A Multimodal Stylistic Study Of William Carlos Williams’ Visual Poetry

William Carlos Williams was enthusiastic about writing poems and indicated that all poems are presented with delicate illustrations,who tried to integrate poetic art with painting,creating plenty of visual poems that broke the language limit and traditional poetic patterns.The existing researches mainly centered on the theme of poems,language,formal skills and other aspects of plain text research.Though several scholars have analyzed the visual art in Williams’ poems,but it needs to go into an intensive study of the connection between the verbal modes and visual modes.This dissertation has explored the foregrounding features of verbal and visual modes with their contributions to the realization of ideational meaning,interpersonal meaning,and textual meaning of Williams’ poems based on multimodal stylistics.Multimodal stylistics is an original direction of stylistics with the aim to expand the research of modes and media from the perspective of stylistics.In this way,the kit of multimodal stylistics,which is effective in the analysis of the printed text,could clarify the semiotic modes to construct meaning.In this dissertation,the author has put forward a multimodal-stylistic analysis system of visual poetry which is more appropriate for analyzing multimodal stylistic features of visual poetry based on Zhang & Mu’s Model.In this model,the basic characteristics can be reduced as two phases,three entities,and six key points.This thesis has analyzed Williams’ real-life scenario thematic poems,plant scenario thematic poems,and female thematic poems.It finds that almost all the selected poems show an experiential function to give information of what he sees,thus the image is “offer”.In the poem,usually represented participants show the action process,sometimes “I” appear to show a reactional process.For real-life scenario thematic poems,the image is usually depicted from a close shot,with a high vertical,which implies the involvement of readers and the people’s ignorance about the beauty of the ordinary object.Another salience feature for real-life scenario thematic poems is the contrast of colors.For plant scenario thematic poems,from a long shot to a short shot with the vertical angle is usually low,which implies the poet’s holding in awe and veneration.While for female thematic poems,a close shot with the vertical angle is usually at the same level,which implies the poet’s call on equality of men and women.For the information value,dominance presents as a top-bottom composition or center-margin composition,which is the extent of thecondition of the scene is depicted.The significance of this dissertation consists of three main aspects: first of all,it attempts to explore a multimodal-stylistic model which is more suitable for poetry analysis and to point out the flexibility and applicability from different kinds of literary analysis.Secondly,it is better for readers to understand the prominent features of verbal modes and visual modes in a visual poem,as well as the thematic meaning and aesthetic value.Thirdly,it has devoted to exploring Williams’ visual poetry from the integration of the ideational,interpersonal,textual function and representational,interactive,compositional meaning,making it possible for readers to have a more comprehensive appreciation of Williams’ poetic style.