Abstract
The five poems analysed in this chapter are by Pound, Stein, Howe and Bernstein, and go further in the pursuit of difficulty: typical RIDs include admissions of helplessness, acknowledgments of iconic chaos or nonsensicality, very erratic interpretations. Besides intensifying some of the challenges common in the typology of transient difficulty, they undermine interpretability itself by renouncing or deconstructing textual schemas. This shows in a systematic deployment of discourse and syntax LIDs, with a loss of importance of lexical and semantic LIDs: this is explained by the fact that in this typology language is neither a vessel for plain communication (like in accessible poems) nor for oblique communication (like in transient difficult poems); by contrast, language is generally used against or irrespective of its communicative function.
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Castiglione, D. (2019). Permanent Difficulty: Against Thematic Significance. In: Difficulty in Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1_8
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