Motivation and textual meaning in the stylistics of poetry

Jeffries, Lesley (2025) Motivation and textual meaning in the stylistics of poetry. In: Style as Motivated Choice : In memory of Peter Verdonk (1934–2021). Linguistic Approaches to Literature . John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 45-67. ISBN 9789027220387

Abstract

This chapter assesses Verdonk’s work on poetry through the lens of my own work on textual meaning in poetry. Using Wilfred Owen’s war poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” as an illustration, it re-examines the attempt in Jeffries (2022) to establish whether a framework originally applied to ideology could be developed into a more general model of textual meaning. The broader project concluded that the framework of Textual Conceptual Functions (TCFs) as originally developed cover much of what might be seen as consensus about the stylistic choices in poems, though there is additional contextually based meaning arising from individual readings of poems. The approach provides a systematic way to identify and assess aspects of a poem’s meaning that would not necessarily be found by investigating formal linguistic features alone or by a literary historical or social approach.