An Ecological Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s “The Grass”

Abstract

As a burgeoning branch of applied linguistics, ecolinguistics mainly studies the influence of language on the sustainable relationships between human themselves, human and other organisms and even the natural environment. One of the most important approaches of ecolinguistic studies is ecological discourse analysis. For instance, the ecological analysis of natural poetry is bound to involve the hidden ideology and potential significance behind the discourse. Emily Dickinson, a famous poet in the United States, has written 1775 touching poems in her life, more than 500 of which are directly or indirectly related to nature and ecology. It has been discussed from different perspectives in the field of literary studies, but discussion from the linguistics perspective is still rare. Working within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics by M.A.K. Halliday, this paper tries to explore how the poem language expresses the writer’s attitude and thought towards the nature through an ecological and linguistic analysis of Emily Dickinson’s representative nature poetry—The Grass. The study shows that the poet’s choice of language serves the meaning of the poem appropriately and that linguistic analysis of the poem can give implications for literary studies.