Poetics of the Medial State of Emily Dickinson’s Persona

Emily Dickinson, the famous 19th-century American poet with a passion for books, botany, and gardens, spent most of her life secluded in her bedroom, where she wrote some 1,800 poems, published only posthumously. Within four walls, the poet built an imaginary bridge between the real and the unreal. One of the most important characteristics relating to the poet is the unwitting creation of an immanent authorial mythology. This article is an analysis-reflection on the poet’s work, her artistic expression, and autofiction. The aim is to highlight the concept of boundary and medial state of the lyrical persona. A linguistic analysis of lexical and semantic syntagms of the poet’s works is carried out. The conceptual images of poetics, conveying the receptive potential of the poet’s worldview, are determined. Consideration of the use of stylistic forms of the poetic narrative was revealed as a priority for media-oriented analysis.


Introduction
More than 135 years after the death of the American poet Emily Dickinson, her work continues to inspire poets, translators, and scholars around the world. Dickinson's work often deals with themes of death, immortality, and the natural world, and her poems are noted for their depth of emotion and keen observations of the world around her. Today, Dickinson is considered one of the most important poets in American literature (Liu and Tang 2020, 796-810). Dickinson's poetry is known for its unique style and unconventional form. She experimented with punctuation, capitalisation, and syntax, creating a distinct voice that challenged the traditional norms of her time. Her innovative approach to poetry paved the way for future generations of poets to explore new ways of expressing themselves. Dickinson lived during a time of great social and cultural change in America. Her poetry reflects this era of transition, offering a unique perspective on the issues of her time. Her work is also important because it sheds light on the experiences of women during the 19th century, a time when women's voices were often marginalised. The present work is aimed specifically at revealing the language, aesthetics, poetics, and social, psychological, political, religious, and philosophical context of Dickinson's original works. Thus, the motivation for this article is to analyse the methodological basis of the concept of mediality in Dickinson's poetic narrative, which will help to technically reveal the meanings of the works.
Like many other disciplines directly or indirectly related to philological research, the concept of mediality has yet to be exhaustively defined. Fundamental to the development of the concept of mediality in literature, linguistics, and other related sciences is the continuation of the concept of the linguistic sign as the sum of a signifier and a signified, stemming from semiotics and cognitive science. For Ogata (2016), Ragan (2018), and Ratcliffe (2021), a poetic text is itself a linguistic sign, consisting of a signifier and a signified. However, it should be noted that scholars often do not share the view that there is a connection that unites the linguistic and literary components. For Arvidson (2019) and Meister, Kindt, and Schernus (2005), this relationship is arbitrary and in poetry there is always a motivated relationship between a signifier and a signified. In fact, the notion of mediality in literature coincides with the notion of deviation from the normal mental state, deviation from normal linguistic usage, deviation from habitual language-which sums up the unusual mental state of the addressee. Elleström (2017) and Stockwell (2019) viewed mediality in literature as a mere inventory of rhetorical figures. Thus, it is unusually difficult to establish clear links linking linguistic resources (the signifier) to the final meaning of the text. The balanced combination of these two components makes any analysis of a literary work unique and rich. The perception of mediality in literature is an understanding of the writer's mediating relationship with readers. Mediality is the representation of the world through structured meaningful signs (Karanasiou 2020). The results of mediality are art forms and communicative forms. In attempts to modify terms and representations of the medium, Bruhn and Gjelsvik (2018) and Kazur (2020) considered mediality as an abstract category, as a particular group of communicative forms, as something that mediates between sender and receiver.
According to Bodin (2018), mediality is an important part of any communicative process where there is the act of production and the act of perception, the sender of a media product and the receiver, form and content. This definition of mediality borders on ideas of pragmatics within the sender's ability to create a media product based on his/her knowledge and interests. These are subsequently aligned with the recipient's knowledge, which allows the media product to be recognised and processed in a way that meets the sender's intentions (Koch-Rein, Yekani, and Verlinden 2020). It should be noted that mediality is not a physical entity, but states that the author describes and the reader interprets in his or her own way. Mediality in narrative and written literature is present only in specific works and is a useful tool of categorisation.
Until now, studies of mediality have largely failed to address the materiality of literature. However, recent studies continue to consider earlier perspectives (certain traditions of comparative literature, book history, and media archaeology) regarding what might be called the material mediality of the fiction text (Kuzmičová 2014;Lino 2020). However, from the perspective of mediality, to analyse a literary text, it is necessary to pay attention to the formal and linguistic features of textual phenomena (Bruhn 2016). Such nuances as the stylistic and rhetorical forms used by the writer are often activators of decoding the test message. Thus, in media-centred analysis, it must be understood that literature is by definition an embodiment of forms, and the text must be viewed through materialist hermeneutics in order to conform to today's materialist and technological approaches. The mediality model of this article allows one to describe as well as comment on the mixed nature of all medial techniques as an a priori characteristic of Dickinson's mediated form of poetry.
Dickinson's poetry is renowned for its ability to capture the complex emotional states of the human experience. Through her poems, Dickinson offers a glimpse into the inner workings of the human psyche, exploring themes such as love, death, and the nature of existence. In particular, her portrayal of the medial state, or the state of being in between life and death, is a recurring motif in her work. This article delves into the poetics of the medial state of Dickinson's persona, examining how she uses language and imagery to convey the profound emotional and spiritual significance of this liminal space. By exploring the nuances of Dickinson's poetry, a deeper understanding of the complexity of the human experience and the power of language to capture the ineffable was gained. Overall, exploring the work of Dickinson can enrich the understanding of literature, history, and culture. Her poetry offers unique insights into the human experience and challenges to think in new ways about the world. Thus, the purpose of the work is to understand the essence of the poet's particular experience, her thoughts or visions that prompted her writing. In this article, an understanding of the artistic material led to the use of a three-step model for describing the state of mediality of Dickinson's persona. Hence, the article undertook the following tasks: the selection and systematisation of rhetorical and stylistic means, conveying the state of mediality of the persona, the selection of lexemes, conveying the marginal, medial state of the persona, and the receptive analysis of the hidden meanings and medial states of the lyrical persona in the works of the poet. The poetic text is analysed from the perspective of mediality, therefore, through motif analysis.

Methods and Materials
This study used a media-oriented analysis of Dickinson's poetic narrative. The work was conducted in three directions: 1. Identification and classification of rhetorical stylistic means conveying the persona's state of mediality in Dickinson's poems; 2. Selection of the most common stylistic means; 3. Receptive analysis of the hidden meanings and medial states of the lyrical persona in the works of the poet.
The following theoretical (as well as practical) elements were used for the analysis of the poet's fiction text: structural (method of internal text relations), semiotic (study of signs and communication codes), and receptive (focusing on the formal composition of the text and analysis of the recipient-addressee perception) elements. The receptive method most clearly describes the medial state of the lyrical persona of Dickinson's works. In this article, the poetic text is treated as a linguistic sign. The distinction between the analysis or preliminary classification of the stylistic resources of a text and the interpretation of these resources brings the analysis results closer to literary style in general and poetic style in particular. Although the choice of rhetorical figures facilitates the analysis, the present work required their flexible classification, which allowed simplifying the methodology. It emerges that the state of mediality of the poet and her persona is most clearly manifested in terms of signification through the use of stylistic figures. Dickinson's outwardly monotonous life was marked by an extraordinary intensity. This duality and tension are evident in her poetry.
A sample of lexemes conveying the marginal and medial state of the persona is illustrated in Figure 1. Longing for love and companionship The rhetorical figures analysed are "physical" evidence of what happens in the poems in which they appear. These figures are the appearance of the same, and their use is fully justified.
This study examines Dickinson's poetic narrative as medially mixed. Medial stylistic forms within a "pure" literary work are analysed. Individual poems that are directly related to issues of mediality are examined to identify and then understand the significance of aspects of their mediality.

Results
The study analysed 120 works in the collection The Single Hound (Dickinson 1914). It was published in 1914 and compiled largely by Dickinson's niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, who also wrote the introduction to the volume. Dickinson's manuscripts were passed down to Bianchi after her mother Susan and aunt Lavinia passed away. The 145 brief poems in the latter volume are largely culled from correspondence between Emily Dickinson and Martha's mother, Susan Dickinson, née Gilbert. The selection consists largely of verses sent to "Sister Sue," Emily's sister-in-law and nextdoor neighbour, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Besides several poems expressing her warm feelings of friendship for her sister-in-law, there is a lyric on the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Although The Single Hound did not receive immediate critical acclaim, it has since come to be regarded as an important collection of Dickinson's work, showcasing her unique style and themes of mortality, spirituality, and nature. That is why this collection was chosen for further analysis in this study. The collection The Single Hound most clearly conveys the mediality of the persona with the presence of the following stylistic figures. The selected classification of stylistic figures was divided into four groups (Table 1).  Johnson (1960, 9-11), the first person to whom the poet entrusted her poems in the hope that he would judge them objectively. A friend and critic, he did not fail to note certain "inaccuracies" that "should be corrected": writing technique, poor grammar, bad rhymes, and improper expressions (1960,(9)(10)(11). However, an analysis of more than 120 poems included in The Single Hound in this paper reveals a number of characteristics that are far from "outliers" (1960,6). For example, in number "63": If pain for peace prepares Lo, what "Augustan" years Our feet await! If springs from winter rise, Can the Anemones Be reckoned up?
If night stands firstthen noon To gird us for the sun, What gaze! When from a thousand skies On our developed eyes Noons blaze! (Dickinson 1914, 33) The first thing to note is that Dickinson's poetry is dominated by iambic trimeter and iambic tetrameter verses, not excluding, as in this example, smaller verses. The main stanza used is that of a biblical hymn, which usually consists of four verses with different rhymes, and with three or four tonic accents. In the chosen poem, the question of rhythm plays an important role in the perception of the work. Rhyme and rhythm do not so much convey the persona's state of mediality, but bring the recipient to a boundary, medial state, as in the repetition of mantras. In this example, it is possible to note the junction of linguistics and literature, where not only the distribution of rhythm, rhyme and tones is ideal, but also the distribution of the vocabulary used. Take the two key words in the first stanza: "peace" and "Augustan," for example. Peace achieved through pain is a better and more lasting peace. Therefore, the importance of "peace" is beyond question. As for "Augustan," two considerations are necessary to fully appreciate the importance of this word and its placement in the verse. First, the very accentuation of the word "Augustan" in English contributed to the accentual flair found in this verse: the rhythmic accent. The central fourth syllable and the syllable of "Augustan" (emphasised in the second syllable) coincide to match with "peace" just above in the previous verse. Both words, "peace" and "Augustan," are thus marked and isolated or protected by the power of rhythmic emphasis. It is important that the semantic load of the lexeme "Augustan" reinforces the meaning of the whole verse. "Augustan" is synonymous with "prosperous" because it comes from the name of the emperor with whom the era of peace and prosperity in Rome began. His reign was one of the most profitable for the empire. Dickinson wanted to convey just how useful peace, achieved through pain and suffering, is, as the key words "peace" and "Augustan" show.
In examining the perception of rhyme, it should be emphasised that the poetic text is a dense network of interactions in which rhetorical figures are rarely isolated. In the line "If pain for peace prepares," the slight hyperbaton that occurs between the verb and the complement allows the lexeme "peace" to gain rhythmic emphasis. Such a technique as rhyme is closely related to other resources such as rhythm, alliteration, and hyperbaton. As with rhythm, Emily Dickinson was "accused" of some clumsiness in her rhymes. However, this judgment is refuted if only by the example of the poem "10": My wheel is in the dark! I cannot see a spoke Yet know its dripping feet Go round and round.
My foot is on the Tide! An unfrequented road -Yet have all roads A clearing at the end -Some have resigned the Loom -Some in the busy tomb Find quaint employ -Some with newstately feet -Pass royal through the gate -Flinging the problem back At you and I! (Dickinson 1914, 10) If one pays attention to the rhymes, one will notice that regardless of the repetition of "round" and "road," the two words take on the meaning that all rhyming words get, and a single "complete rhyme" relationship is established between them, making them even more unique. Faced with the irregularity of the rest of the "Loom" and "tomb" rhyme, they seem quite similar to the repetition of the long vowel sound / u: /, which reproduces, therefore, its importance, the sad and tetrical tone of the stanza in which it is inserted. "Full rhyme" in / u: /, almost like the previous one, appears again in the poem "1674": Not any sunny tone From any fervent zone Find entrance there -Better a grave of Balm Toward human nature's home -And Robins near -Than a stupendous Tomb Proclaiming to the Gloom How dead we are - (Dickinson 1914) In this case, one can find three complete rhymes-"tone," "zone," "home"-that serve as a kind of introduction to the darkest rhyme: the one that occurs between "Tomb" and "Gloom," the very two words whose meaning allows synesthesia. The long vowel / u: / undoubtedly contributes, as in the poem "10," to creating this sombre feeling, while the other rhymes, also participating in this phonetic darkness, see it contained because the vowel sound in them is a diphthong rather than a pure vowel, such as / u: /. Thus, one can observe a state of mediality descending from the so-called "phonetic darkness," created through the combination of the sound characteristics of the lexemes.
Here is another example from the first stanza of the poem "11": I never told the buried gold Upon the hillthat lies -I saw the sunhis plunder done Crouch low to guard his prize. (Dickinson 1914, 11) The rhythmic symmetry that is felt when reading this quatrain is now determined, in addition to the accents as in the poem "63," by the rhymes and their very special distribution. Complete rhymes occupy the entire stanza, but only the second and fourth stanzas show a few regular rhymes at the end of the verse. Rhymes, with the exception of the lexemes "lies" and "prize," do not occur between the two verses, but within them. It seems as if, imitating the situation with that buried gold the stanza tells us about, the rhymes themselves have also been hidden and concealed among other words. This strange distribution of rhymes divides each eight-syllable verse (first and third) into two four-syllable ones and two rhythmic accents, each corresponding to each of the rhyming words. The resulting symmetry is perfect in every way.
Of all the stylistic means Dickinson used in her poems contained in The Single Hound, and there are certainly many, alliteration is one of the most frequent. The abundance of alliteration in her poems reveals their meaning. Alliteration, that is, the repetition of phonemes, is seen as an aesthetic resource for a critical reading of the work. As an example of alliteration, the second stanza of the poem "65" is analysed: Sweeter than a vanished frolic From a vanished green! Swifter than the hoofs of Horsemen Round a Ledge of dream! (Dickinson 1914, 34) There are two key words in this stanza: "Sweeter" and "Swifter." Around them are woven not only the meaning of the stanza, but also its signifier. These four verses speak of softness and sweetness, speed and displacement: they are the semantic charges of the words. The alliterations found in the stanza under discussion are clustered around both words.
Phrasal and syntactic modifications of speech in Dickinson's poetry have always attracted the attention of literary scholars. Dickinson's original syntax often makes it difficult to perceive her poems on first reading. However, the mediality reveals the poetry; the reader understands its meaning.
The expressive concentration of nouns is also conspicuous in the reading of any Dickinson poem. One might say that this medial technique is one of the main characteristics of the poet's style, namely, extreme brevity. This expressive compression may result from the specific use of syntax and rhetorical figures, such as the ellipsis, parataxis, and asyndeton. These recurrent techniques require a sustained effort on the part of the reader to make up for those parts that are missing from the logic of discourse. The poem "668" is considered as an example: "Nature" is what we see -The Hill -The Afternoon -Squirrel -Eclipse -The Bumble bee -Nay -Nature is Heaven -Nature is what we hear -The Bobolink -The Sea -Thunder -The Cricket -Nay -Nature is Harmony -Nature is what we know -Yet have no art to say -So impotent Our Wisdom is To her Simplicity. (Dickinson 1914, 332) The following characteristics can be seen in this example: the almost complete absence of adjectives and the accumulation of nouns. The author's desire to comprehend the essence of things, their ultimate meaning, is evident in the poem.
Consequently, according to the theory of mediality, it is obvious that the form of the poem, that is, its signifier, is adapted to its background or meaning. The expression of the inexpressible is one of the central themes of Dickinson's poetry. It is the great importance that silence has for Dickinson that further justifies the use of figures such as the ellipsis and parataxis in "1681": Speech is one symptom of Affection And Silence one -The perfectest communication Is heard of none - (Dickinson 1914, 686) This fragment in the verse makes the recipient gasp, and "silence" becomes a physical and tangible reality.

Discussion
Despite the poet's acclaim, there is not much criticism of the narrative style of her work (Dickinson and Johnson 1960, 9-11;Noh 2019). A radically opposite view is held by Calvillo (2020), Finnerty (2017, and Hamarowski (2018), who argue that Dickinson was widely experimenting with words and was very well aware of their value. The authors find in the eccentric use of silence an ideal mode of expression, since words can never comprehend the deep complexity of experience. The innermost regions of the soul are indeed deprived of the gift of speech, despite attempts to catch them in the net of words. The author Eberwein (2018) correctly notes that an analysis of Dickinson's work should introduce a stylistic analysis that will focus specifically on figures, such as the ellipsis and alliteration. Formal procedures aimed at adapting syntax to the subjective fluctuations of the narrative subject can convey meaning and subordination of syntax to the constraints of the literary style (Eberwein 2018, 172-74). Chinese scholar Ma (2019) looks for causes deep in the poet's subconscious, choosing to analyse the psychological techniques embedded in literary analysis. Shu-li (2005) argues that the subconscious is like a deep well full of memories and feelings. The poet's inner struggle, which grew into a crisis, led her to poetry. The author emphasises the close connection of the poet's motifs with nature, where she found "harmony" and the physical embodiment of her worship. In this context, it should be noted that not only the theme of nature prevailed in the author's poetic narrative. The theme of loneliness in Dickinson's life and writing can be traced through a chronological study of her poems and letters. Roy, Mahavidyalaya, and Newtown (2015) interact with primary texts through close contextualised readings, drawing also on secondary sources, both biographical and critical, in analysing the motives and implications of Dickinson's internal seclusion. Hamilton (2005) and Merrigan (2020) examine figurative language in the poet's poems, explaining how stylistic figures function in cognitive terms. This approach was intended to move rhetorical criticism beyond figure identification to the practice of explaining the persuasive function of figures. The emphasis on figures is seen as a cognitive rhetoric of poetry. After all, a cognitive rhetoric of poetry should be based on classical theories of rhetoric and poetics, on the one hand, and on cognitive-linguistic theories of stylistic figures, on the other. Such a scope would reveal a continuity between the concerns of current critics and those of classical rhetoricians. It would also place equal emphasis on the poet's creation of figurative language and its comprehensive understanding by the reader. Dickinson's poems are intended to reveal, ultimately, the deeply rhetorical nature of poetry. The European school of literary studies represented by Crumbley (2017) and Holmes (2020) tends to reveal the meanings of the poet's poetic text within a group of metataxis or figures affecting the phrase structure of discourse. The repetition of rhetorical figures undoubtedly speaks to the poet's troubling and distorting view of the world, yet Adrienne Rich, a renowned poet and feminist thinker, in her essay "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson," describes Dickinson as a "woman who lived in a fiercely autonomous inner world, a world not directly accessible to the culture she lived in" (Rich 1979, 180). She wrote extensively about Dickinson in her critical essays and poetry. Rich also recognises Dickinson's subversive use of language and form, particularly her use of dashes and unconventional syntax, which she sees as a means of resisting patriarchal language and asserting her own authority as a poet. Rich writes, "Dickinson's dashes, ellipses, and abrupt transitions are strategies for escaping from the mastery of the sentence and the paragraph, the 'grammar' of patriarchy." Overall, Rich views Dickinson as a powerful and influential figure in the history of poetry, whose work continues to challenge and inspire readers today.

Conclusions
A general analysis of the poems in Emily Dickinson's collection The Single Hound reveals her extremely complex and at times disturbing vision of the world.
An analysis of more than 120 poems included in The Single Hound revealed a sequence of characteristics that convey the state of mediality of Dickinson's persona. The structure of her poems was considered at the junction of linguistics and literature. A perfectly distributed rhythm, tones, and vocabulary were revealed. The state of mediality is reproduced by recreating the so-called "phonetic darkness," constructed through a combination of sound characteristics of lexemes. The study found "different" distributions of rhymes divided into two four-syllable verses and two rhythmic accents. Alliteration, that is, the repetition of phonemes and original syntax, is seen as an aesthetic resource for a critical reading and perception of her poems. The reader understands the poems' meaning as an expressive concentration of the poet's allconsuming longing and a certain feminine unfulfillment. Her poetry expresses the inexpressible, those feelings that she could only experience in the marginal and medial space of her subconscious. Thus, the stylistic techniques convey not so much the state of mediality of the persona, but bring the recipient to the boundary and medial state of meditation. The study results are important for a new reading of the literary text through a new research direction (mediality) as a special format of information transfer. The results of this study can be applied in the courses of literature theory, linguistics, foreign literature, etc. in the context of an innovative reading of narratives, to convey the meaning of expression through a particular format and mode of expression.