The Poet’s language: Foregrounding in Edwin Thumboo’s gods can die;

The poetry of Edwin Thumboo has contributed much to the shaping and definition of Singapore’s English Language poetic canon. In this paper, I explore Thumboo’s esthetic use of consistent foregrounding in the poem gods can die from three perspectives: propositional, textual and interpersonal. Foregrounding refers to the usage of certain linguistic devices for the purpose of attracting attention. In poetry, meaning and esthetic effect are unified through the poet’s deliberate and systematic foregrounding of linguistic devices. Juxtaposed against the backgrounds of the standard language and an often rich and diverse poetic canon, the poet asserts his individuality through the systematic foregrounding of relations between the functional semantic components that together comprise the poem as semiotic object. The approach adopted here is functional‐semantic in orientation and based on earlier work carried out by the Prague School and more recently by Michael’A. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan. While it may be argued that the totality of the poet’s message is unlikely to be ever fully captured by even the most careful and detailed linguistic analysis, nevertheless this should not prevent one from attempting to explore the linguistic intricacy of the poet’s handiwork. For from such analysis, we gain an even better appreciation of the texture and meaning of the poem.