A STYLISTIC STUDY OF SOME OF EMILY DICKINSON’S POEMS

The stylistic study of the language of literary works   has received a great amount of attention from linguists, text analysts, and literary critics. This leads researchers to apply the methods of stylistics in analyzing literary texts. The current study is an attempt to explore the language of some of Emily Dickinson’s poems. It tries to  show how the linguistic features of the deviant form of language can be employed in Emily Dickinson’s poetry and their effect on her style. The categories in the model adopted (Leech 2013) are applied to the data selected form Dickinson’s poems. The poems are chosen according to their themes. Themes of ‘Death’, ‘Poetry’, and ‘Nature’ are taken into consideration. The poems are: I heard a fly buzz when I died, My Life had stood a Loaded Gun , and I taste a Liquor never be brewed. On the prosodic level, Dickinson is famous for the irregularity of her rhyme and rhythm. On the graphological level, capitalization is important in establishing a special prominence with certain words. On the syntactic level, Dickinson develops a short hand system of poetic language because of her violation of grammar. On the semantic level, her poetry has an ability to make abstract concepts concrete through her genius use of meaning transference.