The Poetry of Sound

plicitly, by an equally nebulous third term: sense. The relation is ambiguous, and shift-­ ing, because sound—especially in the context of poetry—is of that species of homographs which produce their own antonyms.4 On the one hand, sound—defined as “the au-­ dible articulation(s) corresponding to a let-­ ter or word” (def. 4b)—has been understood as distinct from linguistic meaning: “the sound must seem an echo to the sense,” as Pope famously put it (29). Furthermore, that distinction is often pushed to a full-­fledged antonymy, so that sound is understood as be-­ ing, by definition, diametrically opposed to meaning: a “mere audible effect without sig-­ nificance or real importance” (def. 4e). John Locke underscores that opposition in a pas-­ sage in his Essay concerning Human Under-­ standing: “for let us consider this proposition as to its meaning (for it is the sense, and not sound, that is, and must be, the principle or common notion)” (31). Or we see the opposi-­ tion, more famously, in Shakespeare’s phras-­ ing: “. . . a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (Macbeth 5.5.26–28). At the same time, however, sound can also denote precisely the signifying refer-­ ent of language: “import, sense, significance” (def. 4d). Indeed, instead of posing an alter-­ native to meaning, sound in poetry has been heard as conveying meaning in its own right. “In human speech,” Leonard Bloomfeld as-­ serts, “different sounds have different mean-­ ings” (qtd. in Jakobson, Language 81). Jan Mukař ovský concurs: “‘Sound’ components are not only a mere sensorily perceptible ve-­ hicle of meaning but also have a semantic na-­ ture themselves” (“Sound Aspect” 23). At once the antithesis and the very es-­ sence of meaning, sound in poetry articulates 1 The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound: The 2006 mla Presidential Forum [ P M L A