A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis Of Yeats's Arcane Poems

By a cognitive stylistic analysis of Yeats's poems from three perspectives (figures and grounds, cognitive deixis and conceptual metaphor), the thesis intends to demonstrate that a cognitive stylistic analysis of poems is an accessible and valuable way to appreciate poems.Firstly, we should know poems are uses of language, and the uses of language are meant to be interpreted as having some relevance to human affairs. For a long time, people have different ways to interpret poems, in which literary criticism is always playing an important role. Critics always focus on the minutiae of disagreement and they pay more attention to deviance. Unfortunately, they emphasize this difference, ambiguity, ambivalence and irresolution to a disproportionate extent. Therefore, criticism alone cannot provide a systematic way in interpreting poems. Secondly, since stylistics is the very study of the use of language in literature, and this study now turns more on cognitive respects. So cognitive poetics, or cognitive stylistics, as one of the latest branch of cognitive linguistics, can offer a scientific means of discussing interpretation whether it is an authorly version of the world or a readerly account, and how those interpretations are made manifest in textuality. It is, in fact, an application of cognitive linguistics to poetic reading. Thirdly, Yeats, as one of the greatest poets in the world literature, created many well-known works, which cover Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Symbolism and Modernism. And particularly, his later poems of Symbolism, are of typical idiosyncratic characters. His magical and intellectual symbols made his poems full of arcane images, by which many people are fascinated.Given the above mentioned thoughts, the thesis tentatively interprets three Yeats's arcane poems from the view of cognitive stylistics. Through these interpretations, the thesis tries to conclude that Yeats's poetic use of language in his poems are nothing more than the unconventional use of common language, and the images in his poems are, in fact, his own experiencing of human and human history, with which he endues them mystical features with his personal and idiosyncratic insight.