The Beauty Of Imagery In Emily Dickinson’s Poetry From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The study of imagery began in ancient times. And imagery is one of the mostimportant features in poetry. What’s imagery? How does it play an irreplaceable role inpoetry? Nowadays, many scholars devote themselves to the study of imagery. And thestudy of imagery has extended into the field of aesthetics. This is a great progress. Somescholars study imagery from philosophy, psychology and linguistics. This thesis studiesthe beauty of poetic imagery, especially Emily Dickinson’s poetic imagery, from theperspective of relevance theory.Generally speaking, the understanding of poetic imagery depends very much on theunderstanding of the context of the poem and the background knowledge of the poet.This kind of understanding is from the point of view of relevance theory and can beregarded as a round communicative act. Based upon relevance theory, a poet can bethought of as a speaker while a reader can be viewed as a listener; the poet conveys hisor her feelings and emotions and this is called an act of “informative intention”. Thenthe reader uses his or her knowledge of the poet’s background and cognitive ability toinfer implicated meanings of the poem, and this is called “communicative intention”; ifthe feelings and meanings can be shared between the poet and the reader, we can saythis is a kind of “mutual manifestness” in information and emotion. However, thedegree of understanding and feelings of images in a poem varies from person to person.In order to reach optimal understanding degree (optimal contextual effects in RT), thereader needs to take effective efforts and gets optimal relevance---the beauty of poeticimagery, that is to say, in the process of understanding a poem, the reader must collectand restructure old and new information to feel the images’ beauty of a poem, whichresults in a complete communicative act.This thesis is a case study of Emily Dickinson’s poetic images, especially herimages of nature, love, death and religion. Based on relevance theory, the author tries toillustrate how to use the poetic meanings (poetic premise) and the creative background(implicated premise) to reach the beauty of Dickinson’s poems (optimal contextualeffects): how her natural images show her tender care for nature and her awe of lives;how her love images embody her eager for love and her rebellious spirit towardmale-supreme world; how her death images reflect her dauntless spirit when she faced death; and how her religious images mirror her disbelief in God and her respect for andadore truth. Her poetry shows “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty”, just as she wrote in herpoem I Died for Beauty---but was Scarce:“… died for Beauty……died for Truth…”Understanding poetic imagery with relevance theory is really a very complicatedprocess, and it has become a synthetic and multi-disciplinary topic today. The study ofpoetic images is developing, and it is attracting more and more attention. Although thethesis has some limited points, the author sincerely hopes it can bring somethingbeneficial for in-depth analysis of how images can be understood in poetry.