Leda and the Stylisticians

This article presents an analysis of WB Yeats’ ‘Leda and the Swan’ for the 21st century, adopting a Text World Theory perspective ( Gavins, 2007 ; Hidalgo Downing, 2000 ; Werth, 1999 ) on this iconic poem. In so doing, I also trace the evolution of the discipline of stylistics – from its roots in formalist linguistics, through functionalist and contextualised stylistics, to the development of cognitive poetics – by examining a series of shifting analyses of the text. I argue that the varying treatments of Yeats’ poem to be found in Halliday (1966 ), Widdowson (1975 ) and Burke (2000 ) can be seen to mirror the development of stylistics over the last half century. I also argue for the positive contribution cognitive poetics can make towards a fuller contemporary understanding of the complex discoursal configuration of ‘Leda and the Swan’, examining both its textual and conceptual structures and its significant political and historical context.