Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Margaret Freeman
(a redaction by the original author of a 1997 article entitled ‘Grounded
spaces: deictic 
-self
anaphors in the poetry of Emily Dickinson’ 
Language and Literature
, 6, 1,
7–28).
When the first edition of a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poems appeared in 1890,
literary reviewers, especially in England, criticised her poems for being unmetrical
and ungrammatical (Buckingham 1989). Critics today are much more tolerant of
such poetic ‘violations’. Tolerance or intolerance, however, do nothing to illuminate
poetic practice. Critics assume that such practices are 
ad hoc
and random or arise
from ‘poetic licence’, the belief that the principles underlying the language of poetry
are different 
in kind
from conventional usage. I accept neither of these positions.
Instead, I believe that grammatical usage results from both a social construct and a
personal idiolect. Furthermore, I adopt the approach of recent cognitive linguistic
theory that the grammar of a language cannot be determined simply on the linguis-
tic level alone, but must take into account the cognizing processes of the embodied
mind (Lakoff and Johnson 1998). Poetic language 
is
different from conventional
language, but they both share the same principles of conceptual integration
(Fauconnier and Turner 2002). When the grammar of a poet diverges from conven-
tional usage, the reason for the divergence lies in the way the poet experiences and
conceives the world. What is needed is a theory that will account for the conceptual
models underlying the choices a poet makes. Consider, for example, the seemingly
anomalous use of the 
-self
anaphor form ‘Himself himself ’ (in 
boldface
) in line 6 of
the following Dickinson poem:
[1]
A Spider sewed at Night
Without a Light
Upon an Arc of White
If Ruff it was of Dame
Or Shroud of Gnome