Phonological foregrounding in Robert Graves’s war poems : a stylistics analyses

Abstract

This dissertation observes the techniques employed in foregrounding the sound patterns in a selection of war poetry by Robert Graves. As expressed in the introduction, the main reason for investigating Graves’s harrowing poems related to World War I, is that this section of the poet’s work have often been overlooked. The analysed poems include “Ghost-Raddled”, “It’s a Queer Time”, “Retrospect: The Jests of the Clock”, “The Dead Fox Hunter”, “The Last Post”, “The Leveller”, and “Tom Taylor”. In this study, Leech’s (1969) understanding of foregrounding is linked with the phonological interpretations of the texts to elucidate the significance of Graves’s sound structures. Stress pattern, the manner, place and voicing of phonemes were all taken into consideration during the process of analysis, and utilised to explain each case of foregrounding. The patterns, as made visible through phonemic transcriptions, seem to have a greater tendency to be foregrounded via parallelistic processes rather than internal or external deviance. Hopefully, the research carried out here will serve as inspiration for others to engage with the works of other lesser known war poets, in order to help their memory last another century.