Speech act analysis of British and American poetry

Abstract

Usually, when learning poetry, students are encouraged to let their imagination run wild and consider elements relating to a poem, such as historical background, the poet’s biography, and figures of speech to come up with the literary interpretation. However, this traditional way of learning poetry is too ideal, complicated, and difficult, especially for new poetry students. The purpose of this study was to apply a supporting device, speech act theory, in the linguistics field to learn poetry in the literature field. Felicity conditions of each act play important roles as a more systematic, concrete, readily understandable tool to appreciate the aesthetics of poetry. The study analyzed British and American poems to find out the speech acts and compare felicity conditions of each act to what happened in the excerpt to crosscheck the literary interpretation. The results revealed that felicity condition from the speech act theory helped in cross-checking the literary interpretation and also made the poetry comprehension easier, more explainable, and more systematic than solely relying on imagination and elements conventionally used in the literature field. As a result, the heuristic tool from linguistics could be combined, applied, and standardized in the poetry pedagogy so that students could easily comprehend the piece and deeply adore its aesthetics.