This study focuses on analyzing the use of emotional nouns in poetic texts to determine their stylistic and pragmatic functions, as well as their role in creating a Romantic poetic picture of the world. Using a corpus-based approach and computer programs for text semantic analysis, the study analyzes the frequency, combinability, and distribution of emotion words to identify the author's individual tendency in poetic actualization of emotions and their participation in dominant metaphoric ways of conceptualizing emotions. The research finds that the variability of emotion words is a leading characteristic of the idiostyle, which is a factor in developing an author's poetic picture of reality. The study analyzed 9107 poetic contexts containing emotion nouns to identify dominant associative connections in creating emotional images.
The studies of feelings and emotions has already extended the boundaries of psychology and is actively carried out by philosophers, political scientists, historians, cultural scientists, anthropologists, educators, linguists [1; 2; 3]. Current researches of emotions explore the number of issues ranging from the way emotions shape human life to the existential threat posed by climate change. These diverse studies present a kaleidoscope of suggestive approaches to the potentially endless subject of emotions in theoretical literature. Thus, the variety of approaches from the perspectives of which these problems are treated informs the topicality of the research of linguistic and literary verbalization of emotions and feelings in the context of different epochs and artistic movements.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are two of the most significant figures of the English and European Romanticism. Together, they co-authored the groundbreaking collection of poetry, "Lyrical Ballads" (1798), which marked the beginning of the Romantic movement in English literature. Wordsworth and Coleridge emphasized the importance of imagination and emotion in poetry, challenging the prevailing Neoclassical belief that poetry should follow strict rules and conventions. Both poets were known for their love of nature and the natural world. They saw nature as a source of inspiration, solace, and spiritual renewal, and often used it as a central theme in their poetry. They experimented with new poetic forms and styles, such as the ballad, sonnet, and ode, and tried to expand the range of poetic expression. Wordsworth and Coleridge had a significant influence on other Romantic writers, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Their ideas about poetry, nature, and the sublime helped to shape the literary movement as a whole.
Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats are two of the most well-known poets of the English Romantic movement, and their works had a significant influence on the development of English Romanticism. One of the primary ways that Shelley and Keats influenced the Romantic movement was through their emphasis on emotion and imagination. Both poets believed that poetry should be a vehicle for expressing intense feelings and exploring the limits of the imagination. Another way that Shelley and Keats contributed to the development of English Romanticism was through their use of language and imagery. Both poets were known for their evocative and vivid descriptions of nature and the human experience. Shelley and Keats both contributed to the development of English Romanticism through their emphasis on individualism and personal experience. Both poets wrote about their own experiences and emotions, and they believed that poetry should be a reflection of the poet's inner self. This emphasis on personal expression and individuality was a hallmark of the Romantic movement.
Emotions played a central role in the poetry of Romanticism, a literary movement that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe. The Romantics rejected the rationalism and order of the Enlightenment and instead celebrated the individual, the subjective, and the emotional.
Romantic poets often explored the full range of human emotions, including love, longing, despair, joy, and awe. They believed that emotions were the key to understanding the human experience and that they could provide access to deeper truths and insights. One of the most prominent themes in Romantic poetry is the experience of nature and the emotions it evokes. Romantic poets often used natural imagery to convey their emotions, and they saw the natural world as a source of beauty, inspiration, and solace. Love and longing were also major themes in Romantic poetry. Many Romantic poets wrote about unrequited love and the pain of separation, while others celebrated the joys of love and the beauty of the beloved. They often used vivid and passionate language to convey the intensity of their emotions.
Another common emotion in Romantic poetry is despair. Many Romantic poets wrote about the feelings of isolation and alienation that were common in the modern world, and they expressed a sense of despair about the state of society and the human condition. At the same time, they also held out hope for a better future, and they celebrated the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity. Overall, the poetry of Romanticism is characterized by a deep exploration of human emotions and a belief in the power of emotion to reveal deeper truths about the world and the human experience.
Linguistic, artistic and imagery embodiment of feelings and emotions has become one of the most relevant subject of researches by domestic and foreign scholars in the field of lexicology, lingua-cultural studies, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, poetics, literary criticism, discourse studies, sociolinguistics, semiotics, etc. For example, researchers in the field of lingua-cultural studies claim that language means of verbalization of feelings and emotion in any natural languages are closely related with the phenomena of national (collective) and individual identity, since a certain specific emotion or feelings are said to be the true essence of culture, being encapsulated in a single, untranslatable word-concepts [4; 5; 6; 7].
Interdisciplinary studies include the interrelation of philosophy, aesthetics, art and linguistics and cover core philosophical issues pertaining the relationship between the speech communities and the role of emotions in social, artistic, religious practices, the relationships between emotions and historical reenactment of imagination and creativity; expressivism in art, etc. [4; 5; 6; 7; 8]. Scholars also focus on the cultural and intellectual contexts in which emotion was discussed, by tracing the history of key terms and concepts associated with emotions in order to understand modern discourses and their changes across cultures, time periods, genres, and languages [9; 10; 11]. Culturally and linguistically specific ways of emotional intercourse, is the subject of different researches involving, among others, studies of marriage, relationships, emotions in history and histories of emotions using verbal and nonverbal, multimodal ways of emotions and feelings expression [12; 13; 14; 15].
Among the most productive direction of modern researches is the cross-disciplinary approach of linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and other social scientists in disclosing the influence of the formal properties of language on the expression of emotions, as well as the linguistic encoding of emotions in creole languages [16; 17; 18; 19].
The merge of cultural and literary perspective in treatment of feelings and emotions constitutes the background of the researches of a literary heritage of a certain author. The studies interpret fiction through the lens of cognitive science, which has rapidly developed in the last few decades and achieved the status of an established scholastic approach [20; 21; 22; 23].
Romanticism was an intellectual and artistic movement at the turn of the eighteenth century that reassessed the previous rationalism of the Enlightenment period, by privileging emotion over reason. The free use of emotional expression was a distinguishing feature of Romantic poetic system [10; 11; 13; 14; 21]. The leading role of emotions and feelings in Romanticism was defined by a prominent Romantic poet William Wordsworth in his “Preface” to his Lyrical Ballads who claimed that poetry itself is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings that take their origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. Romanticism actually offered a dynamic vision of emotion, since Romantic poetry, meditative in its nature, suggests the resolution of a personal protagonist’s crisis by thinking about the world through emotional engagement of the poet in the presented situation [10; 11]. The Romanticism has a recurrent theme of an intense use of emotion to express the artist’s / poet’s vision of the world.
The specific comprehensive researches of different emotions and different Romantic authors are presented in [11; 15; 21]. Crucial notions like the active mind, organicism, the unconscious, the fragmented subject, instinct, and intuition, parental feeling and infancy, arising simultaneously within the literature and psychology of the Romantic era, the issues like the corporeality of mind, the role of non-linguistic communication and the peculiarly Romantic understanding of cultural universals are discussed in the studies that bring new light on Coleridge's, Wordsworth's, Keats’s, Shelly’s and Byron’s poetic heritage, worldview and their theories of poetic language [11; 22; 23].
Emotions, their role and expression in Romantic poetry is multifaceted. Thus, the primary methodological issues that should be settled are the definition and typology of emotions and the language means of their verbalization.
Human emotional states are diverse and versatile and are realized in a wide spectrum of manifestations that encompass emotions and feelings which being subjective by nature are determined by different external and internal factors of human existence [24]. Emotions and feelings as a complex psychological phenomena are defined and classifies according to many parameters [25; 26; 27; 28; 29; 30; 31; 32; 33; 34].
Thus, emotions are defined as a complex experience of consciousness, bodily sensation, and behaviour that reflects the personal significance of a thing, an event, or a state of affairs [35]. They are classified:
According to phylogenetic development (or complexity): Protopathic or lower emotions – subcortical, thalamic, phylogenetically more ancient, elementary (satisfaction of hunger, thirst, sexual sensations), associated with instincts, primal urges and their satisfaction. Epicritic or higher emotions ("feelings") are cortical, inherent only to people, phylogenetically younger: they arise in the course of social life, social relations, and work. They include intellectual (curiosity, sense of the new, etc.), moral (patriotism, sense of duty, conscience), aesthetic (sense of beauty). Usually, in a person, higher emotions prevail over lower ones and have a decisive role in life.
According to the subjective tone (perceived as subjectively pleasant, unpleasant or neutral): Positive – satisfaction, joy, confidence, admiration, pride, trust, sympathy, respect, gratitude, tenderness, excitement, mischievousness, security. Negative – dissatisfaction, grief, longing, sadness, despair, sadness, anxiety, fear, pity, fright, resentment, regret, anger, indignation, hatred, dislike, envy, malice, anger, boredom, jealousy, horror, uncertainty, mistrust, confusion, rage, resentment, contempt, disappointment, shame and reluctance to repent, impatience, bitterness. Neutral – curiosity, surprise, astonishment, indifference.
According to their nature: the Basics are innate and form the basis for the formation of more complex emotional processes, states and emotional-personal qualities. They include: joy, sorrow, fear, anger, surprise, disgust. Secondary ones are based on more complex processes, are accompanied by significant physiological changes and combine the basic ones in various combinations. Among the secondary emotions, the following are distinguished: 1) altruistic – arise on the basis of the need for assistance, help, intercession for other people; 2) communicative – their source is the need for communication; 3) gloric (lat. gloria - glory) – associated with the need for self-affirmation, glory, the desire to gain recognition, respect; 4) practical – their prerequisite is a connection with the success or failure of the activity, the desire to succeed in work, the presence of difficulties. They are expressed in feelings of tension, enthusiasm for work, admiration for the results of one's work, pleasant fatigue, satisfaction that the day has not passed in vain; 5) pugnacious (lat. pugna - fight) – they are based on the need to overcome dangers, which "charges" for a fight. This is motivated by the desire for thrills, passion for danger, risk, sports excitement, "sports anger", borderline mobilization of opportunities; 6) romantic associated with the desire for everything unusual, mysterious, unknown; their signs are the expectation of a "miracle", a feeling of a happy fate, special significance; 7) intellectual - they are determined not just by the need for new information, but by the desire to organize it, to achieve "cognitive harmony"; 8) aesthetic - reflect a person's need for harmony, beauty. They do not arise autonomously, since different emotions are intertwined in them; 9) hedonistic – related to the satisfaction of needs for physical and mental comfort; 10) acquisitive (French ‘acquisition’) – they are most often experienced by people with a pronounced interest in accumulating, collecting, acquiring things.
Scholars also singles out stable individual stereotypes of emotional behavior. Emotion is a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral, and physiological elements, by which an individual attempts to deal with a personally significant matter or event. The specific quality of the emotion (e.g., fear, shame) is determined by the specific significance of the event. Emotion typically involves feeling but differs from feeling in having an overt or implicit engagement with the world [36].
Feeling, in psychology, is the perception of events within the body, closely related to emotion. The term feeling is a verbal noun denoting the action of the verb to feel, which derives etymologically from the Middle English verb felen, “to perceive by touch, by palpation.” It soon came to mean, more generally, to perceive through those senses that are not referred to any special organ. As the known special organs of sense were the ones mediating the perception of the external world, the verb to feel came also to mean the perception of events within the body. Psychologists disagree on the use of the term feeling. The preceding definition accords with that of the American psychologist R.S. Woodworth, who defines the problem of feeling and emotion as that of the individual’s “internal state.” Many psychologists, however, still follow the German philosopher in equating feeling to states of pleasantness and unpleasantness, known in psychology as affect [36]. Feeling is a self-contained phenomenal experience. Feelings are subjective, evaluative, and independent of the sensations, thoughts, or images evoking them. Feelings differ from emotions in being purely mental, whereas emotions are designed to engage with the world.
Similar to emotions feelings are classifies according to the variety of parameters that include (among many): modality: positive, negative, neutral; intensity, longevity, depth; consciousness, unconsciousness; complexity; degree of content and generalization, attachment to the object of feeling – passions and interests. There is a distinction between low and high feelings, the latter are defined as moral, aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, parental and spiritual. Moral are feelings in which a person's stable attitude towards social events, people, and himself is revealed; their source is the common life of people, their relationships, the struggle to achieve a socially important goal. They are distinguished by activity – attitude to one's duties, sense of duty, conscience; social institutions; the state; a certain class, etc.: love, friendship, hate, feelings of pity, envy, jealousy.
Spiritual are feelings that reflect the spiritual world of a person and are related to the analysis, understanding and evaluation of what is happening. Intellectual – are an emotional response, an individual's attitude to cognitive activity in its broadest sense. They are connected with mental, cognitive activity of a person, constantly accompany it and express a person's attitude to his thoughts, the process and consequences of intellectual activity. Levels of development of intellectual feelings are the following: curiosity, inquisitiveness, purposefulness, persistent interest in a certain field of knowledge, enthusiasm for cognitive activity. Praxical (from the Greek prωxis – experience, practice) is a person's experience of his attitude to activity. They arise in practical activities. A person reacts to various types of activity – work, education, sports. They are enthusiasm, satisfaction with the activity, in a creative approach, joy from success or dissatisfaction, indifference, etc. Aesthetic feelings are a sense of the beauty of natural phenomena, work, harmony of colors, sounds, movements and forms. Their source is works of art, music, painting, sculpture, artistic prose and poetry, as well as works of architecture and achievements in the field of technical structures. The highest levels of development of the aesthetic feeling are manifested in feelings of the beautiful, ugliness, tragic or comic [24; 25].
We use these psychological perspective of classification of feelings and emotions as a ground for thematic and semantic classification of emotions in the analyzed empirical material. We distinguish between positive and negative feelings and emotions; and feelings and emotions classified according to their nature and modality: basic or complex, low or high.
Linguistic manifestation of emotions is versatile and covers the language elements of all language levels from phonological to syntactic. The attention is paid to topics such as sound-symbolism and related phenomena (e.g., interjections, ideophones), many linguistics devote their studies to meaning as complex and multifold: the referential or descriptive aspect of meaning as well as connotative one, expressive meaning that conveys speaker’s feeling or attitude towards the content of the message, social meaning indicating speaker’s social role and stance. Emotions are expressed figuratively or implicitly by language elements that acquire emotional or expressive meaning in context. There are recent studies of emotion in discourse [2; 3; 8]. However, most researches of language manifestation of emotion focus on the national language lexicon – the descriptive emotion words – that, being subjected to corpusbased analysis, provide the researcher with the data that allow generalizing about the way of literary (poetic) conceptualization of emotions and author’s idiostylistic preferences.
In my study, I focus on lexical units that denote emotions – the nouns as nominators of emotional concepts in poetic texts. The methodology of corpus based approach realized in this paper (by means of computer program of text semantic analysis Tropes and Ant.conc.) presupposes the following tasks and procedures: the analysis of the frequency, combinability and distribution of emotion words that denote or depict emotions with the purpose of defining their stylistic and pragmatic functions, and their participation in actualizing the dominating metaphoric ways of conceptualizing emotions. The performance of the described algorithm allows disclosing the author’s individual tendency in poetic actualization of emotions and their role in creating the Romantic poetic picture of the world.
The frequency and distribution of emotion words in poetic discourses of the four defined authors allows identifying authors’ individual poetic preferences in conceptualization of emotions and draw a conclusion concerning the variability of emotion words as a leading characteristic of the idiostyle – a kind of a poetic “degree of emotivism” as a factor of developing author’s poetic picture of reality. This stage of analysis was performed by Tropes program application to facilitate the process of emotion words sampling. The frequency and combinability of selected emotion nouns were analyzed by application of concordance methods with the help of Ant.conc program. This stage of the research helped to identify the dominating metaphoric models of poetic actualization of emotions in the discourse of each author and to define dominating associative connections in creating emotional images. There has been processed 9107 of poetic contexts that contain emotion nous.
Poetic discourse of William Wordsworth. By application the Tropes program I identified the configuration of the reference field FEELINGS. The generalized referential field of feelings and emotion in the poetry of William Wordsworth is presented in the picture below (see Figure 1).
It was established: the density of emotion nouns in poetic context - 693 units and variability of lexical representation of the referential field FEELINGS – 51 nouns: Delight, guilt, sorrow, friend, expectation, pleasure, despair, solemnity, pain, happiness, sadness, regret, misery, disdain, joy, fear, pride, gratitude, cheerfulness, thrill, compassion, distress, humour, romance, terror, bliss, seclusion, affection, hope, ecstasy, solitude, love, sympathy, reproach, tranquility, envy, admiration, cheers, indignation, vexation, confusion, commensurability, quiver, hate, malice, reverence, remorse, tenderness, rapture, melancholy, gladness, etc.
Feelings and emotion of positive spectrum: among which there are – delight, pleasure, happiness, joy, pride, gratitude, cheerfulness, humour, romance, bliss, affection, hope, ecstasy, admiration, cheers, reverence, rapture, gladness, thrill.
Feelings and emotion of negative spectrum: among which there are – guilt, sorrow, despair, pain, sadness, regret, misery, disdain, fear, distress, terror, reproach, envy, indignation, vexation, hate, malice.
Feelings and emotion of neutral spectrum: among which there are – expectation, solemnity, compassion, seclusion, solitude, tranquility, remorse, melancholy.
We can observe practically even distribution of emotions and feelings of positive and negative spectrum.
Basics emotions: joy, sorrow, fear, pleasure, pain, sadness cheerfulness, thrill, terror, cheerers, quiver, etc.; moral, aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, parental and spiritual feelings: happiness, love, affection, sympathy, hate, etc. are balanced in the poetic discourse of Wordsworth in terms of their density and variability.
To establish the models of metaphorization I selected 10 emotion nouns with different frequency and with the help of Ant.conc program analyzed the contextual realization of their meaning and combinability: sorrow (19), delight (24) despair (4), pain (27), joy (66), solitude (12), hope (30), love (90), misery (13). The absolute frequency is indicated in brackets. The pictures below demonstrate the results of Ant.conc application for the nouns sorrow, pain and love (see Figure 2-4).
The identified metaphoric models are: FEELING/EMOTION IS AN AGENT, CREATURE, PARENT, THING CONTAINED, CONTAINER, POWER, GIFT, PRECIOUS THING, LIQUID. Emotion and feeling can act as a cause of physical or spiritual transformation, experiencing positive or negative states or sensations: love – pain / bliss, sorrow – pain, joy – sweetness / bliss, guilt – pain, sorrow, fear, etc. that display the tendency of metaphorizing emotion and feeling through related emotion, feeling, sensation, state, experience.
However, there is no possibility to speak about direct correlation between frequency of emotional concept and frequency of their metaphorization. Emotion noun with zero metaphorization is misery. Emotion nous are frequently used in fixed epithets being ascribed some characteristics of intensity: pure delight, grievous pain, gentle love, perfect love, vast solitude, little joy; modality of expressiveness: cheerful hope, boyish hope; cheerful love, true love, overflowing love; utter solitude; lawful joy; sorrowful fear, guilty fear.
Similar stages of analysis have been applied to poetic discourses of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats.
Poetic discourse of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By application of the Tropes program I identified the configuration of the reference field FEELINGS. The generalized referential field of feelings and emotion in the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is presented in the picture below (see Figure 5)
It was established: the density of emotion nouns in poetic context - 1790 units and variability of emotion nouns that constitute the referential field FEELING – 100 nouns:
The results of emotional variability are presented on the picture below (see Figure 6).
The results of Coleridge’s poetic discourse analysis reveals the great coincidence in the spectrum of emotional concepts between Coleridge and Wordsworth. The following emotion nous coincide: Delight, guilt, sorrow, friend, expectation, pleasure, despair, solemnity, pain, happiness, sadness, regret, misery, disdain, joy, fear, pride, gratitude, cheerfulness, thrill, compassion, distress, humour, romance, terror, bliss, seclusion, affection, hope, ecstasy, solitude, love, sympathy, reproach, tranquility, envy, admiration, cheers, indignation, vexation, confusion, quiver, hate, malice, reverence, remorse, tenderness, rapture, melancholy, gladness.
The list of specific emotion nouns includes: Desire, venom, disappointment, outrage, anguish, agony, exultation, mercy, oppression, rapture, distress, rage, fury, beatitude, tenderness, eagerness, temper, seclusion, ecstasy, amusement, desolation, conceit, reverence, agony, gayness, merriment, honour, enthusiasm, loath, horror, loneliness, discontent, worship, despondency, mortification, entrancement, affliction, brooding, inquietude, gayness, repentance, jealousy.
The perceptible high degree of emotional density and variability of poetic context in Coleridge’s discourse can be explained by: the richer synonymic variations to basic emotional conceptual / referential fields: fear (terror, horror, mortification), pain (anguish, agony, venom), sadness (despondency, brooding, affliction, distress, grief), love (passion, romance), solitude (seclusion, loneliness), rage (outrage, temper, fury, discontent, indignation), gladness (gayness, merriment), etc.; the presence of emotions of high intensity and expressivity: rapture, exultation, beatitude, loath, worship, entrancement, repentance, etc.
Feelings and emotion of positive spectrum: among which there are – delight, pleasure, happiness, joy, pride, gratitude, cheerfulness, humour, love, bliss, affection, hope, ecstasy, admiration, cheers, reverence, rapture, gladness, thrill,
Feelings and emotion of negative spectrum: among which there are – guilt, sorrow, despair, pain, sadness, regret, misery, disdain, fear, distress, terror, reproach, malice, grief, jealousy, sorrow.
Feelings and emotion of neutral spectrum: among which there are – expectation, seclusion, solitude, tranquility, remorse, melancholy.
We can observe practically even distribution of emotions and feelings of positive and negative spectrum.
Basics emotions: joy, sorrow, fear, pleasure, pain, sadness cheerfulness, thrill, terror, cheerers, quiver, etc.; moral, aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, parental and spiritual feelings: happiness, love, affection, sympathy, reverence, worship, inquietude, tenderness, beatitude, tranquility, repentance, premonition, etc. are balanced in the poetic discourse of Coleridge in terms of their density and variability.
To establish the models of metaphorization I analyzed 10 emotion nouns that are common for poetic discourses of both authors and 5 emotion nouns that are specific for Coleridge’s discourse with different frequency.
Common nouns - sorrow (34), delight (26) despair (14), pain (43), joy (97), solitude (17), hope (108), love (335); Specific nouns – agony (13), tenderness (7), desolation (3), premonition (2), rapture (5). The absolute frequency is indicated in brackets.
With the help of Ant.conc program, I analyzed the contextual realization of their meaning and combinability. The pictures below demonstrate the results of Ant.conc application for the nouns delight, pain and rapture (see Figures 7, 8).
The identified metaphoric models are: EMOTION/ FEELING – SPIRIT, AGENT, MYSTERIOUS CREATURE, NATURAL PHENOMENON, PHYSICAL PHENOMENON, SUBSTANCE, FLOWER / PLANT, DISEASE / PAIN, DOOM / FATE, POWER, CONTAINER OR THE THING CONTAINED. For example: Clouds of sorrow, shadows of delight, seas of pain, joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice, soft accent of domestic joy, bright flower of hope, bud of hope, and sheltered herself in joy. One of the most productive means of metaphoric conceptualization of feelings and emotions in Coleridge poetry is metaphor-personification: love and joy look round.
Duality, complexity and ambivalence of emotional concepts is displayed by their possible transformations – for example, joy into sorrow, hope into despair and vice versa; as well as by a number of oxymoron: the gentle violence of joy, warm tear of joy, joy in tears, gloomy joy.
However, there is no possibility to speak about direct correlation between frequency of emotional concept and frequency of their metaphorization. Emotion noun with zero metaphorization is premonition. Emotion nous are frequently used in fixed epithets being ascribed some characteristics of intensity and modality of expressiveness: mild, soft, scounting sorrow; huge, pure, deep, true, dark delight; dull, huge, hollow, silent pain; deep, hollow, meditative, silent, generous, uneasy, sweet, secret joy; extreme, savage, silent agony.
It has been observed a tendency of frequent associations of positive emotions with voice, music, light and negative emotions with load, flame, scream, torture, suffering that constitute the semantic grounds of epithets and similes.
The performed analysis displayed only a general surface configuration of the space of poetic conceptualization of emotions and feeling in poetries of the first (older) generation of English Romantic poets, as the analytical potential of the applied computer instruments is limited. However, it can substantiate the ideas about the general features of poetic discourse of either author and to arrive at conclusions based on the comparative analysis.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are two of the most influential poets of the Romantic era, and their works are characterized by a deep appreciation for nature, a focus on individual experience, and an exploration of the human imagination. Wordsworth's poetic system can be seen in his famous preface to the Lyrical Ballads, which he co-authored with Coleridge. In this preface, Wordsworth argues that poetry should be written in the language of ordinary people and that the subject matter should be drawn from the lives and experiences of everyday individuals. Wordsworth's use of language is both highly expressive and reserved in terms of avoiding extensive use of imagery. Wordsworth's poetry is marked by its emotiveness and expressivity, and his ability to convey powerful emotions through clear and direct language. He believed that the imagination was not just a tool for creating beautiful and fantastical imagery, but that it was also a means of perceiving and understanding the world around us. Through the imagination, Wordsworth believed that the poet could reveal deeper truths about human experience and the natural world.
Coleridge's poetic system, on the other hand, was more focused on the power of the imagination itself. Coleridge believed that the imagination was a force that could transcend the limits of the individual self and connect us to a larger, universal consciousness. He was deeply interested in the supernatural, and his poetry often explores themes of magic, mystery, and the unknown. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is known for his ability to express complex emotions through his poetry. His works often explore themes such as love, loss, nature, and the supernatural. Coleridge's poetry is known for its ability to evoke complex emotions in the reader, from love and joy to loss and despair. His use of vivid imagery and symbolism allows him to explore deep emotional themes in a way that resonates with readers even today. Coleridge also believed that poetry had the power to transform the world, and he saw the poet as a kind of prophet or visionary. His poetry often seeks to communicate profound truths about the nature of existence and the human condition, and his use of rich, vivid imagery and complex symbolism creates a sense of mystery and depth in his work.
Thus, while both Wordsworth and Coleridge shared a deep appreciation for nature, a focus on individual experience, and an exploration of the human imagination, their poetic systems differed in terms of their emphasis on the role of the poet and the power of the imagination itself, the stylistic and conceptual dominants.
These complex differences in poetic systems of both authors is specifically reflected in the ways of poetic conceptualization of emotions: difference in the volume of emotional lexicon as well as in the richness of metaphoric models of emotional concepts actualization. Coleridge’s poetic discourse is characterized by the greater variety of emotional concepts, richness of their synonymic representation and diversity of the ways of metaphorization.
Shelley and Keats were two of the most important poets of the Romantic era. They shared a deep appreciation for beauty, nature, and the imagination, and their works reflect this in various ways. Both poets employed poetic systems that reflect their individual perspectives and creative impulses.
Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry often explored themes of political and social reform, along with a desire for a world of perfect beauty, harmony, and order. He often employed poetic structures that reflect this desire for order and balance, including sonnets and odes. In his sonnets, Shelley explores the complex themes of love, mortality, and social injustice. Meanwhile, his odes are devoted to the themes of beauty and the natural world.
John Keats, on the other hand, was more concerned with the complex emotions of the human experience, often through rich, sensuous descriptions of the natural world. He employed a range of poetic systems in his work, including sonnets, odes, and longer narrative poems dedicated to the topics of beauty, mortality, and the transience of life.
Taking into consideration all mentioned above, I could hypothesize that the difference in poetic worldview of the representatives of the younger generation of English Romantics manifests itself in the specificity of emotional concepts verbalization in their poetic discourses.
Poetic discourse of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By application the Tropes program I identified the configuration of the reference field FEELINGS. The generalized referential field of feelings and emotion in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley is presented in the pictiure below (see Figure 9).
The density of emotional concepts in Shelley’s poetry is 5197 units, however, the variability of emotional nouns does not exceed the number of 84 items. Most emotion nouns coincide with Coleridge’s ones, there have been identified the following specific emotional nous: ambition, foreboding, languor, zeal, rejoicing, ardous, penitence, complacency, repentance, torments, well-being, martyrdom, aversion, oppression, compassion, amazement, contentment (17 nouns). However, we also observed the direct correlation between the frequency of emotion noun and degree of its metaphorization: the more frequent is the noun the greater is the number of metaphors, epithets, similes created by them. Thus, love (793), fear (303), hope (283) and joy (206) are the most frequently metaphorized feelings: the dominating type of metaphor is personification (voice of love, forgiving love, blind, speechless love, kind love, etc.).
The defined metaphoric models include: EMOTION/ FEELING – SPIRIT, AGENT, MYSTERIOUS CREATURE, NATURAL PHENOMENON, PHYSICAL PHENOMENON, SUBSTANCE, FLOWER / PLANT, DOOM / FATE, POWER, CONTAINER OR THE THING CONTAINED, INFINITY, ETERNITY, DEPTH, most of which are also characteristic for Coleridge’s poetry (realm of grief, world of hate). The richness of Shelley’s emotional representation of reality is sustained by oxymoron (populous solitude; lovely grief) and the variety of synesthetic images (sweet sadness, sweet solitude, coldest solitude, azure hope).
Emotion nous are frequently used in fixed epithets being ascribed some characteristics of intensity and modality of expressiveness: calm, deep, utter, tranquil, vast solitude; blunt grief; indefatigable, abandoned hope.
Poetic discourse of John Keats. By application the Tropes program I identified the configuration of the reference field FEELINGS. The generalized referential field of feelings and emotion in the poetry of John Keats is presented in the picture below (see Figure 10).
The emotional density of Keats poetic discourse is 1445 units, the variability of emotional concepts is rather low and its general palette is in coincidence with emotional concepts of his fellow poets – Coleridge and Shelley. Among the specific poetic concepts there are the following: fervor, ravishment, execration, penance, torment which frequency is relatively low. The most frequent and productive in terms of their participation in imagery poetic resources are the following nouns: pleasure (42), sorrow (52), pain (67), hope (33), delight (37), joy (49), love (271), grief (38), bliss (33).
The defined metaphoric models include: EMOTION/ FEELING – SPIRIT, AGENT, MYSTERIOUS CREATURE, NATURAL PHENOMENON, PHYSICAL PHENOMENON, SUBSTANCE, FLOWER / PLANT, BIRD, LIGHT, FLAME, CONTAINER OR THE THING CONTAINED, BEAUTY (beauty is a joy forever; love pour’d her beauty in my warm veins), VOICE. The richness of Keats’s emotional representation of reality is sustained by the variety of synesthetic images (sweet sorrow, melodious sorrow, sweet love, scarlet pain, sweet hope, sweet delight, warm, soft delight, delicious love), and a number of oxymoron (sweet grief, the sweetness of the pain).
Emotion nous are frequently used in fixed epithets being ascribed some characteristics of intensity and modality of expressiveness. The poetics of Keats, though not much variegated in terms of difference or intense synonymy, is characterized by the complexity of emotional concepts poetic representation. Among them there are sustained metaphors, complex metaphors-personifications and complex epithets that embody the richness of author’s imagination, his desire to describe the emotion in all subtleties of its nature: a lonely grief, a breathless honey-feel of bliss; cruel pain, dizzier pain; His every sense had grown / Ethereal for pleasure; ‘bove his head / flew a delight half graspable.
Thus, both poets-representatives of the younger generation of English Romanticism, as we assumed, are characterized by a different principles of poetic representations of emotions. By a rather limited number of poetic emotion nouns Keats creates emotional intensity of poetry due to the complexity of emotional images, extension of emotional nouns contextual pragmatics, while the discourse of Shelley is the most prolific in the number of poetic contexts that contain emotional nouns as such and by the realization of conventional metaphoric models, characteristic for his older poets-compatriots. Their density and contextual aggregation creates the vivid, perceptible, detailed description of emotions.
Both Shelley and Keats employed a range of poetic systems to explore their individual perspectives on life, love, nature, and the human experience. Their works continue to be celebrated for their beauty, depth, and complexity, and they remain important figures in the development of English literature. Shelley and Keats, though contemporaries of Wordsworth and Coleridge, approached poetry with a different sensibility and poetics that distinguished them from the earlier generation of English Romantic poets.
One of the key differences was their emphasis on imagination and the ideal. Shelley, for instance, believed that the imagination was the key to creating a better world. He saw poets as the "unacknowledged legislators of the world," meaning that they had the power to shape society by creating new ideals and visions of the future. In contrast, Wordsworth and Coleridge placed greater emphasis on nature and the ordinary experiences of everyday life. They believed that through contemplation of nature and a focus on the "common man," they could find spiritual renewal and moral guidance.
Keats, on the other hand, emphasized the sensual and the aesthetic in his poetry. He sought to create a "poetry of sensation" that would engage the reader's emotions and imagination. He saw the beauty in everyday objects and experiences, and sought to capture that beauty in his poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge, by contrast, were more concerned with exploring the spiritual and philosophical implications of nature.
Another key difference between the two generations of poets was their use of language. Shelley and Keats were known for their lyrical and musical use of language, with a focus on the sound and rhythm of words. They sought to create a sense of beauty and harmony through their poetry, using complex rhyme schemes and meter to achieve this effect. This fact can be considered as the reason for the productivity of oxymoron and synesthetic imagery in their works. Wordsworth and Coleridge, by contrast, were more interested in the power of language to convey complex ideas and emotions. They often used a simpler, more conversational style of language, and were less concerned with intricate poetic structures.
In sum, Shelley and Keats brought a new emphasis on the imagination, the ideal, and the aesthetic to English Romantic poetry, while Wordsworth and Coleridge focused more on nature, the spiritual, and the moral. Additionally, Shelley and Keats were known for their musical use of language, while Wordsworth and Coleridge placed a greater emphasis on the power of language to convey complex ideas and emotions.
The study of emotions and feelings is a diverse and multidisciplinary field that has been explored by various scholars in different disciplines. The research on emotions covers a range of issues from the role of emotions in human life to the impact of climate change. The text focuses on the analysis of the density and variability of emotion and feeling nouns in the poetry of four significant figures in English Romanticism, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Each poet's emotional concepts, metaphoric models, and emotional spectra are discussed, showing that they all use a rich variety of emotional concepts, metaphors, and poetic devices to represent emotions and feelings in their poetry. The study shows the importance of emotions and feelings in poetic discourse and their impact on the development of English Romanticism. The study focused on the lexical units that represent emotions and their roles in creating the Romantic poetic picture of the world in the poetry of English Romanticism. The application of corpus techniques and computer assisted frequency and distribution analysis enables to perform a comparative analysis of the ways of poetic actualization of emotions by different authors.
William Wordsworth's poetry. Using Tropes and Ant.conc programs, the research identified 51 nouns in the referential field of feelings and emotions, which are distributed evenly between positive and negative spectrums, as well as neutral. The research also established the metaphoric models of emotion, including FEELING/EMOTION IS AN AGENT, CREATURE, PARENT, THING CONTAINED, CONTAINER, POWER, GIFT, PRECIOUS THING, LIQUID. The study found that there is no direct correlation between frequency and metaphorization of emotional concepts.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetic discourse. The analysis found a high density of emotion nouns in Coleridge's poetry 1790, with 100 variability of emotion nouns that constitute the referential field of feeling. There is a significant difference in the spectrum of emotional concepts between Coleridge and Wordsworth's poetry. Coleridge's discourse displays a high degree of emotional density and variability, which can be explained by the richer synonymic variations to basic emotional conceptual/referential fields and the presence of emotions of high intensity and expressivity. The identified metaphoric models are EMOTION/FEELING – SPIRIT, AGENT, MYSTERIOUS CREATURE, NATURAL PHENOMENON, PHYSICAL PHENOMENON, SUBSTANCE, FLOWER/PLANT, DISEASE/PAIN, DOOM/FATE, POWER, CONTAINER OR THE THING CONTAINED. Coleridge's poetry employs a range of metaphors and figures of speech to convey the duality, complexity, and ambivalence of emotional concepts. The analysis did not find a direct correlation between the frequency of emotional concepts and the frequency of their metaphorical use.
Based on the performed analysis, it can be concluded that Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry is rich in emotional and feeling-related concepts, with a density of 5197 emotional units. The emotional nouns used in his poetry do not exceed 84 items, with some specific emotional nouns and the majority of emotional concepts characteristic for the discourse of Coleridge. The frequency of emotional nouns in Shelley's poetry has a direct correlation with the degree of its metaphorization. Love, fear, hope, and joy are the most frequently metaphorized feelings, with personification being the dominating type of metaphor. Shelley uses several metaphoric models to represent emotions, including SPIRIT, AGENT, MYSTERIOUS CREATURE, NATURAL PHENOMENON, PHYSICAL PHENOMENON, SUBSTANCE, FLOWER/PLANT, DOOM/FATE, POWER, CONTAINER OR THE THING CONTAINED, INFINITY, AND ETERNITY. Oxymoron and synesthetic images are also used to represent emotions. Emotional nouns are frequently used in fixed epithets ascribing some characteristics of intensity and modality of expressiveness. Overall, Shelley's poetry portrays a rich and varied representation of emotions and feelings. The peculiarity of John Keats poetic discourse and his use of emotional concepts and metaphors. Keats is described as creating emotional intensity through the complexity of emotional images and contextual pragmatics, using a limited number of poetic emotion nouns. The defined metaphoric models include: EMOTION/ FEELING – SPIRIT, AGENT, MYSTERIOUS CREATURE, NATURAL PHENOMENON, PHYSICAL PHENOMENON, SUBSTANCE, FLOWER / PLANT, BIRD, LIGHT, FLAME, CONTAINER OR THE THING CONTAINED, BEAUTY, VOICE. The richness of Keats’s emotional representation of reality is sustained by the variety of synesthetic images, and a number of oxymoron. Overall, Shelley and Keats are credited with bringing a new emphasis on imagination, the ideal, and the aesthetic to English Romantic poetry, while Wordsworth and Coleridge focused more on nature, the spiritual, and the moral.
The perspectives of further research. As the application of the described computer tools is limited in their analytical potential and is not able to disclose the implicit ways of poetic conceptualization of the selected phenomena, emotions in Romantic poetry can be studied through other literary analysis methods such as close reading, comparative analysis, and semantic analysis. Close reading involves a detailed analysis of the language, imagery, and symbolism used in the poem to identify how emotions are represented and conveyed. Comparative analysis compares different poems or works by the same author or different authors to identify common themes, motifs, and emotional representations. Semantic analysis involves using digital tools and software to analyse the language of the poem and identify patterns in emotional language, metaphors, and symbols. Additionally, a study of the historical and cultural context of Romantic poetry can provide insights into the prevailing emotions, attitudes, and beliefs of the period and how they are reflected in the poetry. 6. References [10] [1] [2] [24] [25]