Stylistics and Linguistic Variation in Poetry

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the use of linguistic variation in poetry and demonstrate the usefulness of stylistic analysis in investigating the nature and potential effects of such variation in a particular poem. The text I analyze in detail is “Poet for Our Times” by Carol Ann Duffy, which was first published in 1990. In the rest of this section, I provide a brief overview of the stylistics literature on style variation in poetry. I then go on to introduce Duffy’s poem and conduct a systematic linguistic analysis. My aims are (1) to show how the poem conveys the impression of different language varieties and (2) to explain some of the potential effects of the text as a whole. My choice of a contemporary poem for an investigation of stylistic variation is not surprising, given that the twentieth century saw a considerable rise in the poetic use of a range of language varieties not traditionally associated with poetry, including colloquial, conversational language. This tendency often goes hand in hand with the adoption of imaginary poetic voices, clearly separate from that of the author (Leech 1969, 49; Jeffries 1993, 31-32). The canon of English poetry does, of course, include many earlier poems featuring fictional voices and stylistic contrasts (such as Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”), as well as a number of artistic movements whose program advocated a move toward “everyday language,” as was the case with the Romantics. However, the influence of the notion of poetic diction and the importance of the lyric poem in the literary tradition from the Renaissance onwards contributed to a situation where pre-twentieth-century English poetry was typically characterized by formal, elevated, and often archaic language. It is only against this backdrop that one can begin to explain the view of poetry held by Mikhail Bakhtin, who is famously associated with the notion of heteroglossia—the internal stratification of language into many different (social) varieties. Bakhtin (1984) saw the artistic use of heteroglossia as the defining characteristic of the novel as a genre and emphasized the necessity for stylistics to focus on heteroglossia and develop the tools to account for it. However, he also claimed that, in contrast to the novel, poetry is mostly detached from the living heterogeneAUTHOR’S NOTE: I am grateful to Rich Cureton, John Heywood, and Mick Short for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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