Sound and death in John Haines's poetry

ELS Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities

Stylistics analysis gives an impartial and scientific opinion based on solid quantifiable data and methodical application. It makes use of specific technical vocabulary and notions derived from linguistics. The four layers of language aspects that can be studied stylistically are phonology, graphology, grammar, and semantics. The purpose of this research is to examine the stylistic features of Robert Frost's poem "An Old Man’s Winter Night" through the lens of stylistic analysis. The structure and style of Robert Frost's writing, as well as his subjects, viewpoints, and themes are all examined in this study. Each level has been thoroughly investigated, with attention paid to the phonetic, phonological, graphitic, semantic, and grammatical aspects of language choice. This research is descriptive qualitative with content analysis approach. To attain the purpose, the data is analysed through stylistics devices. Frost employed a variety of stylistic elements to emphasi...

1979

Perhaps it is a truism that poetry has always been about poetry and its powers: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." In fiction, this self-reflexive quality also developed early: Don Quijote is as much about the writing and reading of literature as it is about the adventures of someone named Don Quijote. Romanticism, of course, brought new self-consciousness to both forms, a self-consciousness based on inquiries into the nature of the poet's imagination. Modern verse and fiction both, however, have subtly altered this focus . The interest of contemporary self-reflexive literature seems to be less in its pre-textual genesis than in its own textual processes. The author's text is seen as activated by the reader who therefore actually partakes of the creative role of the writer by his own act of making meaning of the perception of black marks on white paper. Texts which reveal this modern sort of textual interest in the processes of reading and writing are as frequent in Canadian poetry as in any other, and awareness of this fact might serve to help both in the interpretation of individual enigmatic poems, and in the identifying of structural patterns, as opposed to thematic ones, in our literature. Indeed, even if we begin with the poems of a poet as technically "unmodern" as E.J. Pratt we find many which are self-conscious about language, about its powers and its relation to imagination. As the title of his poem, "Towards the Last Spike" (emphasis mine) suggests, it is the process of creating lines of communication-be they lines of a railway or of a poem-that interests Pratt. Macdonald, the orator-visionary of the poem, aware of the power of verbal connotation, locks in battle with Blake, with his language of "facts" and "principles," with the " balance of his mind. " 1 At first Sir John is in danger of losing: "Passion became displaced by argument" (p. 48); but he fights on, knowing that this is a "battle of ideas and words" (p. Sl) and that the orator, like the poet, can sway, can play with the multiple connotations of those words.

International Journal of English Linguistics, 2019

The purpose of this study is to investigate the style of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. A lot of work has been done on this poem in the domain of literary criticism but very little or almost no comprehensive research has been conducted yet, to find out the stylistic features. So, the present study focuses on the use of stylistic devices. Each level has been studied deeply and comprehensively, by looking at the choice of language at phonetic, phonological, graphitic, semantic and grammatical levels. It has been concluded that Frost used a number of stylistic devices including cacophony, alliteration, assonance, tone modulation, denotation, connotation, metaphor, personification, symbolism, and imagery to highlight the idea of dismay and death. The repetition of certain words and choice of mental process verbs like think, see, know, and watch leave a significant effect on the mind of readers. It has also been found that, Frost tried to show the responsibil...

In this writer’s opinion, Dylan Thomas was one of the greatest English language poets of the twentieth-century. This essay conducts a close reading of Thomas’s superb poem ‘A Winter’s Tale’ in order to establish yet another view as to the factors that combine to form what we understand as being poetry. These reflections upon the question ‘what is poetry?’ are focused upon two primary strands referred to as: reception (how the poem sounds) and perception (what the poem says). ‘Reception’, ideally obtained through the ears rather than the eyes, relies upon qualities of sound; through sound-based choices of word selection, stress, metre, rhythm, rhyme - and the structural techniques and effects that can be grouped under the heading: ‘phonemic patterns’; while ‘perception’ depends, in addition, upon the poet’s manipulation of reader emotions and comprehension through language choices, narrative movements, the use of imagery, metaphor, allegory, rhetoric, syntax and the degree and quality of meaning intended. Structure and poetic mechanisms represent the contrivances and processes used to twine and interlace these two strands so as to create whatever effects are intended or suggested by the poet - and can thus be thought of as features which will distinguish a piece as a poem in contrast to other forms of written or oral communication. All somewhat prolix; so here’s a more summative determination. A successful poem is a method of patterned, concise, memorable and rewarding expression that satisfies a recipient’s desire for enthusiastic understanding by involving his or her emotions. How? Initially, and above all, by striving to achieve a degree of combined insight and aural appreciation that provokes those emotional or considered reactions that trigger an emphatic admiring ‘yes’. Next, by poetically addressing those issues and reflections within the boundless panoply of human experience so that at least some people will be captivated by the handling of and response to the subject matter. Then, there is language and musicality; the selection of each word so that how it sounds (resonates, echoes, jangles, chimes, rhymes, whispers, rings et al), alone and with its surrounding cohorts, is deemed to be equally as vital as what it may mean. And the language choices themselves: to be as perfect a selection as possible in order to convey successfully the emotions and imagery intended by the poet - so that the word-choice qualities of suggestion, description, undertone, inference and nuance are faultless. Finally, there are the techniques and devices peculiar to poetry: rhythm, metre, phonemic patterns and an array of mechanisms calculated to convey mood and meaning.

Poetry about the Arctic and in particular the prospects of finding a northwest passage through the archipelago of arctic North America is a line of aft that has developed with many perforations from the type of Thomas James's expedition under Charles I in the early 1630s up to the end of the twentieth century and the onset of environmental apocalypse. This paper brings under discussion for the first time the poetry written by explorers and by Canadian poets in order to study responses to remote landscapes and events in them.

The essay follows a discontinuous, perforated path through 150 years of poetry in English written in or about the North American Arctic.

1982

James Welch\u27s combining of poetry and prose has given him a unique language with which to record his impression of life. In addition, welch has an excellent sense of reality that gives life to his writing. His rendition of lonely rural Montana is valid for much of interior America, and he is a master at tracing the implications of life in similar situations for all people who live with distance and harshness. one of the qualities I respect most about Riding the Earthboy 40, Winter in the Blood, and The Death of Jim Loney is that they communicate movingly about a dark situation without apologizing, or lapsing into what James Welch has termed “an easy romanticism.” The writing has a gritty, hard quality tempered by the use of a sophisticated, ready humor that pops up to entertain as well as teach. In his essay “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James said “A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: which is greater or less according to the intensity of ...

The Dalhousie Review, 2010

16th International Conference on Music Analysis and Theory. Dichotomous Paths and Clashes: Complexities and Multiplicities in Music Analysis and Theory, 2019

In my master's thesis, my aim was to examine two examples of musical settings of Robert Frost's poetry. My intention has been to analyze a particular problematization of the esthetic relationship between the instance that produces meaning (first of all the poet, but also the first-person narrator-in this case the composer and then the performers, who actually carry out the elocutionary act), and the instance that receives it (the reader or the spectator, more generally the public). This problematization is caused by a complication entailed by the musical transposition itself, as regards the means by which the artistic object in question proves to be remarkable, not only esthetically, but also semantically (examples, respectively, could be alliteration and metaphor). The analyzed works are Three Poems of Robert Frost by Elliott Carter and Frostiana: Seven Country Songs by Randall Thompson. The selection process has followed a few indicative criteria: in particular, Thompson's work is relevant because it constitutes the only case where the poet himself expressed his approval of the musical settings of his poems; and I chose Carter's work because, though its composition dates roughly back to the same period of Frostiana, its formal characteristics are completely different.

2019

Linguistic studies have taken such rapid strides in recent years that the range is baffling to the innocent and amazingly delightful to the linguistics-oriented. Applied linguistics is concerned with many fields and subjects on planet earth and possibly beyond that. A piece of literature largely depends on thought and style. This poem is categorized as a Pastoral poem, “winter” being the feature that makes the poem a pastoral poem. Shakespeare who is popularly known for his love sonnets deviated and delved into pastoral poetry describing the harshness of winter and the activities carried out by the people during winter. The entire poem can be anlysed using the theory of pragmatics to see if it follows the four Gricean maxims. The Gricean maxims were posited by Paul Grice as cooperative principles that help in explaining the links utterances have in a speech community. This analysis justifies the claim that stylistics is a linguistic study in that the features of language description...