Stylistics as a lingua-aesthetic approach to the verbal art attempts to solve philosophical problems (related to aesthetics) by analysing the meaning(s) of words and scrutinising multi-levelled relations between the words we employ to characterize the world of arts (Srivastava, 1975). On the one hand, it is concerned not only with various aspects of literary analysis but also with evolving a composite and integrated philosophical outlook on the nature of literary works, or more exactly, philosophy of verbal art. On the other hand, it is concerned not only with the methods and techniques of analysis of over-semanticized and hypogrammatic sentences employed in literature but also with the analysis and description of verbal art as a 'work' and 'text', i.e., literary discourse. Stylistics is, thus, a theory of literature as a verbal art, as well as a method and technique for the analysis of texts.
Stylistics has two distinct contexts for the interpretation of its field. An all-inclusive approach incorporates in its orbit the study of language variation as a property of any 'text'. Stylistics thus broadly becomes a scientific study of intra-lingual variation which is functionally oriented, contextually sensitive and systematically organized. However, in this broad definition of stylistics, the notion of variation is considered as the cardinal principle of language in use. Similarly, the concept of style is extended to the general property of language in use and interaction. Thus, when Hockett defines style by saying that 'two utterances in the same language which convey approximately the same information, but which are different in their linguistic structure, can be said to differ in style' (Hockett, 1958 : 556) or when Riffaterre characterizes style 'as an emphasis (expressive, affective or aesthetic) added to the information conveyed by the linguistic structure, without alteration of meaning' (Riffaterre, 1967 : 413), the discussion on style concerns what choices are potentially available in the language and what specific application speakers have made of these potentialities. In this view linguistic variations that suggest the potential of language and the possibilities of choice on the one hand, and incorporate in themselves the subtlety of effect and the emphasis component in information, on the other hand, from the subject matter of stylistics. In a more specific and restricted sense, stylistics may be viewed as a sub-part of linguistics that deals with the features of literary texts. In this context, stylistics can be termed as the study of structure and function of language used in literature on the one hand, and the application of linguistic principles to the study of literature on the other hand. Both these activities in fact are complementary in function and aim at explicating language-induced aesthetic grounding of the literary artefact. Thus, stylistics in this more specific sense can be defined as the application of linguistic theory that studies language variation as functionally oriented, contextually 'sensitive and systematically organized verbal expression, to the realm of literature. Literature in this context is viewed as verbal art and stylistics is said to explore its aeathetic dimensions by sharpening the tools of analysis employed in language science. It is this literary stylistics with which we are concerned here.
II
A literary work, say a poem, is an art object which finds its objective realization through language. Thus, it has two distinct dimensions of existence. As a linguistic fact, a poem has invariably a verbal dimension of existence, i.e., it is language form (motivated to encapsulate the aesthetic import). As an event in the field of art, it is an art form (grounded in the structure of verbal symbol).The two dimensions of a poem make it simultaneously a verbal symbol and an aesthetic object. It is for this reason that a poem can be viewed on the one hand, as a verbal symbol with aesthetic import, and, on the other hand, as an aesthetic
object grounded in language matrix. Because of this duality, one may create a schism between the two dimensions of a poem either by maintaining that poetry is language (though of a special kind) and, hence, can be studied fruitfully by examining only the linguistic details of a poem (Saporta, 1960), or by holding the view that the language dimension of a poem is merely accidental to its aesthetic properties and hence, poetry can best be studied by examining aesthetic impulses and congruences
(Croce, 1953; Cillingwood, 1938). As a literary theory, stylistics neither aims at creating a schism between the verbal and the aesthetic dimensions of a poem nor does it propose the linguistic and aesthetic studies to be 'simply two peas in the stylistic pod'.Stylistics does not give undue importance to either of these two dimensions. The linguistic insistence on the primacy of the verbal plane without further qualifications deriving from the nature of its content leads to a mechanistic outlook while the aesthetic call for the importance of the content plane without seeking a relationship with its mode and manner of verbal manifestation leads to philosophical hegemony. Linguistic and aesthetic studies actually interpenetrate in stylistics so as to lose their individual identities; in fact, they become the convex and concave aspects of the same curve.
The nature and scope of the field of stylistic can be thus graphically represented as below:
click here to see the chart
It should be pointed out that aesthetics which centres round art in general and linguistics which concentrates on language function, are open-ended endeavours. In their wider perspective both aesthetics and linguistics are global disciplines - the former fades into the area of philosophy, the latter into that of semiology. The field of stylistics bears pressure from both the global disciplines, as its one end is said to be closed by aesthetics and the other by linguistics. This clearly brings out the field of stylistics as the intersecting zone of aesthetics and linguistics, and hence, it demands from its practitioners a dual competence.
The stylistic premise that literature is simultaneously a verbal symbol and an aesthetic object is based on two fundamental facts: (a) all literary artefacts are verbal forms but not all language usages can be characterized as literature, and (b) all literary artefacts are art forms but not all art realizations can be qualified as literature. As literature is the area of convergence where linguistic experience and aesthetic sentience merge to create a verbally qualified art form, it is but natural to expect that the two dimensions of a poem, verbal and aesthetic, will illuminate each other. Because of the dialectical unity between the two, these dimensions exist in a person in reciprocal comprehensiveness. It is for this reason that stylistics demands of scholars engaged in the field that they be sensitive to aesthetic import, as well as, be aware of various linguistic functions.
III
One of the basic assumptions of stylistics is that in a poem there exists a systematic and structural relationship between the verbal and aesthetic dimensions. There is not a single aesthetic feature which has no linguistic reflex of its own. As the aesthetic import of a poem can be grasped only in and through language and as literary intent can reveal its significance only through the dialectics of the verbal and aesthetic dimensions, stylistics aims at bringing linguistic facts into evidence for literary analysis. To achieve this pragmatic end it brings forward the concept of 'text' on the one hand, and of 'work' on the other hand.
A work is an operational unit of a language partaking of the function of signification. It has no connotation of size. In its manifestation it may be restricted to a short lyrical poem or may be extended to cover an epic. It is generated by a system sustained by the inner relationship between its constituent parts. The concept of 'wholeness' and 'organicity' is inherently present as its defining criterion. It is for this reason that a text has invariably a deep 'macro-structure' of sentence. But a work is neither to be characterized simply as a kind of 'super'-sequence or 'hyper'-sentence nor to be defined merely as verbal sequences having local linkages. The hidden macrostructure of a given work brings into the unit of discourse a global coherence. The global coherence transcends linkages or the discontinuities we find between juxtaposed sentences. It is able to fill the intersentential gaps providing a conceptual bond between two autonomous sentences.
A poem as a work is to be regarded as a finite and closed verbal entity. It is a verbal sequence having global coherence apart from its local inter-sentential linkages. It is a self-contained total whole where different sentences as verbal symbols get transformed into one 'composite' sign - an art symbol. One of the most significant facts about a poem is that it is not only a conglomeration of signs (to whatever extent they may or may not be emotionally charged and semantically hyper-sensitivized) but a composite symbol having a function of signification. By signification we mean nothing different than its dictionary meaning: 'the subtle, hidden implications of something, as distinguished from its openly expressed meaning'. According to Riffatterre (1978 : 167), signification is what the poem is really about. It is to be noted that a poem's signification is generally different from its expressed meaning. A poem's implication is not what the poem explicitly says. It is obvious then that a poem as a work is not an ordinary verbal symbol in spite of the fact that it uses the same words, the same sentences and the same grammar we employ in our day-to-day discourse.
Poetry is a work made autonomous. It is a self-contained entity where extrinsic reference to its object is either absorbed as context internal to its specification or made inward to create a 'world' of its own. Meaning here is transformed into being. The word in a poem is more than a verbal shadow of its referent; in fact, it becomes transformed as an object of the world created within a poem. It is in this sense that a poem is characterized as an object in itself, a referent of its ownself and a world of its own being.
It is wrong to assume that words have a fixed meaning defined by the dictionaary of a language. Different contexts of a word reveal its different senses and effects, f-or example, to a botanist the word 'rose' may refer to a 'species of a flower' but the same 'rose' in the register of literature symbolizes 'perfection in beauty'. What is to be stressed here is that when a poem becomes its own referent, a world of its own being comes into existence as its own context for interpretation, i.e., the created context begins to serve as a dictionary and as a context for the interpretation of the words used therein. Take for example, the following lines uttered by Gloucester to Lear (King Lear):
Our flesh and blood, my lord, is grown so vile That it doth hate what gets it. As a literal meaning, i.e., meaning at the micro-structure (sentence) level, it implies "that both he and Lear are hated by some of their children". But critics have talked about 'secondary' or 'implicit' meaning hidden behind this sentence. This sentence of Gloucester suggests another reading that "we have become so depraved that we hate the sexual process by which we are produced" (Empson, 1931 : 139). This second reading is possible only because in King Lear as a work there exists 'a network of expressions of sex-horror' (Olsen, 1978 : 11). We can say that- this implicit meaning comes into being at the macro-structure level (as opposed to the literal meaning of sentence level designation) simply because King Lear as a work has created its own referent which becomes the context for the interpretation of the sentence in question.
Literary object as a work is created by words on a page. It is not to be understood as a physical book which is held in hand or the one which is placed on the shelf of a library. In fact, it is the one which is construed as an object within the space created from the use of the first to the last word. Thus, the work is supported not by the space provided by the page or pages of a book but by the space created by the language employed in a book. It can be viewed as a self-sufficient art-object. However, it is self-sufficient or complete only in a an abstract sense. A work is the language-dimension of art-symbol and hence free of individual's (author's or reader's) projection of value of meaning. Like units of language (i.e., phoneme, morpheme, word, etc.), meaning of art-symbol emerges only as a signifying entity and only through the play of differential properties of these units within a closed system. As pointed out by Saussure, "... in language there are only differences ... a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms" (Saussure, 1966 : 120). Viewed in this perspective, work as an art-symbol may imply positive terms as objects (signifieds.) but in reality it is construed as only differences without positive terms (it is an ensemble whole of significances).
It is this work as an art-symbol which gets transformed as well as realised as a 'text' during the act of reading. A text is generated by the reader who converts the work as art-symbol into a text as an aesthetic symbol. An aesthetic object exists on the 'parole' dimension of the art symbol and hence, involves the reader's projection of meaning. A text comes into being after art-symbol is articulated (gets concretized) in the literary consciousness of a reader. This process of articulation (concretization) is a complex activity as it involves many conditioning factors - inter-textuality (location of a work within the network of other works), ideology (society's signifying practices), intentionality (recognition of author's intention through the effect the work produces in a reader), etc. It is under these conditioning factors that a Work as an art object grows as a Text and achieves plurality.IV
Scholars have talked about the two uses of language - scientific (denotative) and poetic (connotative). This distinction has been formulated in one way or another by Richards, Eastman, Empson, Lowes, Leavis, Ransom, Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Philip Wheelwright, etc. The scientific use of language is motivated by a large utilitarian value guided implicitly by the instrumentality of formal logic and conceptual meaning. Poetry, according to these scholars, employs a different instrument because it is motivated by a different objective. The language used here is evocative and connotative in nature. At the level of symbolic manifestation, one is a monosign while the other is a plurisign in kind.We would like to join hands with Josephine Miles (1940) in questioning this opposition - whether this binary distinction is 'dualistic in absolute terms or polar in relative terms'. It is true that at the level of sentence symbols, poetic language seems
to be "neither one of two major kinds of use, nor more close to one language pole than another". It is the same language which we employ in general conversational talk and it has a plurisignative function similar to that with which we may characterize the language used in science or history. Undoubtedly, Josephine Miles is right when she expresses her basic assumption that, 'as mono-significance is an abstraction for logic, all language is plurisignificant as all objects and words appear
in context. Denotation and connotation are kinds of plurisignificance. Science and poetry are kinds of selection from plurisignificance, the kinds to be distinguished by purpose, use, ingredients of material, plain outward form, and so on ..."What Josephine Miles says is true for the sentence level organization of a poem but is untrue for the language organization at the level of a work. At the macro-structure level, a poem is an art-object, a totality of signs, an overall encompassing symbol (i.e., art symbol). As an art-symbol it does not correspond with an outwardly verifiable fact. The striking point to be taken note of is that a poem as an art symbol does not stand for something else; it need not refer to an object- or context beyond its own existence as sentence symbols do. In fact, it is a created object where beauty experienced is beauty conceived and objectified. An art symbol thus is created out of semiotic system turned inward for the sake of signification. It is for this reason that a poem has a life of its own and language employed in poetry becomes reflexive in nature. A poem as a work exists because it is made autonomous in the process of text-construction where all the conditions or contexts for its interpretation are built-in within itself. Made-for-itself stylistic devices are so used that for its readers the texture of the poetic object becomes perceptible in all its aspects.
What is being suggested here is that the two uses of a language do not differ in linguistic organization if our focus of attention is confined to the attributes of sentence symbol. But once we shift our discussion to the level of the poem as a work (i.e., art object) and attempt to reveal its significance, the distinction becomes obvious. Both types of text, scientific as well as poetic, may yield to certain generalizations or abstractions. But while in one case it is an abstraction about "the supposed states of affairs which we take them to be utterances about", in another case it is the generalization about 'utterances as facts of mind' - a distinction pointed out by Coleridge. This is a distinction manifested at the level of text construction - which may adopt two entirely different ways of presenting the 'object' in focus. One way is to refer to it as an outwardly object while the other way is to interorize it. The second way makes it a self-sustained object with its own texture and life. For example, Richards (1929) talks about John Clare's description of the primrose -
With its crimp and crudled leaf
And its little brimming eye.
According to Richards, the description of the primrose by Clare is not about the gardener's primrose. In fact, the whole utterance refers through this description to a state of mind or experiences of the speaker. The poem is a result of the experience of seeing or imagining a primrose. With a similar dichotomous approach but with a frame of reference different from Richards', Sussane K. Langer discusses the two uses of language. According to her, there are two kinds of symbols employed in poetry-symbols in art and art symbols. Metaphor's, images etc., are symbols in art with discursive properties and behave like usual linguistic symbols, i.e., they designate concepts about things which exist outside of symbols. Contrary to this, Art symbol is a composite whole - a living form objectifying the subjective life, an apparition created out of inward experience. The point which she emphasizes is that "the difference between the Art Symbol and the Symbol used in art is a difference not only of function but of kind" (Langer, 1956). Symbols occurring in art are symbols in the usual sense. They have meaning. The art symbol is the expressive form. Therefore, it cannot strictly be said to have meaning; but it does have its own import.
Richards's (1926) or Langer's (1933 : 1956) dichotomous distinction between the two uses of language or two kinds of symbols are useful distinctions; however, they lack the true perspective of text-production and poetic construction. As there are many building blocks used for the sentence construction-morphemes (words), phrases, clauses, etc., there seem to be many interlocking levels of organization in- the poem. The construction principle is such that a unit of one level enters as a constituent element of a unit of the immediately higher level of organization. As levels are invariably distinct and different in kind, it is obvious that a constitute at one level is never completely the result of compounding the qualities of its contributing constituents at another level.
V
Like a sentence, a poem is a constitute which shows a hierarchical organization of interlocking levels, or layers; for example, one can identify within the poem the following three distinct but organically integrated levels -(a) the level of sentence symbols, (b) the level of symbols in art and (c) the level of art symbol. What is to be remembered here is that all the levels and their corresponding units are inherently verbal in nature. Sentence symbols are denotative in nature and referential in function. Symbols of art are connotators. They are made up of signs of the denotated system which are so constructed as to reveal the 'tone' of the work. As opposed to denotators which are conventional, artibtrary, homological, transitive and mono-semic, symbols of art as connotators are iconic, motivated, analogical, immanent and polysemic in function. Art symbol is the total whole meant to express to poem's signification. The details of the nature of these levels and principles of poetic construction have been discussed elsewhere (Srivastava, 1980). Here we can simply point out their functional relevance.
L - 3b Aesthetic symbol Text Aesthetic competence Sentencefunction L - 3a Art Symbol Work Artistic competence Expressive function L - 2 Symbols in art Connotators Communicative competence Connotative function L - 1 Sentence symbol Grammatical sentence Linguistic competence Denotative function For example, look at the following self-contained poem 'Directions' by Agyeya.
Every dawn
I live a little into the past
Because every evening
I die a little into the future
On L-1 (Level of Sentence Symbol) one can easily find that it is a four single line structured comples sentence ##S##. This complex sentence is constituted of two sentences joined by subordinating conjunction of reason (i.e., because) attesting thereby a structure ##S1 Subconj S2##. Each of the two constitutive sentences on L-2 (Level of Symbols in Art) brings out two symbols as well. One symbol is suggestive of the way the poetic 'I' experiences and leads his life at every dawn, and the other of the way he gives significance to his deeds every evening. The suggestiveness is created out of certain contrasts, i.e., the contrast between ADV time (dawn-evening) and ADV direction which has a structure marker (into) + noun (past-future) on one hand, and the contrast between the intransitive and transitive use of the verb (live-die) on the other hand. Ordinarily, verbs of the type (live) are intransitive in function but we do find many sentences having underlying structures which attest a cognate noun phrase object; for example,(i) 'x sings' as well as 'x sings a song'
(ii) 'x lives' as well as 'x lives a happy life'In the transitive interpretation past becomes 'past life', and modifier 'a little' serves to qualify the noun complement. In its intransitive sense, 'past' remains a part of ADV direction and 'a little' serves to modify the verb live'.
On L-3 (Level of Art Symbol) an associative total of life comes into existence by way of cross-reference and linkages between the two symbols in art. One begins to identify first the 'I' participant of the two symbols as having the same- reference. The model of semiological structure that lies beneath each symbol reveals the significance of items by way of contrast and composition, i.e., dawn/evening past/future and live/die. Inactive verb like 'die', for example, becomes actional, firstly because it is opposed to the structural pattern of the verb live' and secondly, because it has been used with the ADV direction which can occur only with the active verbs implying motion. On the level of Art Symbol, the poetic object of the poem is simultaneously a noun, a modifier and a verb; as a noun the poetic object encompasses the life of participant-I, as a modifier it qualifies the life of participant-I with the alive quality and as a verb it symbolises the act of living of participant-I in present tense with two directions - past and future.
The poem as an art symbol has two different contexts of existence. The first context present it as a verbal 'potential'. Like a 'phoneme' or 'morpheme', this is a unit definable as a bundle of functionally relevant features, the difference being that it is an abstraction in relational structure not of a type of many-member tokens but of a specific class of one-member units. It is a verbally real and self-sustained object but as Ingarden (1964) has pointed out - "not all its deter- minants-components or qualities - are in a state of actuality". The second context brings out the actualized variant of the art-symbol - a verbal symbol concretized by the reader's co-creative activity. Once it is concretized, it becomes an aesthetic object. An. aesthetic object is like the allovariant of a unit - an articulated and fully specified object experientially concrete and subjectively charged.
This distinction between the art object and the aesthetic object is vital to the field of stylistic study. The study of both art-objects and aesthetic objects falls within the area of stylistics. Through a close study of the properties of the work's construction stylistics aims at revealing the intrinsic nature of art object (i.e., literary work). Contrary to this, a study of aesthetic objects is a study in literary performance. It demands the field of literacy pragmatics which discusses the regularities we find in the relationship between 'work' and their 'readers'. (For the distinction between literary poetics and literary pragmatics see, van Dijk, 1972).
What is to be emphasized is that the distinction between the two uses of a language (as proposed by Richards) or the two kinds of symbol (as formulated by Langer) is not to be sought in the micro- structure of a discourse (i.e., in the syntax of sentences). At this level, the grammar of language used in poetry is in no way different from the grammar of language employed in other specialized kinds of discourse. But once we enlarge the scope of grammar by moving beyond the level of sentence construction and move our discussion to the levels of 'work' and 'text' (i.e., the macro-structure of discourse), the distinction between the two uses of a language becomes relevant. By demanding the extension of linguistics beyond the sentence unit and by enlarging the scope of study syntagmatically to larger units like 'text' 1 stylistics is able to capture the textuality (organicity) of a poem and through its applicational tools is able to reveal the poetic uses of discourse.
VI
The earlier Romantic view of literature sought a direct relation between art symbol and human emotion. Poetry for the Romantics was 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' (Words- worth). Literariness was measured in the context
of 'true' feelings either experienced by the poet or aroused in the psyche of readers. It was stated that "the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet" (Shelley). The current formulation of the theory by Richards and Langer is a modification of the earlier romantic approach in terms of the expression theory of verbal form.
Once we accept the stand that the ultimate target of knowing a poem is to experience or re-experience the 'overflow of powerful feelings' or to reconceive the original conception of the poet of which a poem is merely a feeble shadow, we are bound also to accept the stand that a poem has its real existence somewhere outside of its 'text', and, furthermore, its instrumentality (desirability) can be 'justified entirely by its effect in releasing or organizing our impulses and attitudes'.
Stylistics holds the view that a poem is not an object of emotion and passion but an event of cognition and communication. We subscribe to the view that poetry is not an unformed mass of raw emotion but a verbally structured manifestation of sentence; it is not a naked passion but a linguistically realized cognition of intuition; it is not an artefact of formless inner life or mentality but a palpable verbal form objectifying the subjective life. It is precisely for this reason that art objects as aesthetic messages are communicable. Poetry is in essence a discourse. "The emotions correlative to the objects of poetry become a part of the matter dealt with - not communicated to the reader like an infection or disease, not inflicted mechanically like bullet or knife wound, not administered like a poison, not simply expressed as expletives or grimaces or rhythms, but presented in their objects and contemplated as a pattern of knowledge" (Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1949 ; 38). Stylistics not only accepts a poem as being contemplated as a pattern of knowledge about emotions but establishes the locus of the cognitive structure in the 'work' of the poem.
Like a scientific theory which is a net cast to catch the outer reality (Popper, 1965), a poem is a verbal trap in which the reality of our inner life is somehow captured. It is interesting to know our knowing about our inner self given to us. According to MacLeish (1964 : 20), 'We can agree that whatever it is we know in this poem, we know only in the poem. It is not a knowledge we can extract from the poem like a meat from a nut and carry off. It is something the poem means-something that is gone when the poem goes and recovered only by returning to the poem's words. And not only by returning to the poem's words but returning to them within the poem. If we alter them, if we change their order, though leaving their sense much as it is, if we speak them so that their movement changes, their meaning changes also".What poet-critic MacLeish is pointing out is the distinction obviously drawn in stylistics between theme-object and art-object and between the outside view of talking about a poem and the inside view of grasping the existential qualities of a poem. The Theme-object of a poem is the sense of a poem which like a resume can be prepared out of the poem. It is nothing different from the subject matter extractable from the poem as meat is extracted from a nut. different poems can have an identical theme object. Contrary to this, an art object is the existential quality of a poem inherently manifested in and through language. It is and object meant for reflection. As an act of cognition, it does not have any paraphrasable counterpart. The uniqueness and specificity of a poem lies not in its theme object but in its art object.
We can talk about the theme object of a poem. We can also discuss the design of a poem. For example, we can say that John Clare's poem is about a flower bearing pale yellowish petals and growing in clayey soil in early spring and further that the intention of the poet has been to present the flower in texture and shape instead of location, time or colour. Bringing this poem into this context is based on the outside view of looking at poetry. The inside view of poetry is to see how the poetic object of a poem comes into existence. If we look at the poem as a text, we find words crimp and curdled which reveal the texture while the use of the word eye, with the qualifying little focusses our attention on the shape and size of the created object. A Text as a normal form is constructed on the principle of selection and organization of meaning. The imaginable art object comes into being through an organizing process of the text which intensifies the texture, shape and size of the recreated object keeping in suspension other facts of its theme object.
What we are attempting is first of all to show that the context of situation needed for interpreting any utterance in the work is constructed within the poem itself, and, secondly, that the world created and captured within the poem is virtually unfettered by the world external to it. There remains always a distinction in kind between the poet-I and poetic-I, between the document and the monument aspects of poem.
VIIWe should now come to the relevance of stylistics to the teaching of poetry. Stylistics being a theory of literature as well as a methodology of literary study, furnishes, on the one hand, a frame of reference to the goal of teaching poetry and, on the other hand, provides certain conditions for achieving this goal.
The present state of art of teaching poetry in the language department from the school level to the University is generally confined to talking about poetry with an outside view of literature. It deals primarily with the theme object of the poem bringing information from extraneous sources its setting, its environment, its external causes, etc. Without realizing that in the work of art, 'cause and effect are incommensurate: the concrete result of these extrinsic causes - the work of art - is always unpredictable' (Wellek and Warren, 1966 : 73). Poetry is conceived as 'impasse of reason' and a poem in essence is believed to exist in the mind of the author or in an unreasonable and unknowable locus. A poem cannot be taken as a feeble shadow of the original existing in the mind of the poet simply because a poem is concrete and real, it is perceptual and communicable. It is a wrong premise to start our teaching of poetry with the design or intention of the author of the poem without talking the poem itself into consideration - the business of a literary critic is to discover what is being referred to. Teachers generally indulge in the practice of talking either about the 'disengagable form', i.e., as rhetoric elements and overt style as expression (signifier) plane of the poem or about the 'detachable content' i.e., the subject matter as the content (signified) plane of the poem without realizing that a poem as an art symbol is an organic whole - a verbal symbol. The very orientation of these teachers either leads them into the trap of metaphysics where poetry becomes unteachable or makes them mechanical investigators.
Contrary to this, stylistics holds the view that what is communicable is teachable as well. As a poem is an act as communication, there is not metaphysics about it. Stylistics presents a linguistic perspective for the accountability of art form; and thus, in orientation towards literary study it comes in opposition with the traditional way of looking at the object in the following ways:
Stylistics also lays down certain conditions for procedural operation; for example, it emphasizes the following:
a) better know the literary code before you attempt at getting the aesthetic message,
b) better understand a poem before you begin enjoying it,
c) better interpret the poem before you evaluate it as a cultural event,
d) define the basic primes of literary theory both conceptually as well as operationally,
e) make linguistic and literary study work for (within one integrated discipline of stylistics) rather than against each other.Having identified goals for the teaching of poetry and having specified the conditions for formulating methodological postulates stylistics is potentially capable of making the teaching of poetry significantly functional.
NOTE
1. It is because of seeking an extension of the scope of grammar beyond the sentence structure that in recent years the linguistic analysis of units higher than the sentence has rather dramatically increased and is being cultivated under various names: discourse analysis, hyper-syntax, textogrammatic, text-syntax, trans-linguistique, etc. (Hendticks, 1973).
