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Some Linguistic Aspects of the Heroic Couplet in the Poetry Op Phillis Wheatley

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Some Linguistic Aspects of the Heroic Couplet in the Poetry Op Phillis Wheatley SOME LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF THE HEROIC COUPLET IN THE POETRY OP PHILLIS WHEATLEY APPROVED: Graduate Committee; Major Profess Co Lttee Member) ColmLttee Membe -J- . nirecf^F~of G r aHuli t e^STu d"l es"*Ti;T~E n g 1 i sh " Sean of the Graduate Schoo1 Holder, Kenneth R., Some Linguistic Aspects of the Heroic Couplet in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley. Doctor of Philosophy (English), August, .1973, 288 pp., 8 tables, bibliography, 69 titles, This dissertation is an examination of the charac- teristics of Phillis Wheatley1s couplet poems in the areas of meter, rhyme, and syntax. The metrical analysis em- ploys Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser's theory of iambic pentameter, the rhyme examination considers the various factors involved in rhyme selection and rhyme function, and the syntactic analysis is conducted within the theoretical framework of a generative grammar similar to that proposed in Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965). The findings in these three areas are compared with the characteristics of a representative sample of the works of Alexander Pope, the poet who sup- posedly exerted a strong influence on Wheatley, a black eighteenth century American poet. Metrically, Wheatleyfs poems have a very low complexity rating. The mean number of Kalle-Keyser correspondence violations per line is 1.9. She rigorously adheres to the standard ten-syllable line, making frequent use of elision to attain this syllable count. The initial trochee is a 2 frequent variation of the Iambic stress pattern and the caesura expectedly appears after the fourth,, fifth, or sixth syllable in the vast majority of her lines. Judged in terms of modern English pronunciation, about 85 per cent of Wheatley's rhymes are phonetically exact, though she also considers semantic, metrical, and syntac- tic factors in selecting rhymes. The most common type of sentence in Wheatley's poetry is the declarative, followed next by imperatives, then by questions and exclamations. Most of her sentences can be derived by the Aspects grammar, though some require modifi- cation of existing rules or special "poetic" rules. Violations of certain grammatical restrictions produce a few deviant sentences. Permutation and deletion rules are used frequently in transforming ordinary language into poetic language. A comparison of Wheatley's poetic characteristics with those found in the Pope selections reveals several similarities and a few significant differences. Metrically, Wheatley's poems resemble Pope's pre-1730 poems but not his later works, which have a higher metrical complexity rating. Both poets typically write the standard ten- syllable line, both frequently substitute the trochee for the iamb in line initial position, and both generally restrict the caesura to line medial position. Wheatley, however, exceeds Pope in the practice of eliding vowel sequences. Syntactically, Pope and Wheatley are quite similar. Both write the different types of sentences in about the same proportion, make frequent use of permutation and deletion rules, and produce some deviant sentences by violating grammatical constraints. Pope's syntax, however, is more likely to reflect the tone, purpose, and theme of the poem. Wheatley effects syntactic changes princi- pally to meet the demands of rhyme and meter. However, despite the fact that Wheatley does not exploit the pos- sibilities of the heroic couplet as fully as Pope, she shares with him many characteristics in the areas of meter, rhyme, and syntax. SOME LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OP TEE HEROIC COUPLET IN THE POETRY OP PH1LLIS WHEATLEY DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OP PHILOSOPHY By Kenneth R. Holder, B. S. E., M. S. E, Denton, Texas August, 1973 TABLE OP CONTENTS Page LIST OF TABLES . iv Chapter I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. THE LINGUISTIC AND METRICAL ASPECTS OF THE HEROIC COUPLET 22 III. METRICAL ASPECTS OF WHEATLEY'S HEROIC COUPLETS 67 IV. WHEATLEY'S RHYME 129 V. SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF WHEATLEY'S POETRY 180 VI. CONCLUSIONS 278 BIBLIOGRAPHY 284 LIST OF TABLES Table Page I. Wheatley's Poems by Category . 68 II. Metrical Complexity in Wheatley's Poems: by Categories 70 III. Metrical Complexity in Wheatley's Poems: by Poem 71 IV. Pope's Group I Poems 85 V. Pope's Group II Poems 87 VI. Comparison of Wheatley's Poems and Pope's Group I Poems 88 VII. Pope's Group II Poems: by Period ..... 90 VIII. Pope and Wheatley: Elision Practices. 110 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This paper, as a study of poetic style, is an examination of a linguistic and artistic phenomenon that has long fascinated readers, scholars, and critics. For centuries, attempts have been made to define and describe the style of poetry. Some of these efforts have been concerned with psychological, sociological, and physiological aspects of the poet's creation; others have focused on the linguistic features which distinguish poetry from so-called "casual" language. Yet these and other types of stylistic studies have all had a common goal: to capture the mysterious aesthetic that inheres in poetry. Literary criticism, a discipline which has tradi- tionally addressed itself to the study of style, has evolved in the twentieth century, according to Donald C. Freeman, in a pattern similar to the development of modern linguistics. The former has progressed from the anthropocentric and biographical work of men like A. C. Bradley through the text centered, autotelic studies of John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and the 'New Criticism,' to attempts to reconstruct an author's conscious and unconscious motives In the work of Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke, and Norman N. Holland. In like manner, modern linguistics has moved from anthropologically and philologically oriented study (Eduard Sievers, Pranz Boas) to data-restricted empiricism and taxonomy (the so- called structural linguistics) to the concern of transformational-generative linguists with how the surface form of language arises from deeper, more universal forms. (1970b:4-5). That literary criticism and linguistics would even- tually converge was perhaps inevitable. The fusion began about mid-century when both literary critics and linguists realized that "there seems to be no reason to separate the literary from the overall linguistic" (Jakobson 1960:377). This union gave rise to a new area of study that has come to be called "linguistic stylistics." Almost simultaneously with its creation, this new discipline witnessed a shift away from the anthropological and philological methods which critics and linguists alike had so heavily relied upon for more than a century. The single work which, perhaps more than any other, signaled both the merger of the two disci- plines and the change in methodology was Henry Lee Smith and George L. Trager's analysis of the English language entitled An Outline of English Structure (1951). Smith and Trager included in Outline a treatment of morphology and syntax, but the most valuable aspect of the work was their descrip- tion of the phonemic system and the suprasegmental features of English (stress, juncture, and pitch). The analysis presented, according to some, enabled the linguistic critic to describe with a new degree of formality and explicitness the rhythm and stress patterns in poetry. Harold Whitehall, in his review of Outline, was the first to assess the impact of this work on stylistic criticism. Noting that there had long been a demon- strable need for a "sound linguistics" in English criti- cism, he observed that this need had not been met by the philological and etymological achievements of the 19th Century Neogrammarian linguists (.who failed to provideJ the critics of their own time or this with a metrics that would analyse, a stylistics that would reveal, a grammar that would describe, or even a history of English sounds that would elucidate (Whitehall 1951:60). The need for a sound linguistics, Whitehall insisted, con- tinued unsatisfied during the first half of the twentieth century, with the failure of the Eastern European for- malists and structuralists to achieve any significant progress in literary criticism. This shortcoming consti- tuted a real limitation. And while Whitehall's statement that "no science can go beyond its mathematics, Landj no criticism can go beyond its linguistics" (80) was much too strong, the fact remained that literary critics had not been equipped with a critical linguistic theory ade- quate for the analysis of prosodic features of poetry. This need for a new linguistic methodology was, Whitehall felt, at least partially satisfied by Smith and Trager's Outline, for they unwittingly assembled for the critic some of the necessary linguistic tools [and provided] the kind of linguistics needed by recent criticism for the solution of its pressing problems of metrics and stylistics. (1951:80). A new stage in the era of linguistic stylistics ushered in by Smith and Trager was initiated in 1957 with the appearance of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, a work that offered as an alternative to taxonomic descrip- tion an analysis of English sentences in terms of their derivation by transformations from underlying structures. Critics who had been justifiably displeased with the in- adequate syntactic theories of the traditional and struc- tural grammarians could with Chomsky's transformational techniques describe with increased precision such things as a writer's syntactic alternatives, patterns of syntactic deviation from the rules of Standard English, and lexical and structural ambiguity. Transformational-generative theory soon embraced phonology (most notably in Chomsky and Morris Halle's The Sound Pattern of English (1968) and in Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser's English Stress; Its Form, Its Growth and Its Role in Verse (1971) and proved equally valuable for the study of sounds in style. Viewing the phonological component as a system of rules which operate in a transformational cycle to map surface structures Into phonetic representations, the transfor- mationalists provided literary critics with the machinery to describe both diachronic and synchronic phonological variation in literature.
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