“Flickering” subject in a poetic text: towards the problem of perception

The article discusses reader’s perception of subjectness in poetic texts where subject is grammatically removed. Unlike poems with a grammatically and lexically explicated position of the subject, where the text itself, with its grammatical texture (through the use of pronouns, verb forms, etc.), sets the focus of the reader’s perception and makes it possible to clearly identify subjectness; poems relying on strategies of infinitive or elliptical writing can put the reader in a situation of “subjective uncertainty”, where the subjective perspective of the text “flickers” introducing the positions of the semantic subject as variables. The article summarizes the experiment on measuring the reader’s perception of poems, in which the subject can hypothetically be either correlated with the “I-”, “you-”, “any-” position, or perceived as “zero subjectness”. The results of the experiment suggest that when perceiving such poems, the reader typically “autocorrects” (that is, fills in the semantic gaps of the text in the situation of grammatical ambiguity) by relying on the topic of the text framed by their own pragmatic experiences. The article argues that whenever a poem lacks unambiguous subjective semantics, a reader will utilize their holistic perception of the text to compensate for and overcome its “flickering” grammar.