Implicit Cohesion And Its Functions In Imagist Poetry

Both explicit and implicit cohesion are two important approaches in formatting cohesion and coherence in a text. Halliday and Hasan made a detailed discussion on grammatical cohesive devices such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and other lexical cohesive devices including repetition, synonymy and collocation in their book Cohesion in English. Meanwhile, Halliday and Hasan admitted in this book that grammatical and lexical cohesive devices they proposed are not prerequisite in constructing cohesion and coherence in text. In other words, implicit cohesion is recognized by Halliday and Hasan. As an important component of modern poetry, Imagist poetry enjoyed its reputation and status by the distinctive writing style and artistic achievement and exerted great impact on latter poems. The existence of implicit cohesion and the study on implicit cohesion will blaze a new way in studying Imagist poems.This thesis makes a comparative study between Imagist poems and other modern American poems by way of quantitative analysis. It finds out that there is obvious and unique existence of implicit cohesion in Imagist poems and it tries to discuss the function of implicit cohesion in Imagist poems. This thesis hopes to serve as a modest spur to induce further research on implicit cohesion or other methods in the teaching and appreciation of Imagist poems.After comparative study, this thesis finds that context, metaphor, image and logical relation are more conspicuous in Imagist poems rather than other modern American poems. This finding indicates that the composition and expression of Imagist poems is more conservative and indirect than other poems. Readers need to ponder and imagine more on the lexical items to figure out the true intention of poets.