EXPLORING THE LANGUAGE OF POEMS: A STYLISTIC STUDY

Perceiving the meaning of literary texts requisites studying and understanding the language of these texts. Stylistic approach to literary texts does not only involve linguistic textual analysis but also encourages readers to interact with textual structure to infer meaning (Tuta , 2006a). This paper focuses on the relevance of stylistics approach for the analysis of poems in Teaching English as a Foreign Language contexts. To this end, Siegfried Sassoon`s The Rear-Guard and Wilfred Owen`s Anthem for Doomed Youth are taken into consideration. After having explained in what ways stylistic analysis helps the reader to come to terms with the process of coding the meaning embedded in the text by focusing on the linguistic features, the two poems are compared and contrasted via a stylistic approach. The paper does not solely focus on analysing the texts, but also argues in favour of exploiting language-based approaches in literature study in English as a Foreign Language contexts, since stylistics is interested in what writers do with and through language.