Poetic text as an ethical and aesthetical system. Types, levels and functions of a poetic text (exemplified by English poetry)
The article studies the phenomenon of a poetic text as a complex semiotic system from the positions of phonic harmony, stress, poetic meter, individual author’s intonation and some other lexical and phonetic means of poem’s organization. The four main poetic texts’ types are highlighted: regular (syllabic-accentual, accentual and blank verses), free (works break the rules of syllabic-accentual versification), mixed ones (verses have peculiarities of both regular and free types), and poetic prose (prose texts, which are aesthetically tense, have a lot of different stylistic figures and bright poetic images). Understanding poetic texts from the positions of a phonetic, stylistic and metric structure of a poem is supposed to be a narrow understanding of a studied phenomenon. Viewing a poem from the point of view of its functionality is a broad understanding of a poetic text. Three main functions of a poem a named and characterized. Among them are a creative (genesis of new meanings), an aesthetical (expressing emotions and high feelings) and an ethical function (naming antonymic pairs of concepts, such as beautiful - ugly, love - hate, good - evil, life - death, truth - untruth and some others). The complex of these functions leads to the broadest understanding of poetic texts, because it actualizes the characteristic of spirituality of poetry in general. This characteristic allows nominating personal, verbally unexpressed feelings of an author, exchanging his personal experience, admiration or fear of standing themes of human existence. These themes can be expressed in terms of the paradigm: life - death - love. The authors’ definition of the phenomenon of a poetic text is given. The practical material includes the example of the English-language poetry within the period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.