Abstract This paper presents a stylistic analysis of two poems of well-known poets of the English literature, namely; E.E. Cummings and the Irish noble laureate Seamus Heaney. The researcher's attempt here is to approach Cummings‘s poem ―maggie and milly and molly and may‖ and Heaney‘s ―A Kite for Aibhín‖ from the stylistics‘ point of view. The paper also analyzes the poems using the tools of linguistics with a view to make their meaning explicit. It is worth noting that stylistics as a scientific discipline is really beneficial to those who are teaching and studying English language and literature. No matter whether English is the native, second or the foreign language. Not only foreign students but also the speakers of the English language can benefit from stylistics. They can get linguistic beside literary competence. Nowadays, stylistics with its tools and methods of linguistics can help to a logical and scientific understanding of the literary texts based on linguistic evidence.

This article attempts to see, through the structural significances of poetic language, the nature of the split between linguistic description and literary interpretation. Rhythm is the most prominent means of relating form to content in poetic language. The first account of this prominence is seen through identifying its position in the two prosodic forms of metrical and non-metrical poetry. Foregrounding has been seen as a significant feature in literary creation. Following Bradford (1997) the analysis undertakes three stages of analysis as ‘discovery procedures’, ‘naturalization’, and ‘judgment’ (renamed in our work as ‘remarks’). The first level examines the degree of the tension between the two patterns. In the second level, i.e. naturalization, the analysis goes on turning the peculiar language of the poem into that of the ordinary, which means making sense of a text. This translation of the poetic language has been shown to be considerably rooted in elements of form in the cla...

Poetry, like our experiences, is intrinsically abstract and intricate with its oblique language and inventive structure. Sanctioning the fact that human experiences and emotions are inherently so complex that a plain and direct language will fail to articulate, the poet's use of a language flexible and inventive enough to capture the complexity and abstraction of those experiences becomes highly significant. Furthermore, the chief apparatus of creating meaning in a language is its lexicon. Poetry, as contrasted to prosaic expressions, acquires its distinctiveness and lucidity by the choice of unique lexical patterns by the poet. A text acquires a prosaic or a conversational tone according to the ratio between the lexical elements and the functional elements. Writers bank on the syntax and diction to build up the desired tone, temperament and background in a text as also to rouse the interest of the readers in the poetry. This paper makes a comparative study of the use of lexical density and sentence complexity as stylistic devices in the poetry of A. K. Ramanujan and Nissim Ezekiel.

In analysing a range of 20th century poems and excerpts, stylisticians and literary critics have individuated a number of linguistic and textual features which they relate – with various degrees of explicitness – to the complex notion of ‘difficulty’. While there is a fair amount of agreement in the set of phenomena identified, to the best of my knowledge these have never been analysed, grouped and classified from a linguistic and unified perspective. This is the chief aim of the present paper, in which I reconsider previously discussed poetic excerpts in order to derive a checklist of linguistic phenomena demanding further investigation and even future empirical testing. Another major aim is that of illustrating how widespread and problematic the use of ‘difficult’ and ‘difficulty’ is, often implying quite distinct senses. The meaning of this pair will be kept indeterminate throughout the whole paper, where it simply refers to the personal usage of the critic or stylistician at stake. At the end of the paper, by contrast, a clearer characterization will emerge in the light of the textual excerpts analysed: difficulty is regarded as a combination of semantic opacity and hypothesized processing effort at syntagmatic level. However, being part of a wider ongoing research project, a more satisfactory formulation is still to come. Finally, an additional outcome of the paper is that of adding some evidence to the study of poetic language by taking into account recent poetic developments that so far have been given little attention in stylistics.

A linguistic analysis of literature has caused debates among linguists and between linguists and literary critics. The debate among linguists occurs because they have different opinions regarding the nature of literary language, while the debate between linguists and literary scholars arises as literary scholars question the authority of linguistics to study literary writings. Therefore, in this paper I argue that the language of literature is similar to that of non-literary texts, and I also believe that because the centrality of language in literary writings, linguistics, as the study of language, has the authority to study literature. One linguistic approach to literature is stylistics, which studies the forms, functions, and meanings of literary language in a detailed and systematic way.

Since poetic text is completely detached from the external world, it creates a "context of situation" (Halliday, 1985) for itself through special patterning of its own lexis. This study investigates how the lexicalization strategies make the nature of poetic texts so distinctive from other modes of language. Among all linguistic elements illustrating special patterning in poetic texts, this study focuses on the way the field diversity leads the reader to negotiate a meaning which requires more processing time, effort and attention; consequently, rendering it more enjoyable in nature and hence of aesthetically higher value. The purpose is to investigate the relationship between "the higher degree of semantic field diversity compared with semantic field lexical density" in a poetic text and "the aesthetic effect" of that text. To achieve this goal, twenty poetic texts with an already-established literary and aesthetic value are analyzed in terms of lexica...