RADICAL LANDSCAPES OF R. F. LANGLEY’S POETRY: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF “TO A NIGHTINGALE”
RADICAL LANDSCAPES OF R. F. LANGLEY’S POETRY: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF “TO A NIGHTINGALE”

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to examine R. F. Langley’s poetry as an example of radical landscape poetry, which is characterized by the interplay between landscape and language in an open field of con/textual relationships, with special focus on his poem “To a Nightingale”. Langley’s poetry can be regarded as a Modernist compound of tradition and innovation, affirmation and negation, certainty and doubt, and the human and the non-human. Langley’s poetic landscape(s) or his artistic canvas is associated with the late-modernist writing of his time. In Langley’s poetry, the relationships between landscape/environment and humanity, the human and the non-human are depicted as mutually constructive. Situated between the romantic and the existentialist discourses, Langley’s poetry possesses a modernist, depersonalized, scientific, innovative, experimental and speculative approach to reality and language. “To a Nightingale” epitomizes the modernist indeterminacy of reality and language through the vertiginous vacillation of the speaker between alternatives of truth and expression in the checkerboard of existence, as well as through the disordered structure and shape of the poem, alternating between opposite poles, through the use of stylistic devices such as parataxis, juxtaposition, enjambment, parallelism, deviation, foregrounding and discoursal relations.

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