Theories of pragmatics and stylistics are important in explaining and understanding the use of figurative language in literary texts, especially in poetry. The current study aims to present a pragmatic-stylistic analysis of the use of figurative language in a collection of confessional poems by male and female poets, showing how male and female poets employ these linguistic features to express their personal experiences with special emphasis on rhetorical devices, deictic expressions, and implicature. It aims to identify how these linguistic and stylistic resources contribute to the construction of personal experience and self-expression in confessional poetry and to examine similarities and differences between male and female poets in their poetic styles. Following a qualitative descriptive approach based on content analysis, the study examined selected poems by prominent male and female confessional poets, including Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. The analysis was conducted within the theoretical framework of Perrine’s classification of figures of speech, Levinson’s taxonomy of deixis, and Grice’s theory of implicature. There are twelve types of figures of speech based on Perrine’s theory, five types of deixis (personal deixis, time deixis, place deixis, discourse deixis, and social deixis) by Levinson’s classification, and two basic types of implicatures (conversational and conventional) based on Grice’s theory. The study results showed that figures of speech in confessional poetry, with metaphors ranking the highest, are mostly used by both genders. However, male poets demonstrate a higher degree of linguistic ambiguity and structural complexity in their figurative expressions. Both male and female poets employed all types of deictic forms to achieve their communicative and artistic purposes, with the personal deictic form as the most frequently used type to reflect subjectivity and solipsism. However, differences were perceived in the function of deictic choices. It was also found that particularized conversational implicature was the most common type employed, as confessional poetry relies heavily on the poet’s private and personal experiences. The research concluded that the pragma-stylistic approach offers important contributions to the linguistic mechanisms employed by confessional poets for the construction of identity, emotion, and personal narrative. It also explains that there are stylistic tendencies associated with gender that can be identified in the pragmatic and metaphorical choices of poets, highlighting the common communicative strategies that characterize confessional poetry as a distinct literary trend. Finally, the study concluded with several recommendations and suggestions for further studies.
