Style Evolution: Space and Movement in Longfellow’s Lyrical Poems

Abstract

Variance of individual style over time and the tendencies in style evolution are important issues in modern linguistics. This paper investigates how parameters of space and movement categorization were deployed by the famous American poet H.W. Longfellow at different stages of his creative career. The attention is focused on lexical units with spatial meaning. The analysis revealed significant changes in (i) the structure of space, (ii) the ratio of horizontal vs. vertical relations of objects, statics vs. dynamics, and (iii) the role of a human being in poetic space. The early verse represents the world as a balanced unity, which then turns into a more complex system with two strata of reality. At the final stage of Longfellow’s creative career, space in his poetic world is integrated again but now acquires a new structural organisation that is different, to a certain extent, from that of his early period.