Image Schemas in Romantic Poetry

This study affords new insights into the meaning construction phenomenon and poetic language. It is a widely held view that the language of poetry and the naturally occurring language represent two different types of language, which employ different meaning construction devices and principles, and which have little in common. However, this work aims to verify that poetic language is but a mode of meaning construction, and its devices, which have long been said to be literary devices serving different rhetorical aims, are part of the general devices used in performing different mental activities, most importantly meaning production and consumption. As a way of cross-checking this hypothesis, romantic poetry was taken as the corpus of the study. The paper represents an application of a major cognitive semantic theory, namely image schema, to three Romantic poems, namely Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, Keat’s ‘To Autumn’, and Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’. Perhaps among the major conclusions of the study are the following: (1) It is not possible to establish a neat dividing line between literal and figurative meaning, or to enforce a clear division between the language of poetry and that of everyday use, especially with respect to meaning construction devices and techniques. (2) Romantic poetry exploits, for aesthetic purposes, cognitive processes, including linguistic, that were initially evolved for non-aesthetic purposes. The reading of poetry involves adapting cognitive processes for purposes for which they were not originally devised. (3) Romantic poetry uses few concrete nouns combined with abstract deictic references, which makes it virtually impossible for a reader to pinpoint the exact thing the poem describes. The information provided in the romantic poems is very lowly categorised and therefore violent to our ordinary cognitive processes of dealing with the world. (4) The majority of the rhetorical devices, specifically the meaning devices, are important meaning construction devices that involve different cognitive processes. Representative examples of such devices include ‘allegory’, ‘allusion’, ‘hyperbole’, ‘juxtaposition’,personification’, ‘satire’, ‘simile’, etc