| Abstract: |
Poets have at their disposal the stylistic liberty to manipulate language in sheer departure from the conventional grammar and language rules, by fragmenting, twisting and organising language, to express profound themes and values. This paper sees and examines as style the poets’ linguistic manipulation in Yeats’ ’Second Coming’’ and Donne’s ’The Flea’. It further examines forms of poetic expression deployed by Yeats and Donne in their poems to create, indict, teach and mirror some of the religious and marital issues in the society. The study adopts literary stylistic approach in analysing the poems. The study reveals how the authors’ use words with great economy and compactness to communicate through myriads of unfolding implications. Deviation principle and foregrounding are also utilised as tools for linguistic manipulation in these works. Analyses of the two poemshavedemonstratedthat the two poets manipulated language at all levels of linguistics organisation – semantic, syntactic, phonetic, etc., to bring their imagery to the forefront of their readers’ attention. Their works are full of condensed statements which heightened thoughts,painted pictures through the medium of diverse poetic resources with the aid of linguistic manipulation, to prove that the major aim of language is to communicate. |
EBONYI JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE
