A Pragma-Stylistics Analysis of Lowell and Snodgrass’ Confessional Poems

Abstract

Analyzing any text according to pragmatic principles means approaching the text's meaning and the writer's intention. This study investigates the role of pragmatics theories in interpreting and understanding poetic text and their impact on the poet's style. In other words, how the poets exploit pragmatics theories, such as Searle's speech acts, Grice's maxims, and deixis, in their style of writing to convey their intended meaning to the readers. Therefore, two confessional poems are selected to be analyzed pragma-stylistically: The Dolphin was written by Robert Lowell (1973), and Mementos 1 was written by W. D. Snodgrass (1960s).   The current study aims to: 1) analyze the texts of selected poems by applying pragmatics theories to find out the style of each poet through which one can reach the right interpretation of the poem.2) find out the most dominant type of speech acts used by each poet. 3) investigate any flouting of Grice's maxims. 4) identify types of deixis and find out the most dominant types used in confessional poems.  The present study concludes that 1) representative speech acts are performed more than other types.2) most of Grice's maxims are flouted, and the quantity maxim is the most dominant flouted by each poet. 3) Both poets use person deixis more than other types.