Navigating the Ontological Blur: A Stylistic Inquest into Poe’s A Dream Within a Dream

Abstract

This study presents a comprehensive stylistic analysis of Poe’s 1849 poem A Dream Within a Dream that surpasses traditional approaches to Poe analysis, which focus primarily on biographies and themes. The gap in the existing body of Poe’s work centers on how isolated linguistic elements of style have not been synthesized for a complete analysis of Poe’s work as a body of literature. To fill this void in the current literature on Poe, this study employs a strict three-tier analytical model that integrates Sense, Sound, and Structure into one cohesive analysis of the poem. At the level of sense, linguistic style elements, including figurative language, denotation/connotation, and sensory imagery, are examined to illustrate how the poem translates the abstract quality of transience into the tangible reality of the physical world. At the level of sound, prosodic features are examined to demonstrate how the poem’s sounds recreate for the reader the continuous ebb and flow of time while simultaneously inducing feelings of profound existential despair. At the structural level, irregular line lengths, variable stanza lengths, and extensive enjambment are examined to show how the poem’s structural characteristics mirror the instability of human perception. Overall, the integration of these three disparate linguistic tiers demonstrates how Poe’s intentional use of form creates an active representation that raises the question of an ontological blurring of the lines between reality and illusion. Finally, this analysis contextualizes Poe’s poetic language within an applied linguistics framework, demonstrating the structural relationship between aesthetic inquiry and the integrated form of an aesthetic object.