production - or can they be rather a relief, a vacation, a rescue from same? Since the achievement of a communicative poiesis (perhaps a kind of conjunction of opposites) allows so much effort & expostulation and explanation to drop away?

A quote from R.A. York's The Poem As Utterance, a study of 19th & 20th cent. European poetry from the vantage of "pragmatics" - a branch of contemporary linguistics (Methuen, 1986). Speaking of the usefulness of same, he writes:

"it might lead to a soundly based classification of utterances, as, for example, between those which aim primarily to alter the world and those that aim primarily to effect a communion in appreciating or comprehending the world." (pp. 8-9)

Here we have another version of what Mandelstam called the future of poetic research : delving into the impulse of the text.

Look closely at this divide : doth it not faintly resemble the avant/quiet picture box?

O my peeps, there's something deep here. Vita activa, vita contemplativa. "Mary hath chosen the better part."

The Third Way reconciles both halves of this dumb-dumb rain.