Constructions of person marking and poetic structures in self-addressing poems

Abstract

The paper attempts to approach and interpret the category of self-addressing poems from new perspectives. It chiefly focuses on the constructions of person marking and the poetic structures resulting from their various realizations, relying on the implicit assumptions and recent results of literary theory, cognitive poetics and stylistics. In the analyses, poems by Vörösmarty, Arany and Babits figure prominently but other texts are also touched upon. From the various results it is worth highlighting that several concepts and issues that are essential for the model of self-addressing poems, such as the relationship between the addressee and the addresser, the exhortation, the personal crisis (a contrast between role and personality), are given new interpretations. The analyses demonstrate that, contrary to the apparent ‘simplicity’ and homogeneity of the selfaddressing poetic pattern, this kind of poem occurs in extremely varied poetic structures in the history of lyrical poetry.