On Robert Frost’s Poetry From The Perspective Of Iconicity

As a celebrated American poet in the 20 th century,Robert Frost has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times,and honored the poet laureate of American literature.Although the language of his poetry is seemingly concise,it contains abundant and profound emotions and feelings of Frost.Based on the detailed literature review,what comes under observation is that many scholars,both abroad and at home,have done in-depth researches on the poetry of Frost from various perspectives of traditional literary theories,such as romanticism,symbolism,naturalism,existentialism,and even modernism,yet very few systematically delve into his poetry from the very viewpoint of iconicity theory in cognitive linguistics.In accordance with iconicity theory in cognitive linguistics,this thesis holds the perspective that there exists some reflection or resemblance between human language,especially the literary language that being a form of sign,and the cognition,the conception,or the realistic world.As an unique literary genre,poetry possesses special language in form and structure,and there also should be some iconic relationship between the poetic language and its meaning or the cognition/conception of the poet.On account of those factors,taking iconicity theory in cognitive linguistics as the basic perspective,and the poetry of Frost as the breakthrough point,this thesis tries to probe into the iconicity of the poetic language in his poetry,hoping to analyze and appreciate his poetic language,and make better comprehension of the profound implication and the inner conception of him,for instance,Frost’s opinions on the relationships between human and nature,human and human,human and God,etc.,and his meditations on the relationships between past and future,ideal and reality,life and death,etc.To be specific,the research questions are: What principles of iconicity theory in cognitive linguistics can be applied in the analysis of Robert Frost’s poetry? How can the profound meaning hidden in the language of Robert Frost’s poetry be better comprehended from the perspective of iconicity theory in cognitive linguistics? So as to solve those questions,this thesis expressly selects some representative poems of Frost,and specifically analyzes those poems according to the following six respects: sound iconicity in imagic iconicity,sequence iconicity,distance iconicity,quantity iconicity,and markedness iconicity in diagrammatic iconicity,and metaphorical iconicity,exploring the iconicity between the distinct poetic language forms or structures and the profound emotions,or conceptions of Frost.This thesis insists that although Frost has passed away already when the iconicity theory was formally put forward in the later period of 1960 s,iconicity was saturated in the language of his poetry.Furthermore,by dint of the skillful application of the relevant artistic techniques and rhetorical devices in his poetry,such as phonaesthesia,comparison,repetition,irony,metaphor,and the like,Frost makes the iconicity in his poetic language much more remarkable.In short,this thesis not only makes it clear that it is feasible to appreciate and analyze Frost’s poetry from this very new perspective of iconicity in cognitive linguistics,which theoretically broadens the research scope in his poetry,but also practically further proves the existence of language iconicity in the mechanism of human cognition.