Evolution of Robert Bridges’ Style Through the Lens of Metaphor

Abstract

The study of the author’s individual style is an intensively developing area of modern linguistics. Currently, the author’s individual style is considered as a system characterized by both statics and dynamics. Metaphors are some of the most reliable markers of individual style, since they give an idea of the writer’s personality and mental worldview. This article analyses the individual style in the lyric poetry of Robert Bridges, an outstanding English poet of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The obtained results made it possible to establish that the stable part of Bridges’ individual style is a set of concepts forming his conceptual sphere as well as the central opposition of his oeuvre: the microcosm–macrocosm opposition. The varying characteristics of Bridges’ individual style are the ranks of concepts, changes in which are associated with a shift in the focus of the author’s attention and transformation in his worldview. The quantitative changes in Bridges’ later lyric poems compared to the early ones include a growing share of negatively coloured vocabulary and number of substantive metaphors, as well as an increasing variety of metaphorization of certain concepts. The main trends in Bridges’ individual style transformation are the tendency towards compensation, manifesting itself in various aspects of metaphorization, and the tendency towards simplification and concretization. The analysis of the evolution of Bridges’ metaphorical system showed that at the initial stage of his writing, he is equally interested in both the inner world of a person and the outside world, while in his later lyric poems Bridges focuses on the outside world, in particular, society.

For citation: Kolokol’nikova O.D. Evolution of Robert Bridges’ Style Through the Lens of Metaphor. Vestnik
Severnogo (Arkticheskogo) federal’nogo universiteta. Ser.: Gumanitarnye i sotsial’nye nauki, 2021, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 65–75. DOI: 10.37482/2687-1505-V104