Author(s)

Ziqiu Gong ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ The School of Languages, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai, 201620, China

Corresponding Author

Ziqiu Gong

ABSTRACT

Emily Dickinson was a representative of the Imagist poets in the early 20th century. She was good at observing the features of animals and using their characteristics in metaphors, so animal metaphors account for a large part of her poetic works. She used animal metaphors to reflect the context of the times and her personal life and to express her emotions and thoughts. This article intends to study the animal metaphors in Emily Dickinson's poetry and the profound implications embodied in them, based on cognitive linguistics. Different from former researches, this thesis is to study metaphors of animals and their functions in the poetry and it focuses on four typical animal images, including birds, bees, crickets and rats. Through the use of these animal metaphors, we are able to understand the profound meanings of the poems as well as Emily Dickinson's core of thoughts and attitudes towards the times, thus mapping the poet's own personality.

KEYWORDS

Animal Metaphor, Emily Dickinson, Cognitive Linguistics

CITE THIS PAPER

Ziqiu Gong, A Brief Analysis of Animal Metaphor in Emily Dickinson's Poetry. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2024) Vol. 7: 12-18. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2024.070203.

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