Leda and the stylisticians

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of WB Yeats’ ‘Leda and the Swan’ for the 21st century, adopting a Text World Theory perspective (Gavins, 2007; Hidalgo Downing, 2000; Werth, 1999) on this iconic poem. In so doing, I also trace the evolution of the discipline of stylistics – from its roots in formalist linguistics, through functionalist and contextualised stylistics, to the development of cognitive poetics – by examining a series of shifting analyses of the text. I argue that the varying treatments of Yeats’ poem to be found in Halliday (1966), Widdowson (1975) and Burke (2000) can be seen to mirror the development of stylistics over the last half century. I also argue for the positive contribution cognitive poetics can make towards a fuller contemporary understanding of the complex discoursal configuration of ‘Leda and the Swan’, examining both its textual and conceptual structures and its significant political and historical context.