Wartościowanie i wartości w tekście poetyckim (na przykładzie nazw kwiatów w liryce Młodej Polski)

Abstract

The article presents the ways of valuating and the functioning of values in a poetic text. Selected names of flowers appearing in Young Poland’s poetry have been used as the exemplary material. The author aims at indicating how far the general model of valuating, which is established in the standard variety of the Polish language, is reflected in modernistic works, to what extent poetic texts creatively process conventional ways of valuating connected with words referring to flowers, and how far they introduce a reader into a new, or other world of values connected with floral lexis. The analyses presented in the article prove that individual, modernistic ways of valuating the names of flowers and the visions of values connected with flowers differ from those established in the language and culture. Iris, culturally associated with ‘(sophisticated) beauty’, in modernistic poetic texts is a medium of anti-values: ugliness and kitsch; forget-me-not, which is commonly connoted with positively featured ‘memory’, in Young Poland’s lyrics is called a bad weed of memory; rose, stereotypically connected with ‘transcendental good’, in poetry from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries connotes ‘transcendental evil’ and ‘sin’; similar to lily, which conventionally is an image of ‘purity’, ‘innocence’ and ‘virginity’, whereas in Young Poland’s works it evokes ‘eroticism’, ‘passion’, ‘sensual love’ and ‘sin’. The names of flowers in Young Poland’s poetic texts are evaluated by means of different kinds of rhetorical devices and semantic changes: metaphors, personifications, anthropomorphisms, hyperboles, accumulation of epithets, modifications in the connotative sphere of words, as well as categorization, a change of rationality, or symbol exposition, thanks to which traditional valuating of flowers and conventional values connected with them are subject to transformations. In effect of such transformations, valuating becomes ambivalent, positive associations are more often than not destroyed, connotations carrying negative axiological undertone prevail, and values are substituted with anti-values.