Examining Seamus Heaney's Poem "A Herbal": A Corpus Stylistic Approach

Abstract

     This study aims at analyzing a selected poem "A Herbal" written by one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century; Seamus Heaney. The methodology is a corpus-based one. Using the tools of the computer to analyze and interpret poetry allows readers/ researchers to examine to what extent technology can bring the attention to crucial details that might be missed by human manual analysis. This does not imply that the later analysis should be neglected, but to emphasize employing both of the analyses to reach much more reliable results. In short, this study is qualitative and quantitative in nature This study has a great importance.  There is an attempt to fill a gap in the area of analyzing poetry using corpus stylistics. As a matter of fact, few works are conducted by using corpus stylistics to examine poetry. The findings show how important to apply both quantitative and qualitative analyses to interpret and study literary texts. Relevantly, it can provide researchers with a better understanding of the themes, keywords, and the style of language. The obtained results have an objective trait. To put it differently,  the data is examined by computational tools, here, WebCorp Live and Wmatrix, then the data is scrutinized in terms of manual study. In fact, this work demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary work, here humanities (linguistics) and computer studies. The results reflect the importance of using technology to study literary texts