Exploring poetic effects through the lens of conversational implicature in Seamus Heaney’s poetry

Abstract Based on the classical and neo-Gricean theories of conversational implicature, this study explores the ways in which different types of conversational implicature achieve their poetic effects. Viewing literary communication as an interactive process between poets and readers, we take some poems by Seamus Heaney from his mid-career collection The Haw Lantern and his late-period publication Electric Light as examples. Based on Chen’s inferential mechanism for the conversational implicature of poetic metaphors and Hirschberg’s classification of scalar implicature, not only do we examine how metaphors in poetry and the connotations they express apparently violate the Maxim of Quality outlined in Grice’s Cooperative Principle, but we also explore the other types of implicature in poetry, such as conventional implicature and (non)entailment scalar implicature, and their role in deepening the theme of poetry. Research has found that poets violate the Maxim of Quality by using metaphors. Through shared knowledge, poets and readers establish connections, and readers understand the implicature that poets intend to convey. Moreover, Heaney’s poetry deepens the thematic meaning by using implicature triggers such as but , then , and so . In addition, the poetic effects of the non-entailment scalar implicature in Heaney’s poetry are mainly reflected in its thematic construction generated by logical connection, numerical order, and non-finite and finite words, and entailment scalar implicature mainly involves temporal implicature, spatial order, and type and subtype in colors, as well as part and whole. This study aims to shed light on the studies of conversational implicature in poetry.