Semiotic Interpretation Of Poetry

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) is an eminent representative of Metaphysical poets in 17th century Britain. He has contributed much in terms of poetic subjects and form, resulting in humorous, refined, idyllic poetry of his, blending conceit, witticism, passion and profundity.Dissertations on semiotics are multitudinous and those on poetry do not lack, but few of these have addressed poetry from the perspective of semiotics and seldom or never have they taken Metaphysical poetry as their samples for study. A systematic discipline of semiotics is not yet established and an independent theory of poetic semiotics is still in its embryo stage, and not surprisingly a scientific case study on poetry and semiotics with works of a poetic school or a poet as examples is much needed but yet to be initiated.This thesis is a case study on Andrew Marvell, intending to interpret poetry from a semiotic perspective and to bring poetry study into the framework of semiotics, and thus propounding a systematic methodology of semiotic poetics for poetic interpretation. It first expands/revises the Semiotic Triangle to comprise such factors as language, sign, poetry and literature, and then uses the new Semiotic Triangle to examine poetry with Marvell's poems as examples. It is proposed in this thesis that poeticity of poetry lies in the transcendence from mimesis to significance, which the reader can perceive during the heuristic reading and retroactive reading. The actual process of such transcendence takes place when matrix generates poetic text within a certain model and in either of two categories herein this thesis named as expansion and condensation. The matrix is further realized by semantic and syntactic hypergrams, leading to intertextuality, the relation between the poetic text and other hypertexts.The thesis then on the basis of the previous reasoning points out four requisites of sound poetic interpretations:a formalist methodology of treating poetic texts with such methods as close reading; the awareness of defamiliarization in textual poetic production, the degree of which is decided by individual poets; the comprehension of quadratic semioticization lying in poetry; and finally reader-based (not reader-centered) poetic interpretations, which are not final but serve as materials for another round of semioticization and interpretation. These four requisites are propounded to further prove the belletristic nature of poetry. Poetry is a further semioticization of informative language and its interpretations should be idiosyncratic, democratic and diverse, as the conclusion points out.