| Regarded as the pioneer of experimental poetry, E. E. Cummings’s unconventionaltreatment of poetic language has reached unprecedented heights, and has intrigued andbaffled numerous scholars, researches and readers alike. Nevertheless, the very existenceof poetry, like other types of literary texts, demonstrates the significance and value ofinterpretation and exploration. The eccentric use of language by E. E. Cummings should beattributed to his double identity as both a poet and a painter. He was deeply influenced bythe contemporary European visual art, especially Cubism. Most poems he composed are aperfect blend of the art of painting technique and poetry creation so that they are paintingsin poetry and poetry in paintings. Among them, linguistic deviation is one of the means ofrealizing the foregrounding and achieving the aesthetic value.Chronologically, the thesis begins with a brief introduction on E. E. Cummings’s early lifeand later experiences, and continues with a review on the study of stylistics and E. E.Cummings’s poetry from the perspectives of literary criticism and linguistics. Furthermore,the thesis discusses the uniqueness of the poetic language and three dimensions oflinguistic deviations as the means of achieving foregrounding in E. E. Cummings’s poetry,namely graphological, lexical and semantic deviations based on the linguistic deviationtheories of Geoffrey N. Leech with reference to Yu Xueyong’s three-dimensional modeland framework for achieving foregrounding. Finally, selected poems with distinctivefeatures are analyzed in detail, the themes of which range from four of Cummings’s majorthemes, namely love, life, nature and death. The attempt to analyze the stylistic features ofsymbolic poetry demonstrates the complementation of linguistics and literature as well asthe interaction between art and aesthetics, listening to the voice echoing from the depth ofpoet’s heart and providing reference to the interpretation and appreciation of poetry ifpossible. |
PDF Full Text Request