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Keywords: 
Stylistics, Functionalism, Aesthetics
 
1. Introduction 
The tremendous proliferation of linguistic theory since the publication of Saussure's 
Cours de linguistique ge'ne'rale
(1913) led to a resurrection of classical rhetoric into modern stylistics. The most revealing product of this linguistic 
growth is the theory of style. The theory had witnessed dramatic changes: instead of being a means of persuasion- a 
creative activity to produce expressive and impressive speech events, as in 
elocutio, 
the notion of style had come to 
mean "a differential mode of linguistic expression that is manifested on lexico-syntactic level"( Hendricks, 1980:49). 
Simply put, the notion has been developed from style being 
a dress of thought
into a linguistic structural power that 
encodes the speaker/writer's world view(s). Modern stylistics, to my mind, is distinct from classical rhetoric, not from a 
chronological stance but from an epistemic one: while style is viewed as an applied embellishment or extra beauty in 
ancient rhetoric, it is underpinned in the modern theory of linguistics as one structural power to carry one's ideologies 
and emotions. Moreover, while classical rhetoric is heavily preoccupied with figures of style in highly exemplified 
writers as that of Greek and Roman exponents, poetics had emerged in modern literary and linguistic theories to explore 
the parameters and values of beauty in a literary artifact. Sure, this distinction is not restricted to the ancient European 
theories of language only; it could be traced back to ancient discourses, of which is the Arabic history of rhetoric, too.
In practical terms, stylistics refers to the application of methods, approaches and techniques of linguistics to the 
aesthetic area of literature. What matters in modern stylistic interpretation is language as a creative semiotic system: to 
do a stylistic analysis is to penetrate the variations of linguistic forms or strata in a literary product. The modern 
linguistic lesson stresses the assumption that language is not merely an amalgam of phonemes, but an interlinked 
network of levels or strata. In addition, language is correlated to cognition and culture. Understanding the various 
patterns in language is not without comprehending the various patterns of thinking; knowing the patterns of language in 
one's style is the knowledge of one's cultural structure.
This study purports to investigate the lexicogrammatical complexity and richness of John Keats's 
Ode on a Grecian 
Urn,
(1816) in terms of the so-called 
Aesthetic 
stylistics (henceforth As) – an approach characterized by the interaction 
between the formal text-linguistics and its aesthetic interpretation. It is hypnotized that Keats's aesthetic experience is a 
par-excellent manifestation of the Kantian 
purposiveness
: the Ode is disinterested neither in morality nor in ideology- it 
is purely aesthetic. In other phrase, there is much in Keats's Ode which has stressed Kant's Aesthetics or axioms of 
Beauty. The human experience is essentially constructed in language, and Keats's special use of language gives 
structure to that experience. Comprehending, describing and analyzing the options made by the writer-speaker in 
structure are the main concerns of modern stylistics. The complexity of the Ode's texture is the imaginatively product 
of his deep insight into the notion of beauty, therefore, it is of interest to study the evolution of Keats's style. By 
applying 
AS 
to the Ode, the linguistic description or the first circle will be interlinked to the aesthetic interpretation or 
the second circle. While the text- linguistics is scrutinized in terms of Halliday's 
Functional Linguistics (FL),
the 
aesthetic vision will have recourse to Kant's axioms of beauty in his 
Kritik der Urteilstraft, KdU (Critique of Judgment
). 
Flourishing Creativity & Literacy 

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