Processing of literary texts is often seen as difficult, but also worth the effort as a potentially
rich and engaging source of relevant language data from which to learn. The advocate of
stylistics as a means to develop language proficiency is committed to the value of conscious
attention to details of linguistic features ‘foregrounded’ in a text, whether through ‘deviance’
of some kind, or simply as the consequence of repetitions, parallelism or other such salient
patternings seen to contribute significantly to meaning. The metalinguistic reflection and
discussion promoted by stylistic approaches in the processing of literary texts especially,
poetry, are held to contribute to deeper processing, understanding, memorability and
development of the additional language in use. Stylistic approach to literary texts does not
only involve linguistic textual analysis but also encourages readers to interact with textual
structure to infer meaning (Tutaş, 2006). This paper focuses on the relevance of stylistics
approach for the analysis of poems in Teaching English as a Foreign Language context.
Since a poem veils things more than what it reveals, the emphasis on the aesthetics of
language and the use of different techniques in poetry such as repetition, meter and
rhyme are what commonly distinguish poetry from other literary works. It is this
defamiliarizing of language that attracts researchers to investigate it more than any other
literary works. The mystery of a poem should be brought out deeply and clearly through
its structural and contextual features. To do this, formalist principles are applied to tease
out the subtle and implicit meaning and message of a poem. The author has thus, in this
study, selected Walt Whitman’s poem “One’s Self I Sing” as the subject of this study and
has chosen the linguistic approach to examine the stylistic features in this poem and also
to show that formalist approach is suitable to analyze Whitman’s poetry since Whitman
the poet was the one who tried to free poetry from its traditional and conventional metrical
system and urged the poets to write in a style that was appropriate to their content. |
