How Pragmatics Leads to a Better Interpretation of Poetry: A Discourse Stylistic Study of D.H. Lawrence's Poem "Sorrow"

Abstract

This paper is a serious attempt to show how pragmatics can be utilized in the linguistic analysis and interpretation of poetry. It supports the claim that a particular literary text may have more than one reading that leads to different interpretations of that text. The readers' own experiences, the paper claims, play a vital role in creating different readings of one single literary text. Given the fact that in pragmatics an utterance may have more than one meaning depending upon the mutual background information between the addresser and the addressee, the researcher takes advantage of this very fact and uses it in the analysis and interpretation of the poem. The poem concerned is treated as a dialogue between the poet and the reader or the analyst, in which the latter tries to get totally involved in the events of the text (poem). It is worth noticing that only pure linguistic considerations are behind the selection of D. H. Lawrence for conducting this study.