Written between 1916 and 1931 and available in English for the first time, Yakubinsky's seminal essays afford us an unprecedented view of the history of modern and cultural theory. Addressing central questions of poetics and sociolinguistics – such as what distinguishes poetry and literature from ordinary language?, where do poems come from?, what is our role in and contribution to the evolution of language?, how are language and politics intertwined? – their insights and criticisms are as fresh and apposite today as they were a century ago. Visionary Russian linguist Lev Petrovich Yakubinsky (1892-1945) attended Kiev and Petersburg Universities from 1909-15. In 1916, he co-founded the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOYAZ), thus initiating the groundbreaking movement of Russian Formalism and inventing modern criticism and literary studies. On Language & Poetry Three Essays By Lev Petrovich Yakubinsky, Michael Eskin Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. Copyright © 2018 Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-935830-51-1 CHAPTER 1 On the Sounds of Poetic Language "O zvukakh stikhotvornogo yazyka." Soborniki po teorii poeticheskogo yazyka [Essays on the Theory of Poetic Language], vol.1 (St. Petersburg, 1916), pp. 6-30. The manifestations of language must be classified according to our goals in employing the verbal means at our disposal in a given situation. If we employ these means solely for the practical purpose of communication, then we are dealing with the system of practical language (practical verbal thinking), where the linguistic means (sounds, morphological elements, etc.) don't possess independent value. But there are other language systems where practical considerations take a back seat, without completely disappearing, and words and meanings themselves acquire independent value. Contemporary linguistics focuses almost exclusively on practical language. The study of other language systems, however, is equally relevant. In this essay, I elaborate some of the psycho-phonetic features of the language system at work in the process of poetic creation. I conditionally call this system poetic language (poetic verbal thinking). * * * In practical verbal thinking, we don't focus on the sounds of words; we don't consciously pay attention to them, they don't possess independent value, merely serving communication. It is precisely this lack of conscious attention to sounds in practical language that explains why many slips of the tongue go unnoticed, and why we can easily get away with sloppy articulation, slurring endings or entire syllables — something students of acting in particular have to grapple with. There is yet another, more complex aspect to the phonetics of practical language, which Jan Baudouin de Courtenay calls the non-coincidence of our articulatory intent and its actual execution: it consists in our failure to articulate what we actually set out to articulate — as when, due to physiological conditions affecting our speech organs, we say 'l if e' instead of 'l iv e' (as in 'l iv e theater') without really noticing the difference between the voiced v and the voiceless f, which is possible only because we don't pay close attention to sounds in ordinary speech. In practical language, then, a word's semantic aspect — its meaning — takes precedence over its phonic aspect — its sound — which is perfectly understandable, since we pay attention to differences in pronunciation in ordinary speech mostly when these differences imply differences in meaning. When it comes to poetic language, the situation is reversed: we do become consciously aware of the material texture of words, we are enjoined to focus on their sounds above all. On this subject, testimonies provided by poets themselves based on self-observation go a long way. A poetic utterance's rhythmicality, for instance, bespeaks the conscious experiencing of sound in the process of poetic creation (poetic verbal thinking). As has often been remarked, rhythm in verse depends on the syllables' specific phonic make-up, for example on their consonant count. Consequently, our perception of and attention to rhythm in poetry is inseparable from our conscious awareness of its sound patterns. Phonic correspondences in verse (alliterations, assonances, rhymes, etc.) may or may not be intended by the poet; in the former case, we again witness a conscious focus on sounds in speech: rhyme, for one, would hardly make sense if our relation to sounds in poetic and practical verbal thinking, respectively, were the same. * * * In one of his letters, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's speaks precisely to this issue when he addresses Ivan Turgenev's criticism of the presumably "limping rhymes" in his (Tolstoy's) 1859 poem "John of Damascus": We still have to address Turgenev's accusation of my limping rhymes! Could it be that Turgenev belongs to the French school, which aims to satisfy the eye rather th