depth and surface grammars

An early poetry teacher of mine insisted that poems are collections of complete, grammatically correct sentences. Poets who failed to apply the basic rules of grammar to their poems did not write poems but rather littered the page with incoherent collections of words and phrases masquerading as poetry.

This view left a huge impression on me. Whenever I’m tempted to use mere words or phrases instead of complete sentences, I feel like a moral and poetic failure. Whether or not I am one or both of these things, however, surely doesn't boil down to whether or not I’ve purged myself of the temptation to occaisionally write in non-sentences.

So I’ve been plotting a revolution against this teacher’s perspective for quite some time. What follows is a back-of-the-envelope sketch of my strategy to date.

I can imagine Wittgenstein saying something like the following:

If we permit the deep grammar of our form of life (language) to fully shape our speech, then we will address only the world, its problems, its states of affairs, etc. our speech will be essentially practical. If and when our speech is not practical, as in religious language or poetry, we will not be saying anything per se, in the sense of direct communication – rather, in these cases, we will use language for an entirely different end: to elevate the spirit, so to speak.

Now I’d go on to say:

Such extra-ordinary uses of language will rupture the deep grammar of our form of life in a profound way. Something about the way the words are gathered together, juxtaposed, and so on, will violate the rules governing how words must, in our language, be combined in order to “make sense”. Moreover, while profound, this violation may be equally subtle and therefore nearly impossible to detect (i.e., we might construct a poem of sentences all of which meet the minimum criteria required to be considered reasonably grammatically correct).

But does a break with deep grammar somehow license a break with “surface” grammar?

It may, I think, only if the two grammars are conceived as occupying opposite ends of a continuum of grammars. My job, then, to complete my revolution, would be to deconstruct the opposition between what I’ve provisionally called grammars of “depth” and grammars of “surface”.