Курсовая с практикой на тему Elegiac tonality in English-language feminist poetry on the subject of analysis of poems and sonnets from the collection «A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets» by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Содержание:

Introduction 3
Chapter I. Theoretical aspect of studying of the stylistic peculiarities of Elegy 6
1.1 The concept of «Elegy» 6
1.2 The stylistic peculiarities of the elegy 9
Chapter II. Poems and Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay 17
2.1 The biography of the prominent poetry Edna St. Vincent Millay 17
2.2 Linguistic analysis of «A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets» by Edna St. Vincent Millay 23
Conclusion 29
References 32

Introduction

Введение:

Every person can experience the feeling of love, but it seems that only a poet can express all the shades and nuances of this feeling. No wonder most of the world’s poetry is made up of love lyrics. And one of the most notable places belongs to the great American poetries Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The subject of the image in the lyrics is the spiritual life of a person, the world of his ideas and feelings. Lyrical works are based on human experiences, which in turn are reflected in the life that surrounds the poet and determines the character of his inner world. Then the expressed state of character gets the distinctive features of an artistic image, which creates an individual picture of the spiritual world of a person. Recently, there has been an increasing interest of linguists in the language of fiction, where they are particularly interested in the functional properties of this type.
The study of the language means of Elegy is of great importance for revealing many aspects of English poetry. Edna St. Vincent Millay describes English-language feminist poetry without unnecessary details, does not embellish it, and presents reality as it is. Today, all the problems considered by the author sound quite topical.
An artistic text is always a certain image system that consists of words, the smallest units of the text. The artistic text is a reflection of the author’s view of the surrounding reality. The author describes what is close to him, evaluates the image, develops ideas that are clear to him, and uses language elements and metaphors that are filled with personal meaning for him. The picture of the world that he creates in his work is an expression in words of the author’s picture of the world as a person. The writer gives the positive characters acting in his text the qualities whose content is close and understandable to him, and the direction of whose activity corresponds to his ideas about the right (norm) and the right (ideal). Among these representations, we need to look for figurative and semantic dominants. In artistic speech, all figurative and semantic units are designed to work on their reflection as accurately as possible.
For Edna St. Vincent Millay, love was one of the most important values in life. The entire creative biography of the poetries is inseparable from his love lyrics. In the image of Edna St. Vincent Millay, as in life itself, love is many-sided and multifaceted. 

The Elegy contains a detailed account of the life and death of the mourner, great importance is attached to the story of the feelings of third parties in connection with the death of the object of loss. Like the object of loss, these third parties are characters in the texts in question. 
It is necessary to tell, that the main aim of my work is to discuss the lingvo- stylistic peculiarities of elegiac tonality in English-language feminist poetry on the subject of analysis of poems and sonnets from the collection «A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets» by Edna St. Vincent Millay. According to the aim of research the following tasks have been determined:
1. To give definition of an elegy.
2. To study the definition of Stylistic devises of poems.
3. To get acquainted with the biography of the prominent poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay.
4. To trace the features of poems and sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The object of my paper are the texts of the collection «A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets» by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The subject of this work is stylistic devices, which are used by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The material of linguistic analysis is the collection «A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets» by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The actuality of the theme is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s manner of writing. It is her sonnets and poems, which attracts the readers by their peculiar effect.
The scientific usage of the work is represented by the fundamental analysis of the theoretical knowledge about metaphor, epithets, irony, personification, oxymoron, and antithesis and, their functions in the poetic text.

Заключение:

Elegy is a genre of lyrics dedicated to reflection. Originated in ancient poetry; originally called the lament over the dead. Elegy was based on the life ideal of the ancient Greeks, which was based on the harmony of the world, proportionality and balance of being, incomplete without sadness and contemplation, and these categories passed into modern Elegy. An Elegy can embody both life-affirming ideas and frustration.
The poetry of the XIX century still continued to develop Elegy in a «pure» form, in the lyrics of the XX century, Elegy is found, rather, as a genre tradition, as a special mood. In modern poetry, an Elegy is a plotless poem of a contemplative, philosophical, and landscape character.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) — famous American poet, winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1923. Classical in form (mainly sonnets), deep and unusually bold in content, love and philosophical lyrics of E. Millay won her fame during her lifetime. Her work was highly appreciated by A. Steinberg and A. Revich, whose seminars she attended. Her quatrain My candle burns became an anthem of the 20s of the XX century, as it fully corresponded to the spirit and mood of the era.
E. Millay’s poetry is characterized by a special atmosphere of feelings and passions, sincerity and spontaneity of emotions, poetics of unexpected comparisons, a parallel combination of heterogeneous details held together by a single lyrical feeling.
The main themes of E. Millay’s poetry are bittersweet love, the inevitability of change, death and nature, the poet and his work. E. Millay in his work follows English examples of sonnet art, which can be explained, first, by the ascent of the traditions of American literature to English, and secondly, by the special appeal of the works of W. Shakespeare to E. Millay. The poet’s sonnets are distinguished by «austerity without pomp; splendor without ostentatious luxury; images without vanity, depth of feeling, passion, and not eroticism».
The main theme of E. Millay’s sonnets is love, which is artfully supplemented by ontological motives and ethical and aesthetic reasoning. «I follow beauty» — says E. Millay in his correspondence, commenting on the content of his poetic works [4, p. 67]. She found beauty in human nature, music, poetry, and creativity. True beauty meant more to her than social (traditional) morality.
E. Millay notes that a poet has two ways: either to be within a certain tradition or to have the courage to completely abandon it, which only a truly talented poet can do. The poetess reveals the potential of a woman’s nature in her attitude to love and highlights the ability of a woman to search and find, think and do, which is new in the image of a lyrical heroine in literature.
The main human vices that the poetess condemns in her poetic works are tastelessness, mediocrity, vulgarity, excessive prudence and self-deception. For example, in the poem The Penitent (collection A Few Figs from Thistles, 1922), sexual innuendo and playful tone is what helps E. Millay Express his attitude to the extremes of Puritan prudence and insincerity of feeling.
Edna Millay seeks in her works to find a formula, a definition that would immediately explain the often opposite factors and phenomena of human life and the world around it. The work of the poet is characterized by the unity of the aspirations of the soul and mind, the search for an ideal, freedom, spiritual beauty and the fight against distortions in the life of society.
The use of the phenomenon of epiphora and alliteration. Alliteration is the repetition of consonant or vowel sounds at the beginning of closely spaced stressed syllables. This technique makes the text euphonious and easy to remember:
WE were very tired, we were very merry
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry…
The use of the phenomenon of consonance. Consonance is a phonetic phenomenon based on the repetition of final consonants:
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
Repeating the same sound combinations of words:
We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, «Good morrow, mother!» to a shawl-covered head,
Grammatical and lexical tools:
Using a rhetorical question and an imperative sentence:
AND what are you that, missing you,
I should be kept awake
As many nights as there are days
With weeping for your sake?
Sometimes we encounter repetition not only of identical or the same details, emotional connotations and abstract notions in a text, but also of similar ones. In this case, we deal with whole thematic fields in a text. Anaphora, anaphoric repetition- repetition of the first word or phrase in several successive sentences, clauses or phrases.
Euphemism [‘ju: fqmizm] — indirect naming because of the taboo character of the object named, a mild or vague substitution for a harsh or blunt expression.
The author uses short, simple and sometimes one word sentences to describe how the personages feel.
The fictitious dialogue is a dialogue in the mind of one character. This is a one-voice speech, not uttered by the hero aloud. The hero makes assumptions and gives assumed answers to his questions.

Фрагмент текста работы:

Chapter I. Theoretical aspect of studying of the stylistic peculiarities of Elegy
1.1 The concept of «Elegy»
The term «Elegy» is applied to ancient texts. The Elegy originated in Greece in the seventh century BC as a genre characteristic of the ancient Elegy is its metric organization (elegiac distich). Originally, this was the name of any poem intended to be performed to the accompaniment of a flute. Intended for public voice-over, focused primarily on civil subjects, the ancient Elegy is thematically diverse: from heroics to philosophical meditations. It was different from an epigram in its connection with singing and its large volume; the subject matter did not matter to it. Only the Roman poets Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid made it a genre primarily of love and meditative lyrics.
Elegy as a lyrical reflection, the ancient Greeks were diverse in content.
— a martial Elegy (Callen, Tirta),
— accusatory Elegy (Archilochus, Simonides),
— sad Elegy (Archilochus, Simonides),
— political Elegy (Minnorm, Callen),
— philosophical Elegy (Solon, Aognd).
The Romans divided the Elegy by form into:
— autobiographical (Ovid),
— love, erotic (Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius),
— political (Propertius),
— mournful (Ovid).
As a genre, Elegy developed in the late XVIII and especially in the early XIX centuries. In contrast to the archaic Elegy-lament, the Elegy of the Christian era already radically transforms the relationship between man and nature: nature does not mourn with the dying poet, and then rejoices at his resurrection. Nature is already opposed to the grieving man. The realization of the eternal life of nature and the finiteness of human existence in the era of overcoming mythological thinking changes the structural Canon of the elegiac text: not only life and death