The reader interested in convening Paterson’s poems and theory might push off from his remarks in part 1, titled “Lyric,” on contranyms, or what he knows as “auto-antonyms such as ‘cleave,’” whose contrary meanings’ coincidence with their phonological identity “will inevitably leave, in the mouth of the English speaker, the strange aftertaste of paradox.” As it happens, Paterson is one of several poets in the past couple of decades to have opened up this compact word. Unlike many of its cousins–“pall,” for instance, and “fast”–“cleave” has contrary senses (“to hold” and “to cut”) that come from separate etyms. It is possible, however, that all words began as “enantiosemes” (to borrow Roland Barthes’s coinage) that harbored their antitheses at the outset and depended on context to determine their nonce meanings.
Well, good luck with that, folks. If that's your cup of tea, there's a whole potful for you to savor.
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