Comparative Study of Context in Poetry: Reading Shirko Bikas and Ahmad Shamlu’s Poems as Case Study

The present study is an attempt to analyze the context of the poetic text. The context contains the situation which, because of the agreement between the speaker and the listener, reveals the meanings of the words; or a linguistic environment surrounded by words, phrases and sentences; or a group of methods surrounding the speech. Therefore, the role of context is to determine the meaning of signifiers. The context of the text itself becomes another signifier formed based on the common signifiers. Since the context itself produces a semantic text and affects the meaning or the mechanism of the text, the context which determines the meaning of the word is a mental context that later joins the language, not the speech. Such a view is different from that of Saussure; Because from his perspective, once the language and then the speech play roles. The contexts, considered as the basis of this study, are the ones introduced by Van Dijk. The reason behind applying Van Dijk’s classification is that it is much more comprehensive than the other ones. The present study consists of two parts: In the first part, the concept and definition of the text are discussed, then the concept and definition of the context are studied, and different viewpoints are presented. At the end, the value and importance of the context are discussed. In the second section, different types of context are identified in the text, along with the required samples, and the analysis of the contexts based on their meanings.