A Study Of The Linguistic Deviation In Hopkins’ S Poetry

The famous poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was living in nineteenth century, tried to be unique in poetic creation. He broke the traditional ways of poetic creation, which was popular at the end of the nineteenth century in British. The poetry of Hopkins is rich in musicality and innovative in meter. With his comprehension in religious, unique insight, and high degree of creative spirit, Hopkins has been transmitting complex and advancing spiritual strength in his poems. It is well-known that his poetry is obscure and difficult to understand. Although the number of his poems is not more than fifty, his status in English literature history is not affected at all. Being studied from various aspects and viewpoints, Hopkins has already become the focus of the contemporary literary critics.Linguistic deviation is one of the main features of Hopkins poetic language. And the linguistic deviation phenomenon in poetry, which involves the deviation of more frequent and bizarre, is different from other styles. Linguistic deviation has made a great contribution to the poetry. Therefore, this thesis tries to analyze Hopkins’ s poems from the perspective of linguistic deviation. It first introduces the background and experience of Hopkins, and then summarizes the researches about his poems both abroad and at home. Furthermore, this thesis discusses Hopkins’ s poetry from three levels, namely, graphological, semantic and lexical deviations which are based on the linguistic deviation theories of Geoffrey N. Leech. Finally, selected poems with distinctive features are analyzed in detail, the themes of which range from two of Hopkins’ s major themes, namely nature and religious. These selected poems are not very frequently touched upon in previous studies.By analyzing, this thesis gets the following conclusion: graphologically, the linguistic deviations in his poetry is mainly reflected in the format of text, punctuation and capitalization and decapitalization, and the graphological deviation is an important device used by the poet to imply some specific information and highlighting the theme of his poetry; semantically, Hopkins adopts lots of rhetoric and symbolizations which make his poems show vivid pictures and arouse readers’ emotion effectively; lexically, he likes to invent new words which makes his poems difficult to understand, and these lexical deviations help the poet express his views on nature and religious and arouse readers’ interests with effect. All the usages of linguistic deviations in Hopkins’ s poem are the reasons why his poems are difficult to understand. At the same time they also play an important role in highlighting the theme of his poetry. So in order to appreciate his poetry clearly and thoroughly, one should make clear the implied meanings under the linguistic deviations firstly.This thesis offers a new angle for the critics who are interested in Hopkins and his poems. It is useful both for the linguistic and idealistic study of his poems. However, it is only a beginning. It needs a further study by the author and anyone who is also interested in this topic.