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BarbaraHermstein
Smith
I Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago, 1968), esp. pp.
14-25.
2 Since the term context has been acquiring increased currencyin contemporary
aesthetics and linguistics,I should point out that it is not my intention here to
quarrel with or qualify the sense it bears for other theorists. It might have been
better to discover or devise another term altogether for what I am here defining
and later elaborating,but the alternativesthat presented themselvesseemed just as
likely to create comparable confusions,and I confess to a temperamental loathing
of neologisms. It should also be noted that, in proposing that we view the context
of an utterance not merelyas its physical settingbut as the totalityof its determin-
ants, I am not so much broadening the ordinaryreferenceof the term as affirming
the existence and significanceof a particular relation, namely causality, between a
verbal event and the universe in which it occurs. Defined in termsof that relation-
ship, the "context" of an utterance inevitably refersto somethingmore extensive
than what the common use of the term suggests,but also somethingmore particular.
II
3 I have considered the matter elsewhere: see "The New Imagism," Midway
(Winter, 1969), pp. 27-44.
BENNINGTON COLLEGE