A Functional Stylistic Analysis Of John Keats's Poetry

John Keats is one of the most important British poets in the Romantic period; his poems perfectly capture the characteristics of Western Romantic poetry. Throughout Keats's poetry, it can be found that Keats has his unique artistic orientation of poetry, mainly reflected in meaning, melody, language and so on. Many scholars have studied Keats's poetry from his ideas, writing style and other aspects. However, there are few functional stylistic studies made of his poetry; therefore, this paper attempts to analyze Keats's poetry from the perspective of functional stylistics.Stylistic study has a long history, but since it came into being, controversial problems arise and it becomes a big and hot issue. Different scholars have different views on stylistic study. Functional stylistics is one school of stylistics, which is mainly developed from Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics. In 1969, Halliday read his article Language Functions and Literary Style in the Symposium on Literary Style, held in Italy. It marked the birth of Functional stylistics. Since then, Functional stylistics gets a lot of attention constantly and continues to be applied into the practice of text analysis by scholars. Now functional stylistics is getting more and more mature and gradually becomes the most vital and vigorous representative in stylistic study.Halliday argues that language has three functions, i.e., ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Ideational function refers to the function that the speaker is treated as an observer. It is mainly used to express the speaker's experience in the actual and the inner world and it also used to show various logical relationships among different things. The former includes processes, participants, and circumstances; the latter consists of such relations as coordination, subordination, conjunction, etc. Interpersonal function refers to the function that the speaker is treated as an intruder. It means people use language to communicate with other people, to set up and maintain social relations, to express his attitudes or emotions, to influence their attitudes or behavior, and so on. Textual function refers to the function as organizer. It is mainly used to organize the previous two functions, ideational function and interpersonal function. It can enable the addresser to construct text suitable to the situation on the one hand, and on the other hand, it also can enable the addressee to distinguish coherent texts from disorganized sentence groups. These three functions are called the metafunctions of language. Ideational function is mainly reflected by transitivity system, voice system and polarity. Interpersonal function is mainly reflected by mood system, modality, and tense system. Textual function is mainly reflected by thematic structure, information structure and cohesion. This paper mainly adopts transitivity system, mood system, and thematic structure as the theory framework of the text analysis. Corresponding with the three metafunctions of language, Halliday summarizes three constituents of situational context, i.e., field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse. Restricted by the three constituents of situational context, discourse is regarded as the semantic unit composed by ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning.This thesis begins with the introduction of Halliday's functional stylistics theory, mainly three metafunctions: ideational function, interpersonal function, and textual function. Then ten poems by Keats are chosen as texts for analysis, including six odes and four sonnets. These ten poems are mainly analyzed from the perspective of transitivity system, mood system, and thematic structure, and with the association of context in the evaluation of the poems. The purpose of analyzing Keats's poems through Halliday's functional stylistics is to find language features of Keats's poems and make further study. The analysis can help readers understand Keats's poems from a brand-new perspective.The findings indicate that Keats's poetry have their comparatively distinctive features in language use. From the perspective of ideational function, the use of material processes, relational processes and mental processes contributes greatly to the realization of the general theme of the poetry. Material processes are in the dominant position and are used to describe the doings and happenings in both the real world and the imagined world; relational processes rank the second and are used to contrast the harsh reality and the beautiful imagined world; mental processes follow relational processes in number and are employed by the poet to express his feelings. From the perspective of interpersonal function, declarative clause is used to offer information in the poetry; that is, to express the general theme of the poetry. Different from other literary works, the simple present tense is used to express the poet's feelings or narrate something. From the perspective of textual function, the domination of simple theme indicates that language in the poetry is simple and concise, and the fact that unmarked theme outnumbers the marked theme shows that language in the poetry is not so deviated.Through the analysis of the ten poems, it is proved that functional stylistics is a very operational and practical stylistic theory of analysis. On the one hand, it is able to provide objective standards for the analysis of poetry and help reader get subjective understanding of poetry based on objective criteria, which reflect the functional stylistics'practical and theoretical value, and promote the application of linguistic theory to the poetry study; on the other hand, it is useful for poetry teaching, providing a new means of teaching.