Language Arts In New Year Letter: A Stylistic Approach

As one of the greatest poets and the leader of the “Auden Generation” in the1930s, W.H.Auden was famous for his versatile writing styles and ideas. As a workwritten in the1940th, when he left England for America and began his journey ofpursuit of helping people search for their inner self, New Year Letter was amasterpiece surely worthy of researching to get a better understanding of the authorand his language art. On one hand, after exploring and imitating of other great poetsbefore or in his times, the writing styles and language skills of Auden were muchmore mature than early times, he was capable of using different poetic forms as heliked to transfer any ideas he would like to convey. On the other hand, affected by thenumerous great works he was reading and the change of political world, his points ofview on various issues were also more mature than before and the mix of other greatmen’s opinions would give an overall analysis of each topic. This paper aims toexplore the integration of Auden’s mature language skills and his versatile themes toshow the readers how did he build a bridge for communication between himself andhis readers so as to achieve his goal of guiding readers to begin their journey ofexamining themselves and making their own choices.Based on Leech’s linguistic theories on poetry, majorly stylistic theories, thisresearch explores this typical work of the particular time from the aspects of both itsform and content, paying great attention to the combination of the two. In the firstchapter of this paper, it introduces the author and this poem together with the researchsignificance and research methodology. For chapter two, it explores the ordinarinessof the language and its parabolic didacticism to show the poet’s attitude toward poetry,which is to inspire readers’ self-exploration and self-choosing through presenting thecomplex and ambivalent world in an objective aspect. As to chapter three, it analyzesthe detailed usage of stylistic theories of foregrounding, which includes deviation andparallelism. Each of them contains lexical deviation, grammatical deviation, semanticdeviation, phonological parallelism, syntactic deviation respectively. Besides, it alsodiscusses figurative language appeared in this poem, such as metaphor,personification, transferred epithet and so on. Through this chapter, the author’slanguage skills of attracting readers’ attention, evoking readers to think deeply and leading in the themes to be revealed could be seen clearly. Chapter four analyzeslanguage arts and thematic exploration, reflecting the close relationship betweenlanguage usage and thematic expression. The author presents readers the ambivalentrelationship between art and life, evil and sin, free will and necessity to lead people tostep on the road of searching for themselves and choosing what they really wantthrough their own experience. The last chapter makes a conclusion on what have beendiscussed in former four chapters, providing an overall perspective on Auden’s effortsof shortening the distance between him and readers, transferring what the authorwanted to convey in a secret way. Finally, it displays Auden’s ultimate goal ofshowing a real and objective world to readers to inspire readers to make a changeafter self-exploration.