exhaustively empiricist

The Russian Formalists were at their best in their earlier, relatively informal texts: [Roman] Jakobson’s “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” for example, written in 1931 in response to Mayakovsky’s suicide, is surely one of the most profound texts ever written on how poetic strength can be dissipated and ultimately end in self-destruction. And Viktor Shklovsky’s famous discussion of ostranenie (making strange) and faktura (density) have become classics. Later Formalist works like Jakobson’s exhaustive analysis of the two versions of Yeats’ “The Sorrow of Love” (see “Linguistics and Poetics”) are perhaps less suggestive because they are exhaustively empiricist, the study counting such things as every instance of the article “the” and so on. Literary criticism, I would posit, will never be an exact science, and Jakobson was at his best when he did not try to give an exhaustive account of every part of speech or syllable count in a given poem.

—Marjorie Perloff, Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics (U. of Chicago Press, 2021)