Pronouns in Dickinson’s poetry as a means of constructing a poetic self

Poetic language is often defined by its apparent violations of ordinary language’s rules because of its usage of ‘unacceptable’ or at least very unusual constructions, labelled as ‘poetic licence’. This is also true for Emily Dickinson’s language, characterised as ‘obscure, elliptical or ambiguous. The present paper is an attempt to show how the ‘poetic forms’ are nothing but an extreme exploitation of everyday language resources, which can sometimes appear to be ambiguous or obscure only as a side effect of their extra-contextualisation. The case in point is the analysis of Dickinson’s use of personal pronouns, which is not agrammatical, but resorts to the pragmatic and topicality conditions overruling the semantic rules of gender agreement, thus building her view and feeling of herself as a woman and a poet.