On The Essential Characteristics Of Wordsworth's Poetic Language

This thesis aims to approach Wordsworth's natural language with three distinctive characteristics: naturalness, universality and metaphoricality. Instead of confining only to the"language really spoken by men"as Wordsworth has famously emphasized many times in his Preface, this thesis sets out to offer a more comprehensive and systematic analysis of Wordsworth's poetic language by means of the three characteristics proposed.This thesis is divided into five parts: in the first part, the introduction will be made to Wordsworth as a poet and his views on poetic language; then past literatures on Wordsworth's diction in poetry will be reviewed; the central argument of this thesis will be made at the end of the Introduction part.Chapter One focuses on the naturalness of Wordsworth's poetic language. A comparison will be made between the poetic language, the everyday language and the language of prose. Combined with textual analysis and relevant literature reviews, this part points out that the naturalness of Wordsworthian natural language lies in its deriving from the simple and natural language of everyday use.In Chapter Two, the universality of Wordsworth's natural language will be elaborated. Wordsworth is trying to use a universal language to express the past and present humanity and this requires the poet to select and purify the everyday language before they finally enter into poetry and become a universal human language.The metaphoricality of Wordsworthian natural language will be elaborated in Chapter Three. The chapter begins with a comparative analysis between objectivism and subjectivism, and then the experientialist view will be proposed as a theoretical foundation for Wordsworth's use of his unique metaphors. Lakoff and Johnson's container metaphor will be generally introduced, together with textual analysis, to highlight the uniqueness of the Wordsworthian metaphor.Conclusion will be made to link the three distinctive characteristics of Wordsworth's poetic natural language and their interchange and inter-dependence will be pointed out. Behind the three characteristics lie the poet's intentions to construct in his poetry an ideal world where words and meanings, nature and mind, things and thoughts are one.