Palindrome

A palindrome is a word, phrase, line or whole text that reads the same from left to right and from right to left: "eye," "level," "Madam, I'm Adam." The palindrome belongs to the formal-experimental, combinatorial genres of verbal art, in which the artistic effect is achieved through the virtuoso overcoming of a rigid technical constraint — the reversibility of the letter sequence. The composition of palindromes demands exceptional linguistic inventiveness and a feeling for the sound-letter structure of the word. Historically palindromes have been known since antiquity and the Baroque, and in Ukrainian literature they were used by masters of formal experiment, notably Ivan Velychkovsky in the Baroque age. The palindrome demonstrates the playful, combinatorial potential of language and belongs to the domain of "poetry of form," curious and visual-verbal genres.