A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis Of Dylan Thomas's Poems

This thesis analyses the Welsh genius poet Dylan Thomas's poems from threeperspectives (figure and ground, script and schema, conceptual metaphor). The methodologyadopted in this thesis is the combination of theoretical elaboration and case studies. DylanThomas was influenced by French surrealism, Yeats, Anglo-American Imagism and all theseform his personal styles in the poetic creation. The bold and novel deviations, unpredictableimages and the unique arrangements of phonological rhythm in his poems convey his specialexperience as a talented poet. People can perceive his poetry directly just as they smell thefragrance of rose. However, these characters also cause disturbance when readers understandand appreciate his poems. How to understand the deeper ideas in Thomas's poems andappreciate those vertiginous metaphors becomes the target that many researchers assiduouslyseek for. In recent years, the rapid development of cognitive poetics brings dawn to therealization of this target.In current studies of cognitive poetics, scholars borrow the fruit of cognitive science andapply relevant theories to interpret literary texts. They mainly concern readers'intellectualoperation or cognitive mechanism. The major cognitive methods include figure and ground,script and schema, texts world, discourse world, prototype theory, cognitive grammar, mentalspace, conceptual metaphor and other theories, which are used to interpret and understandliterary text.In the first chapter, the author introduces relevant theories of cognitive poetics,meanwhile accounts for Dylan Thomas's life history and his works. In the second chapter, thewriter mainly discusses the stylistic deviation of"Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"under the direction of figure and ground theories and analyses the special meaning of someprepositional phrases with the guidance of image schema theories. In the third chapter, thewriter analyses Dylan Thomas's another representative poem---"The Force that through theGreen Fuse Drives the Flower."According to script and schema theory, people form different image schemata in their minds by their experiences. In the poem"The Force that through theGreen Fuse Drives the Flower,"the vivid images, unique symbols and other literary effectsare produced by breaking the original image schemata that exist in readers'minds, which isalso the reason why Dylan Thomas's poems are difficult to understand. In the fourth chapter,the poet makes an analysis to Dylan Thomas's two poems:"The Poems in October"and"ARefusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London"from the perspective ofconceptual metaphor. Since Lakoff & Johnson (1980)began to discuss conceptual metaphor,people have realized that metaphor is not just a matter of language but is about thought andreason. Metaphor is a mapping from one conceptual domain to another conceptual domain,that is, from the source domain to target domain. In this chapter, the writer firstly introducesthe operating mechanism of conceptual metaphor and then analyses Dylan Thomas's twopoems on a deeper level. In the conclusion part, the writer concludes that the three cognitivemethods are complimentary to each other and they are the most effective ways to analyzeDylan Thomas's irrational poems, since the three methods all concern how readers'minds runwhen they read the text. With the help of the three methods, researchers can get into the heartof Dylan's poems and appreciate the true meaning and beauty of his poems more easily.