Muldoon is not talking here just about meaning, but about the whole creative process. His words register the distinction between what Kristeva calls the symbolic or thetic aspects of poetic language (‘discovering the extent of limits, the confinement, the controlling of readings’) and their semiotic source, the poet ‘opening himself, or herself to the floodgates’. The latter point, Kristeva implies, is where rhyme comes in: ‘this experience of the semiotic chora in language produces poetry. It can be considered as the source of all stylistic effort, the modifying of banal, logical order by linguistic distortions such as metaphor, metonymy, musicality’.

Rhyme is certainly part of poetry's ‘musicality’. But music itself involves intellectual awareness and command as well as semiotic energies:

Poetry's musical dimension is inseparable from its discursive potential: ‘No text, no matter how “musicalized”, is devoid of meaning or signification; on the contrary, musicalization pluralizes meanings’. W.K. Wimsatt points out that the musical element of poetry in isolation ‘has little if any aesthetic value’, while the varied degrees and kinds of meaning carried by the rhyme words are crucial: ‘verse in general, and more particularly rhyme, make their special contribution to poetic structure in virtue of a studiously and accurately semantic character. They impose upon the logical pattern of expressed argument a kind of fixative counterpattern of alogical implication.’