THE MEANS OF W. WHITMAN’S LANGUAGE PICTURE FORMATION IN THE TEXTUAL SPACE OF THE COLLECTION ‘LEAVES OF GRASS’

Abstract

In the article the means of forming the language picture of the world of W. Whitman in the textual space of the collection ‘Leaves of Grass’ are analyzed. Since the author considered the poetic word as a living organism, prone to development, he was quite meticulous in the choice of lexical material, demanding maximum correspondence between the depicted object and its artistic definition. It is proved that, in contrast to his contemporaries, the artist set himself the task of breaking the outdated romantic system of poetry and democratically opening the poetic door for language from the point of view of generally accepted norms of non-artistic language. It is noted that such democracy was manifested primarily in the very rhythm of the poem, in the simplicity of the typologically related phrase. It is as if the poet purposely juxtaposed different stylistic lexemes, without avoiding contrasts. It was revealed that from the widely presented lexical system, he chose exactly those words that best reveal the author s intention, mounted them in the text, connected them with other words, creating his unique language picture of the world. It was found out that the author was able to implement such a technique thanks to the principle of cataloging, which can be considered the most characteristic and original feature of his idiostyle. In Whitman s ‘catalog’ the down-to-earth, material principle prevails, the object appears not as a sign of something higher, but as a typical representative of a certain ‘class’. For the artistic reproduction of reality, the artist exploited commonly used vocabulary with a neutral semantics, but by combining it with elevated pathos, he turned poetic language into a passionate monologue of a lyrical hero. No adjectival forms in the vast majority of poems was successfully compensated by the active use of verbs designed to visibly reproduce the dynamics of the literary world. In this way, by analogy with a coordinated orchestra, W. Whitman masterfully built a cultural model of his own macrocosm from the colorful chaos of multifaceted reality.