What Makes Poems Poetic?
Poems are different from other kinds of text.There are things about them that make some people hold them in especially high regard, by comparison with all other kinds of texts equally aimed at a non-specialist audience.There are things about them, also that make a lot of other people shun them like the plague, by comparison with all other kinds of non-specialist text.Are they the same things in both cases? For some time I have been trying to specify some of the stylistic features or resources in poems that seem especially instrumental in causing readers to feel moved, ”immersed”, or engaged — features that might lie at the heart of literariness or ”poeticality” or literary creativity.One of these is lexical repetition, echo, and reformulation — where I am trying to develop a model that will distinguish productive and immersive repetition from the many kinds of lexical repetition that are judged to be boring or pointless or unpoetic.I will discuss these issues by looking at a few modem or contemporary poems by Wallace Stevens, Michael Longley, Kathleen Jamie, and Jo Shapcott.There should be some implications for the teaching of English to advanced or high-proficiency learners —e.g., the kind of student of English who can cope with poetry.
poems poeticality lexical repetition sample texts
Michael Toolan
University of Birmingham
国内会议
重庆
英文
17-29
2014-10-16（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）