Are There Any Students in this Literature Classroom? From the Teacher's House of Wisdom to the Threshold of Students' Minds

A multitude of linguistic applications to literature have been made to show the relevance of stylistic analysis to the teaching of literature. Yet, such a linguistic approach to literature continues to be met with reservation and even antagonism from literary scholars and educationists in many universities around the world. The present paper adopts the point of view of a literary man concerned with such linguistic processes and aims to show how the solid theoretical premises and the set of tools of analysis offered by Critical Linguistics are likely to yield interesting clues useful in interpreting poems. The essence of this research is that in order to achieve a "healthy" exploration of poems, there is a need for the perspective of a linguist. Such a perspective will likely to lead to fresh inferences by pointing to potentially seminal areas in the poem and allowing students to improve their linguistic competence as well as their overall appreciation of and delight in poetry.