A Study On Cognitive Stylistics In E.E. Cummings’s Visual Poetry

As one of the most innovative American poets in the twentieth century, E.ECummings was especially famous for his visual poems that deviated from traditionaltypography, spellings, capitalization, punctuation and grammar, which has attracted alarge number of scholars to study. Both at home and abroad, a great pile of researcheson Cummings’ poems have been made, which gives us a better understanding of thethemes, meanings, and poetic deviations in his poems.Through relevant cognitive stylistic theories, this dissertation is designed to findthe correlations between the poetic form and the poetic meaning of Cummings’ visualpoems at the morphological, syntactic and textual level, which offers a newperspective for common people when they are reading Cummings’ visual poems,makes them be more interested in such a kind of poetry, helps them recognize howCummings’ visual poetry is created and cognized.In this dissertation, on the basis of different themes, E. E. Cummings’ visualpoems are classified into two kinds, namely, nature-thematic visual poems andhuman-thematic visual poems. This paper has made a specific and systemic analysisabout the two types of visual poems with the application of cognitive stylistic theories,image schema, conceptual metaphor and text word, specifically. According to thequalitative analysis of cognitive stylistics in Cummings’ poems, it finds that the formof his poems bears an analogy to the objects and themes expressed at different levelsof a text. Cummings applies these techniques such as word-splitting, word-formation,syntactic dislocation and irregular uses of capitalization and punctuation to iconize themeanings of his poems in order to achieve a harmonious unification between formsand themes of the poetry. His idiosyncratic style may be a result of the pursuit ofevoking a perceptible similarity between the form and the theme in readers’ mindsrather than the result of a resist to tradition. Therefore, with the help of relevantcognitive stylistic theories, readers are able to interpret the meanings underlying thesurface of trickery and formlessness, and have a better appreciation of his poeticstyles.The significance of this dissertation lies in two aspects: firstly, it offers a newview for the appreciating on visual poetry with the application of cognitive stylistictheories; secondly, in some degree, it simplifies the technique when readers areenjoying those anti-traditional poems, makes it more possible for the common people to read obscure visual poetry and broadens the popularity of them.