Dear Sheeraz Ali,

Yes, you can apply CDA to poetry – I hope the following references/ links are of assistance

Kind regards

Paul Chaney

Dalia Gavriely-Nuri (2012) Cultural approach to CDA, Critical Discourse Studies, Volume 9, Issue 1, February 2012, pages 77-85. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17405904.2011.636484

Snežana Dabić (2010) Discourse analysis versus philosophic reading of a literary text: The herne's egg, W.B. Yeats, Critical Discourse Studies, Volume 7, Issue 2, May 2010, pages 113-125 DOI:10.1080/17405901003675414  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17405901003675414

Arran Stibbe (2014) An Ecolinguistic Approach To Critical Discourse Studies, Critical Discourse StudiesVolume 11, Issue 1, January 2014, pages 117-128 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17405904.2013.845789

el-Malik, Shiera S. (2015) Interruptive discourses: Léopold Senghor, African Emotion and the poetry of politics, African Identities, Volume 13, Number 1, 2 January 2015, pp. 49-61. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2013.838368

Roberts; Brasel; Crawford (2014) Poetry as praxis: An exploration of poetry discourse as qualitative inquiry, Journal of Poetry Therapy, Volume 27, Number 4, 2 October 2014, pp. 167-181. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2014.948262

Romanus, Aboh (2013) Proverbs and Euphemisms as Discourse Strategies in Joe Ushie's Poetry, African Studies, Volume 72, Number 1, 1 April 2013, pp. 107-120. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2013.776199

Dear Paul Chaney and Violeta Cautin-Epifani,

Thanks for your response to the question. I have viewd answers and the appnded files. I got the very idea about the application of CDA tools to the evaluation of any poetic work.

CDA is an academic affair. It has nothing to do with the practice of writing or presenting poetry. If this was to change, with CDA being applied to all poems prior to presentation, or applied by editors to make choices, poetry - as it has been known - would probably expire, and turn into another bizarre academic exercise.  My name is Mark Govier, I write and present poems.

Dear Mark ,

I can not figure out the reason why poetry is not amenable to  CDA , of course after  it is published and presented ,

Moreover, transforming poetry to an academic exercise  is not worrisome provided the poets' imagination and ideas are not restricted or denigrated by  ''philistine'' attitudes.

I also  write poetry  and have published on CDA.

However, I completely agree with you on the fact that CDA , if applied by editors to make choices, can be detrimental to the free unshackled flow of profound ideas the repercussion of which could be marketization and bowdlerization  of poetry as a fantastic literary genre.

Hi Rahimi,

I would not deny that persons in non maths-science academia derive satisfaction in concocting and applying various analytical systems that allegedly 'decipher' fiction works - such systems, however, do not generally explain why people read poetry or fiction.

I appreciate some in English departments do wish to use their brains in a more complex manner, and would suggest a course in Pure Maths, Applied Maths or similar science subjects, could provide them with this.

The problem, as I see it, is when such analytical systems are picked up by artistically mediocre students in English departments, who, once armed with their PhD or whatever, seek to impose these systems on the rest of us.

Mark

Dear Sheeraz

Language is about power and celebration of ones understanding of it. Poets identify a choice of words to employ in their poetry. Through the analysis of the carefully chosen words, the readers get to understand the actual meaning being communicated by the poets. An example will be analyzing two poems, where one is written by a person politically colonized and the other by the colonizer who has power over the colonized. The language employed by the two poets in their works will indeed depict their stance and feelings related to their situations. Therefore CPD can be applied to poetry in my view.

Mafiki

Dear Sheeraz,

Language is not about power or celebration.  In the real world, language is about communication. The readers and the hearers of poetry do not necessarily wish - outside the limited and restrictive world of university non maths science departments - to descend into the world of pseudo-intellectual analytics. Rather,  they most often wish to connect with a poem, poet, in the most natural and instinctive of manners. 

I have no problem with any non maths science academic or academically inculcated individual, choosing the CPD approach to poetry, within academia. However, I do when this is extended, outside of academia.

Mark

Maybe poetry language is about everything, including power. I write poetry, and I think that CDA could be applied on my writings since they are influenced by politics, ideologies, and personal beliefs. This is my humble opinion.

Dear All,

I appreciate your answers to the question and there is no doubt that CDA is an academic discipline.  A number of academic setting in Pakistan use poetry for the teaching of English as a Foreign language. off course, it is debatable to consider poetic meaning can be discovered by applying CDA but the lines or words follow meter which are difficult to analyze because many CDA experts have been occupied with the analysis of text rather than poetry.

Dear Mr. Sheeraz Ali,

I happened to come across this article "Critical Discourse Analysis of William Blake's Poem The Sick Rose" on the following link:

http://vfast.org/journals/index.php/VTESS/article/view/93/148

Hope the article provides an example relevant to your question.

Best regards,

Cameen

Dear Cameen Kettanun,

Thanks for the link to the article. I think its a good example of CDA and its application to poetry.

Regards,

Sheeraz Ali

Dear Sheeraz,

Ignore Govier, he's just part of the materialist "hard sciences" clique. I have personally analyzed an epic Latin poem using CDA for my honors in Classics and passed it cum laude. In fact my opinion is that poetry, being more complex than prose, deserves more structured analysis, not less.

Dear Gerhard Venter,

Thanks for your reply. can you send you work mentioned by you.

Regards

Sheeraz Ali

I would be selective as to the poem I apply CDA to. It would certainly work with a poem like John Milton’s Paradise Lost and some of Robert Browning’s; it may also work with some of Paul Celan’s and poems in which the Speaker is a strong presence. But one has to be selective, since CDA is crafted for use in the analysis of certain kinds of social discourse where meanings are decidable, unlike literature, where things like ‘poetic metaphor’ are often at work, rendering meaning, as Derrida would say, ‘undecidable’. I can hardly think of a poem by Boleslaw Lesmian, for instance, that I could apply it to.

Dear Amechi Akwanya,

Your answer is quite correct and comprehensive. Yes off course, CDA tools can be applied to understand social meaning.

Regards.

Dear Sheeraz Ali,

a little bit late but here is my humble opinion:

Not only CDA can be applied to Poetry, CDA and Poetry have a bidirectional relationship. I think the nexus between them is the concept of metaphor, not as a rhetorical figure but as the basis of the human language.

While Poetry is in part about the creation of metaphors, CDA is in a certain way a methodology to reveal metaphors.