meaning. Once having selected a word, the poet then becomes aware of
interesting semantic relationships with others in the poem. After select-
ing the word for its rhyme, the poet then has to construct meaningful
sentences, images, and metaphors around it. Through such entangling,
the physical sound, or even typed appearance, of words (which we
defined as “hardware”) can influence the poem’s “software” of gram-
mar, syntax, metaphor, and argument.
Poets also entangle language in other ways. Logical paradoxes and
puns engage words in multiple levels, as when John Donne writes, “And
death shall be nor more, Death, thou shalt die,” joining “death” and
“die” in a paradox involving their mutual cancellation. Similarly, when
in “A Hymne to God the Father” Donne puns on his own name, telling
God, “When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For, I have more,” he
uses the low-level sonic similarity of his name to a common English
verb to make the large theological point of his refrain. Far more than fic-
tion writers, poets use words on multiple levels. In the process, they
engage multiple areas of the reader’s brain, activating not only their left
and right hemispheres, as we’ve seen, but mixing thought and feeling by
activating the amygdala, where emotional memory is stored.
The formal and metrical rules of poetry also make it more memo-
rable. To borrow a term from information theory, they increase the
“redundancy” of the language system they create. Redundancy enables
codes to overcome noise and randomness as they transmit meaning from
sender to receiver. All types of human language employ such devices for
reducing noise. Redundancy also plays a vital role in enabling various
living and artificial systems to become complex. It does this, according
to Campbell, by
making probabilities unequal, instead of smoothing them out evenly across
the whole range of possibilities. It means that the parts of a system are not
wholly independent of one another, but are linked statistically, in a pattern
of possibilities. Redundancy in a message system holds information in a
loose balance between total constraint and total freedom.Unfortunately, words like “rules” and “constraints” have a bad odor in
the modern era, as they are mistakenly conflated with restrictive social
codes and laws imposed by authoritarian governments. They are also
conflated with the clockwork order of Newton’s scheme, against which
so many modern artists have rebelled.
Modern writers and critics are right to believe that the constraints of
language inhibit freedom. After all, a key purpose of rules is to limit
The Enchanted Loom: A New Paradigm for Literature 159