![]() ![]() It’s remarkable how opposite Dickinson feels when reading poems like this. But she uses this negative emotions to figure creative solutions, alternate assemblages and alliances, as in poem #579: If Whitman’s sublimity is epic, crossing boundaries to join the immensity of all that is America, Dickinson’s is private and tends to revolve around negative emotions, transforming them into tools of creativity. ![]() Her poetry reveals a strong connection between biographical fact and its metaphorical equivalent, which is one reason why her poetry was taken up by feminists in the later 20th-century. They aren’t just “reflections” on life.Īs with her sight disability, Dickinson tends to use disadvantages, limitations, and negative emotions more generally as occasions for glimpsing into something more fundamental about life. In other words, there’s a real, literal materiality to some of these meditations. She often complains about trouble with her sight and often uses it as a way to meditate on the relationship between subjectivity and reality, e.g., in poem #258, a “certain Slant of light” “oppresses” her. It’s assumed she suffered from exotropia or if not that, she clearly had a condition that impacted her vision. More recently, Dickinson has attracted attention from disability studies because she had a serious eye problem. The emblems of Dickinson are inspired by Emerson, but how they operate and what kinds of techniques make them work is very different from Whitman’s hieroglyphics. But how to “emblematize” or decode the emblems of nature is precisely what poets such as Whitman and Dickinson work out in distinctive ways. The importance of emblematic framing harkens back to Emerson’s Nature, the foundation of American Transcendentalism. Any concrete sensation is, for a Dickinson lyric, highly emblematic of an internal state. Rather than cataloguing an epic list of variegated sites, a la Whitman, Dickinson lyrical poetry often interweaves intense emotion, abstract concepts, and just a smattering of concretion curated for effect. The poem above, #458, is typical of Dickinson’s landscape. Whereas Whitman’s poetry flows forth in an almost libidinal outpouring, overcoming limitations through a spiritual and erotic embrace of all things, Dickinson’s poetry almost seems to contract the world into a deeply private subject/speaker. As a contemporary, Walt Whitman often represents the counterpart to Dickinson. One way to think about Dickinson’s poetry is in relation to other mid 19th-century American lyricists, especially those belonging to the Transcendentalist movement.
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