Persuasive Devices Used in Poetry: A Pragma Stylistic Study

Abstract

Persuasion seeks to persuade the reader that what is happening in a novel, short story, poetry, play, or even academic nonfiction writing makes sense and can be trusted. Writers who effectively utilize persuasion make their thoughts and literary choices credible. Pragma stylistics can be considered as a branch of stylistics with the addition of a pragmatic element that establishes the speaker's style. Persuasion is an effort to alter human behavior by communicative means. Thus, the main aim of this study is to investigate the persuasive devices used in poems and to show the most dominant persuasive device in poetry. The analysis is based on Leech and Short's (2007) model of persuasive devices. Descriptive qualitative approach used in this research. The results of the analysis conducted that there were 7 persuasive techniques used in poems. Additionally, the findings proved that the highest one metaphor repeated 13 times with (23.63%), then personification 11 times with 20%. According to the results, the most dominant was a metaphor to create mental pictures by comparing two seemingly unrelated things, helping the reader visualize abstract ideas in a tangible way.