An Analysis of the process of defamiliarization and foregrounding in the poem “The Swan” by Charles Baudelaire

Defamiliarization is a mode of expression different from everyday language in order to highlight an expression, make it strange and different from everything that is familiar and known, and includes all the process that the writer or poet uses to make a text unusual in the eyes of its audience. French symbolist poets, including Baudelaire, began to create a new literary expression and abandon the traditional technique of poetry, thus giving priority to form; by using unusual and unfamiliar structures, they tried to challenge readers' normal understanding. So, since symbolic poetry is full of literary, linguistic and semantic ambiguity, it seems necessary to address its obvious and doubtful aspects. The present study seeks to analyze the poem "Swan" by Charles Baudelaire, French symbolist poet, in order to discover, according to an analytical and descriptive approach, its foregrounding and the defamiliarization processes used, based on a formalist perspective. Thus, within the framework of this article, the processes of defamiliarization and the linguistic enhancement of mentioned poem were studied at different levels: lexical, syntactic, semantic and phonetic. The research results indicate that in this poem the deviation from lexical and semantic norms is used in its broadest form, and the use of mythological images, figures of speech, alliteration and assonance has led to the foregrounding of this poem.