The Informational Temperature of the Text

Concrete poetry has been accused of impoverishing language. This rebuke has often been made in almost apocalyptic terms, with some accusers speaking of willful castration, and others going so far as to threaten launchers of concrete poetry with a stay in Dante's Hell. All artistic discipline implies a voluntary limitation of means. In poetry this can be seen in terza rima of Dante, or, even more pronouncedly, in rigorous melopoeic texture of Arnaut Daniel's sestinas. In both examples, expressional form chosen drastically limits poets' linguistic options. But without delving further into such generic considerations, we will attempt to develop our discussion in objective field of modern aesthetic analysis. Information theory provides us with precise tools, free of visceral emotional appeals. In this way we can attempt to identify straightforwardly linguistic and aesthetic characteristics which gave rise to aforementioned censure, and proceed to locate them and poetic object which they distinguish in a wider process of formal evolution, as well as in cultural context from which they derive their necessity and their justification. Max Bense in his Theorie der Texte (1962) introduced, for aesthetic and literary purposes, B. Mandelbrot's theorem on informational temperature of a text.' If we take 1 as highest limit of a text's informational temperature, that temperature, in a given text, will be higher nearer it is to 1. In such cases, for Mandelbrot the available words are 'well employed,' even words being utilized with appreciable frequencies. Low temperature, on other hand, means that words are 'badly employed,' words being extremely rare (p. 30). Of first case, Mandelbrot, basing himself on Zipf (1949), gives James Joyce, whose

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