Abstrakt
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.
Słowa kluczowe:
wartości, wartościowanie, nazwy kwiatów, poezja, Młoda Polska
