It is argued here that the cognitive pragmatics approach to poetic effects provided by relevance theory, based on the notion of weak implicature, provides a sounder basis for the description and explanation of poetic/literary communication than previous attempts to do so in terms of text-internal linguistic properties or sociocultural phenomena. An illustration is provided of how poetic effects may be achieved through utterances containing epizeuxis and metaphor. Particular emphasis is given to an analysis of emotion and the communication of nonpropositional affective effects in poetic epizeuxis and poetic metaphor. (Copyright 1993, Sociological Abstracts, inc., all rights reserved.) (LLBA 1993, vol. 27, n. 1)