II. Emily Dickinson and her poetic world

II.1. Dickinson’s poetic style

Emily Dickinson had an important contribution to American Letters

especially through her poetry. She wrote more than 1,750 poems, only ten were

published during her lifetime, and without her direct knowledge or approval.

She famously wrote in one of her poems, “Publication – is the auction / Of the

mind of man”, it appears that she never intended to publish her poems, she saw

them as a private endeavor for her own and her family’s consumption. This is a

collection of her works published:

“Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson (1945), Final Harvest: Emily

Dickinson's Poems (1962), Further Poems of Emily Dickinson: Withheld from

Publication by Her Sister Lavinia (1929), Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890),

Poems: Second Series (1891), Poems: Third Series (1896), The Complete Poems

of Emily Dickinson (1924), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960),

The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime (1914), Unpublished Poems of Emily

Dickinson (1935)”.

“In the 1850s she began writing poems on scraps of paper, progressively

experimenting with form and meter, and collected them in “fascicles” which she

stitched together herself. It is thought that the outbreak of the Civil War greatly

affected her and profoundly changed the style of her poetry. Her life became

increasingly reclusive and sedentary; she restricted her contact to the outside

world mainly to correspondence and devoted herself to household chores and

writing poetry .Very little else is known about her life apart from anecdotes and

her perceived eccentricities, such as the fact that she exclusively wore white

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dresses”.1

Emily Dickinson is the reclusive bride of silence – the radiant girl in

white who tarries in the world like an ethereal visitor and associates on speaking

terms with birds, bees, butterflies, lilacs and gentians as her only equals. She is

the one for whom isolation from society is the way to grace a discipline that

involves the universe. She is the one for whom the unknowable is as present to

her vision as the view from her window.

After Dickinson's death her poems were brought out by her sister Lavinia,

who was amazed by the vastness of Emily's poetry. She co-edited three volumes

from 1891 to 1896. Despite its editorial imperfections, the first volume became

popular. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Martha Dickinson

Bianchi, the poet's niece, transcribed and published more poems, and in 1945

“Bolts of melody” essentially completed the task of bringing Dickinson's poems

to the public.

The publication of Thomas H. Johnson's edition of Emily Dickinson's

poems finally gave readers a complete and accurate text. Johnson's work was not

made easier that the author had left alternative versions of words, lines and

sometimes of whole poems. Johnson found a valuable assistant in Theodora

Ward, who was then completing an edition of Dickinson's letters to her

grandparents. As editor of Emily Dickinson's Selected Poems (1924), Conrad

Aiken (1889-1973) was largely responsible for establishing that poet's

posthumous literary reputation. Her new series of her letters are commented by

Allan Tate in 1932 who also said about Emily Dickinson that :”There is none of

whom it is truer to say that the poet is the poetry.” A fully volume from 1935 is

followed in 1938 by some academic studies signed by Yvor Winters (“Emily

Dickinson and the limits of Judgement”) and George F. Wicher (“American

Humor”).In 1960 Jay Leyda publishes a chronology of her life entitled “The

years and Hours of Emily Dickinson”. Thomas H. Johnson’s “Emily Dickinson,

An Interpretive Biography” marks the beginning of a real wave of dickinsonian

criticism in which there is noticeable Charles R. Anderson (“Emily Dickinson ‘s

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Poetry –Stairway of Surprise”- an initiation in one hundred key-poems

belonging to the poet), Richard Willbur (“Sumptuous Destitution”), Archibal

Mac Leish (“The Private World: Poems of Emily Dickinson”), David Higgins

(“Portrait of Emily Dickinson, The Poet and Her Prose”) and many others.

Her work can be interpreted in so many ways. “Influenced most by the

Bible, Shakespeare, and the seventeenth century metaphysical2 (noted for their

extravagant metaphors in linking disparate objects), she wrote poems on grief,

death, loss, affection and longing.”3

T. H. Higginson, an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, her only critic during

her lifetime, called her a "wholly new and original poetic genius", but he

encouraged her not to publish her poems because he “felt that she was

unclassifiable within the poetic establishment of the day—departing from

traditional forms as well as conventions of language and meter, her poems

would have seemed odd, even unacceptable, to her contemporary audience.” He

called Emily "my partially cracked poetess at Amherst".

Emily Dickinson’s poetry “penetrates into the depths of the human soul

and mind with infinite insight.”

The poet and philosopher Sri Chinmoy4 said of the poet:

"Emily Dickinson wrote thousands of psychic poems. One short poem of hers is

enough to give sweet feelings and bring to the fore divine qualities of the soul."

“With a deep sense of gratitude, let me call upon the immortal soul of Emily

Dickinson, whose spiritual inspiration impels a seeker to know what God the

Infinite precisely is. She says:

“The infinite a sudden guest

Has been assumed to be,

But how can that stupendous come

Which never went away?”

Emily Dickinson was considered to be one of the most original poets of the

19th century. Although she had an unconventional way of writing she admired

the works of some well-known poets like, Walt Whitman, John Keats, Elizabeth

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Barrett Browning5, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and George Sand.

In 1892, Thomas Bailey Aldrich published a review in the Atlantic Monthly:

“She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by

the mannerism of Emerson…but the incoherence and formlessness of her –

versicles6 are fatal.” She fascinated a lot of scholars, like Sylvia Plath7 and was

the inspiration for the feminist writers.

“Emily Dickinson approached language like an explorer of new lands. It

offered her the excitement of adventure. It conferred the fresh wonder of

discovering what no man had ever seen before. She used words as if she were

the first to do so, with a joy and an awe largely lost to English poetry since the

Renaissance. Also with a creator's license: coining with a free hand, boldly

maneuvering her inherited vocabulary, collapsing the syntax, springing the

rhythm, slanting the rhyme.”8

Emily Dickinson’s critics have associated her work with the following

traditions in literature: the Emersonian tradition: the most significant influence

had Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet and philosopher. The emersonian terms

(eternity, doubt, redemption, revelation, grace, hope, etc.) that she uses, are in a

certain way different and tend to convey a complete new meaning to her poems.

The New England tradition: The most characteristic feature of the New England

people is to be shy, withdrawn, not very communicative, that’s why Emily never

writes long poems, she tends towards concentrated, somewhat wrought lyrics

that abound in ambiguity, allusion, compressed syntax that represents the main

concern.

- The 17th Century Metaphysical Tradition: as I already said she is a fan of

the 17th century authors.

- The Nature Poetry Tradition: a possible influence of William Cullen

Bryant9 and Henry Thoreau10.

“The author had humor, insight and an unusual power of terse and well

rounded expression.”11 Her work is interesting, but is disappointing in that it

gives so little clue to her personality.

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“Her direct, first-person voice makes much of her poetry easily accessible, yet

her unusual word usages and oblique approaches to a subject call for multiple

readings and sometimes multiple interpretations. Her density and

imaginativeness hark back to the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century, while

her play with language and her psychological and philosophical insights, many

quite unusual for the largely conservative 19th century, brought her a wide

audience only posthumously.”12

Emily Dickinson’s vocabulary, her lexical sources are derived from:

besides the lexicon Webster that she once used to call “my only company”, the

Bible, Shakespeare, which she knew by heart, Emerson, Melville and the last but

not the least the dialect from Connecticut. What’s interesting about this dialect is

the mixture of rural notions with academic notions, of the words that have

Anglo-Saxon origin with the ones that have Latin origin, of the regionalisms

with the neologisms.

The original structure of rhythm derives from Psalms and Protestant hymns, her

customary four-line stanzas and alternations in iambic meter between tetrameter

and trimeter, to what rhyme is concerned its ABCB schemes and assonances

give vocality to her poems. Here are some examples of assonances: “soul-toll;

spar-despair; lawn-down; wood-road; ear-fair; barns-hands; death-earth; here-

more; not-fact; down-noon; crowl-cool; came-time; room-storm; erect-regulate;

prison-heaven; them-dream; dig-dog; corn-noon; glass-face; head-ride; came-

world;” other assonances that have a more remote vocality: “pause-emphasize;

sun-heaven; around-head; scrumb-home; farm-beam; firm-room; ghost-passed.”

Another small, nevertheless full of literary meaning detail is that she writes the

majority of nouns and verbs with capital letters.

“Beyond deciphering her handwriting and trying to guess at dates, editors

have had to work from poems that often appeared in several unfinished forms,

with no clear, definitive version. Early publications of her selected poems were

horribly botched in an attempt to "clean up" her verse; they were only restored

in the collected poems as edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955, first in three

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volumes with considerable variants for each poem, and then in a single volume

of all 1755 poems five years later in which a "best copy" was chosen for each

poem. In no case were several versions of a poem combined. Only twenty-five

were given titles by Johnson and those often reluctantly. A typical manuscript

for a poem might include several undated versions, with varying capitalization

throughout, sometimes a “C” or an “S” that seems to be somewhere between

lowercase and capital, and no degree of logic in the capitalization. While

important subject words and the symbols that correspond to them are often

capitalized, often (but not always) a metrically stressed word will be capitalized

as well, even if it has little or no relevance in comparison to the rest of the words

1 Biographical note from “The single hound”,prefaced by Martha Dickinson Bianchi, p.1692 Metaphysics, a branch of philosophy dealing with the ultimate nature of reality.

Metaphysical poets, a poetic school from seventeenth century England who correspond with

baroque period in European literature.( source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical).

3 Ferlazzo , Paul J. “Critical Essays on Emily Dickinson”. G. K. Hall & Co. Boston,

Massachusetts. (1984)

4 Sri Chinmoy is a spiritual teacher who amongst other activities has written many volumes of

spiritual poetry,source: http://www.poetseers.org/sri_chinmoy.5 Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), English poet wrote Sonnets From The Portuguese

(1850);

6 versicle n 1.a short verse or sentence said or sung in public worship by a priest or minister

and followed by a response from the people: 2. a little verse.

7 American writer whose best-known poems are noted for their personal imagery and intense

focus. Plath wrote only two books before her suicide at the age of 31. Her posthumous Ariel

(1965) astohished the literary world with its power, and has become one of the best-selling

volumes of poetry published in England and America in the 20th century.

8 Charles R. Anderson : Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise. Publisher: Holt,

Rinehart and Winston, New York. (1960). p.3

9 Bryant William Cullen (1794-1878) Am. poet and editor

10 Thoreau H. D. (1817-1862) Am. writer

11, Cairns W. B.: A history of American Literature, New York Oxford University Press

London, Toronto, Melbourne (1930)

12 source: internet, Magill Book Reviews, property of Salem Press.

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in the poem. Early editors removed all capitals but the first of the line, or tried to

apply editorial logic to their usage. For example, poem 632 is now commonly

punctuated as follows:

“The Brain – is wider than the Sky –

For – put them side by side –

The one the other will contain

With ease – and You – beside –

The Brain is deeper than the sea –

For – hold them – Blue to Blue –

The one the other will absorb –

As Sponges – Buckets – do –

The Brain is just the weight of God –

For – Heft them – Pound for Pound –

And they will differ – if they do –

As Syllable from Sound – “

The above capitalizations, which include such seemingly unimportant words as

“Blue,” “Sponges,” and “Buckets,” capitalizing “Sky” but not “sea,” were

regularized into the following traditional capitalization and punctuation by early

editors:

The Brain is wider than the Sky,

For, put them side by side,

The one the other will contain

With ease, and you beside.

The Brain is deeper than the sea,

For, hold them, blue to blue,

The one the other will absorb,

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As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,

For, lift them pound for pound,

And they will differ, if they do,

As syllable from sound.”

II.1.a. “Eccentric” use of dash

One of the most characteristic uses of the dash is at the end of a

poem with a closed rhyme; the meter would shut, like a door, but the

punctuation seems open. In these cases, it is likely meant to serve as an extended

end-stop. The dash was historically an informal mark, used in letters and diaries

but not academic writing, and removing the dashes changes, even upon first

glance, the visual liveliness and vigor of her verses. While Johnson’s system of

transcribing all dash-like markings as a printed "n-dash," or short dash (as

above), is imperfect, in early editions, these dashes were replaced by more

regularized punctuation, such as commas and periods.

“Unlike the exclamation mark, the dash that dominates the prolific period is a

horizontal stroke, on the level of this world. It both reaches out and holds at bay.

Its origins in ellipsis connect it semantically to planets and cycles (rather than

linear time and sequential grammatical progression), as well as to silence and

the unexpressed. But to dash is also "to strike with violence so as to break into

fragments; to drive impetuously forth or out, cause to rush together; to affect or

qualify with an element of a different strain thrown into it; to destroy, ruin,

confound, bring to nothing, frustrate, spoil; to put down on paper, throw off, or

sketch, with hasty and unpremeditated vigour; to draw a pen vigorously through

writing so as to erase it; [is] used as a euphemism for 'damn,' or as a kind of

verbal imprecation; [or is] one of the two signals (the other being the dot) which

in various combinations make up the letters of the Morse alphabet." Dickinson

uses the dash to fragment language and to cause unrelated words to rush

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together; she qualifies conventional language with her own different strains; and

she confounds editorial attempts to reduce her "dashed off” jottings to a "final"

version. Not only does she draw lines through her own drafts but also through

the linguistic conventions of her society, and her challenges to God are

euphemistic imprecations against conventional religion. Even the allusion to the

Morse alphabet is not entirely irrelevant: through her unconventional use of

punctuation, particularly the dash, Dickinson creates a poetry whose

interpretation becomes a process of decoding the way each fragment signals

meaning.

Dickinson's transition from a dominant use of the exclamation mark to a

preference for the dash accompanied her shift from ejaculatory poems, which

seem outcries aimed with considerable dramatic effect at God or others, to

poems where the energies exist more in the relationships between words and

between the poet and her words. In this intensely prolific period, Dickinson's

excessive use of dashes has been interpreted variously as the result of great

stress and intense emotion, as the indication of a mental breakdown, and as a

mere idiosyncratic, female habit. Though these speculations are all subject to

debate, it is clear that in the early 1860s Dickinson conducted her most intense

exploration of language and used punctuation to disrupt conventional linguistic

relations, whether in an attempt to express inexpressible psychological states or

purely to vivify language.”13

“Emily Dickinson’ eccentric use of dashes is an integral part of her

method and style and cannot be translated to commas, semicolons and the rest

without deadening the wonderfully naked voltage of the poems.”(Huges Ted in

the introduction of “The poems of Emily Dickinson”, Edited by Thomas H.

Johnson).

I have chosen a poem to exemplify better these changes that have

occurred in her work along the time.

13 Denman, Kamilla: "Emily Dickinson’s Volcanic Punctuation." The Emily Dickinson

Journal (1993), source: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/dickinson/dash.htm

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“Poem 320, "We play at Paste," was changed in punctuation, capitalization, and

even stanza form.

We play at Paste – 

Till qualified, for Pearl – 

Then, drop the Paste – 

And deem ourself a fool – 

The Shapes – though – were similar –

And our new Hands

Learned Gem-Tactics – 

Practicing Sands – 

The above poem, when published for the first time, looked like this:

We play at paste,

Till qualified for pearl,

Then drop the paste,

And deem ourself a fool.

The shapes, though, were similar,

And our new hands

Learned gem-tactics

Practicing sands.

Not only does the poem leave a completely different visual impression on the

page, but the pacing created by the punctuation is distorted as well, causing "The

Shapes – though – were similar –“ to be compressed into “The shapes, though,

were similar.”14

14 poets.org, from the Academy of American Poets, Guide to Emily Dickinson’s Collected

Poems

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The reason why I chose the excerpt from above is that I find it

terrible for the publishers of those times to distort a poem in this way. This

“mere” change succeeds in changing the literary meaning and the cultural

message that this poem has. In the attempt of making Dickinson’s poems more

educational several words were actually changed: in the poem “The brain is

wider than the sky” that I have quoted before, the word “heft” was replaced with

“lift”. Another case is the replacement of the dash with a simple coma, which

again manages to compress sequences full of emotional charge into a

meaningless phrase.

Nevertheless “Dickinson’s profusion of dashes dominates the page and

her statistics are just as impressive. Edith Wylder analyzed thirty poetry

manuscripts (choosing every tenth poem in Bingham packets 80 to 91) and

identified 221 irregular notations, further classified as angular slants, reversed

slants, horizontal marks, and curved marks. After an admittedly rough

mathematical calculation, critics estimate over seven thousand dash-like

notations in Dickinson's holographs. In a videotaped interview, poet Adrienne

Rich15 recalls: “I'll never forget the shock of opening the second edition of the

poems in which the dashes had been restored and getting a sense of a whole new

reading of the poetry, a whole new voice;” the resulting typography seemed

“much more jagged, much more personal, much more original, much more

uncontainable than I had ever thought her to be.”

Probably Emily Dickinson was influenced by Lawrence Sterne's extensive

use of varied dashes to indicate Lockean associations within the mind which

defy the linear progression of ideas. Sterne scholarship can illuminate

Dickinson's poems; for example, Ian Watt describes how Sterne uses the dash to

represent “a nonlogical junction” between “one train of thought and another”

and to enact “the drama of inhibited impulse, of the sudden interruptions and

oscillations of thought and feeling”. Similarly, for Dickinson, the dash

represents the multiple avenues of thought inherent to genius and challenges the

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reader to puzzle through sophisticated metaphoric connections which are

perhaps less obvious to our slower minds. “16

II.1.b. Dickinson’s nontitling

“Omissions are not accidents. “17

                                            Marianne Moore

“The knowledge of things is not to be derived

from names… no man will like to put himself or the

education of his mind in the power of names. “(Cratylus

439b, 440c)

                                     Socrates       

The titling system used most frequently today in Emily Dickinson’s

volumes of poems, is the number assigned by Thomas H. Johnson in his various

collected editions, along with the first line of the poem. The matter of titling

becomes a very important issue for the editors because Dickinson was never

eager to publish her entire work that is why she “ gave titles to twenty-four

poems; twenty-one of the titles are for poems which she sent to friends, three are

for poems in the packets. In every instance but two, among the twenty-one for

poems sent to friends, the title is supplied in the letter accompanying the poem,

not on the copy of the poem itself. The exceptions are no. 15 and 227.”18

“The most obvious explanation for Dickinson's nontitling would be that

she did not publish. The innovation of providing titles for short poems grew out

of the commercialization of poetry. Poems are given titles when they are

intended for public consumption; Dickinson never prepared hers for public

consumption. However, this explanation has its weaknesses. Dickinson's

nonpublication and nontitling may be associated without the first being the

15 Adrienne Rich (May 16 1929 - present) is an American feminist, poet, teacher and writer.

16 from the American Literature Course, Eccentric Use of the Dash: Sava, Ioan (course notes)

17 source: www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/

18 source: www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/

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cause of the second. Certainly nonpublication allowed her to forego the titling

that a publisher likely would have insisted on. But finally, her nontitling says as

much about her nonpublication. Titling reveals an author with the marketplace,

and its requirements, in mind. Dickinson never showed any inclination to title,

not in her earliest poetry, not in the poetry before Higginson's counsel against

publication. Her nontitling strongly suggests she never had any interest in

publishing.

Most of Dickinson's many commentators say nothing about her nontitling.

Perhaps they assume that the nontitling is the result of nonpublication, and that

there is nothing more to say about it. However, three contemporary critics have

given alternative explanations. For Mutlu Konuk Blasing, titles are associated

with authority, an authority that Dickinson, as a nineteenth-century woman in a

patriarchal culture, could not claim:

Dickinson's gender displaces her from this patrilineal line of symbolic

substitutions that authorizes poetry. . . . Dickinson's untitled, unauthorized work

celebrates the deviation of a "slant" language and consists, in fact, of poems

without titles and often without authorized versions. She resists the Word

directly authorized…

Dickinson's nontitling can also be seen as an example of a modern

linguistic skepticism that was itself a form of a larger epistemological

skepticism.

In his “Dickinson: The Modern Idiom”, David Porter explains Dickinson's

nontitling as one aspect of her radical modernism, a modernism in which "a

mind explosive with signifying power but disinherited from transcendent

knowledge" creates … in general an art marked by absences and omissions.

According to Porter, she could not title:

“Because she had no definable purpose, and was without a sense of mastery

carried through to its conclusion, she was unable to recognize the definiteness

involved in putting a title to a poem. With no particular subject to her parabolic

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sweeps, no presiding project, and no sense of form fulfilling itself, there were no

titles. The absence is emblematic of the artistic career.”19

“Similar to Porter, Richard Howard sees Dickinson's nontitling as one of a

number of related "problems" in her poetry: the problem of her never wanting to

publish, the problem of her variants, the problem of her dashes, and so on - all

aspects of the fact that “there is no finality to her work - there is only presence”.

For Howard, though, Dickinson's nontitling is not the result of being

tempermentally unable to finish (as Porter says), but of being tempermentally

uninterested in finishing:

For herself, the poems are endless approximations, in part a throwaway, in part

provisional stays and props against ecstasy - what she called "an unfinished

Pleasure." For her, each poem written was merely a way of proceeding to the

next one, a release from bonds, a transition . . . and in such a procession, titles

were not only an irrelevant distraction, they were a betrayal, foreclosing what

was to be perpetually dissolved, kept open.

“All three critics - Blasing, Porter, and Howard - discuss Dickinson's nontitling

as one of several related features of her poetic practice. In contrast I offer an

explanation that focuses on only her nontitling, and that is based on evidence of

her linguistic skepticism. Statements in both the poems and letters depreciate

language, and specifically names, as providing only second-hand, inadequate

knowledge. These statements, along with three features of the poems and letters,

suggest that Dickinson rejected titling out of a Socratic, specifically Cratylian,

distrust of names as knowledge. The features are: her use of quotation marks in

poems to set off terms; her odd way of referring to her own poems as if they

were nonlinguistic things; the frequent avoidance of familiar names within

poems.

19Mulvihill, John: “Why Dickinson didn’t title”, internet article source

http://community.livejournal.com /em_dickinson/4195.html

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One of the earliest debates over the relation between words and things

occurs in Plato's Cratylus, which Socrates concludes with this statement about

the inadequacy of names:

“the knowledge of things is not to be derived from names. . . . no man of sense

will like to put himself or the education of his mind in the power of names.

(439b, 440c)

In the tradition of the Cratylus20, Dickinson honestly depreciates the knowledge

value of names in several poems:

Of Mines, I little know - myself -

But just the names. . . .

(P299)

I scarce esteem Location's Name -

(P725)

Their names, unless you know them,

'Twere useless tell.” (P1746)”

We can associate the fact that she didn’t title with the fact that she didn’t want to

publish her poems in the first place. Or maybe she was simply skeptical.

The artificiality of a name cannot be put next to a poem full of significance.

“If names are a poor substitute for more immediate knowledge of objects

and phenomena, so are titles a poor substitute for knowledge of her poems”.

Her poems are created “by intuition” and not “by terms”, because after all poetry

is made of words and of a variety of names. Higginson reports that Dickinson

said, during a visit, to him: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so

cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the

top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I

20 “Cratylus is the name of a dialogue by Plato, written in approximately 360 BC. In the

dialogue, Socrates is asked by two men, Cratylus and Hermogenes, to tell them whether

names are "conventional" or "natural", that is, whether language is a system of arbitrary signs

or whether words have an intrinsic relation to the things they signify. In doing this, Cratylus

became one of the earliest philosophical texts of the Classical Greek period to deal with

matters of etymology and linguistics.”source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cratylus_(dialogue)

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know it. Is there any other way."21

The most interesting thing about not titling is that it gives the poem a status of a

phenomenon. A title looks like an idea, it conceptualizes, abstracts the poem,

whereas a poem cannot “be wordless / As the flight of birds”.

“One way to show the effects of not titling is to show the effects of not

naming within a poem, as in the well-known "A narrow Fellow in the Grass"

(P986). The speaker never refers to the "Fellow" as a snake but as "he," "him,"

"Fellow," and as one of "Nature's people." These references, because they are

unspecific, create a feeling of either familiarity (no names necessary between

friends) or apprehensiveness (no name suggests the unknown), or both. The

speaker also identifies the "Fellow" metaphorically and metonymically through

an accumulation of details about its appearance and environment: "The Grass

divides as with a Comb" and "He likes a Boggy Acre." The circumvention22 (in

the sense of "to avoid by passing around") of the name of a creature (or object or

phenomenon),(1) "defamiliarizes" the thing being described (to use the

translation of the Russian Formalist term), which (2) evokes a more immediate

experience, or intuition, of the thing. Since the title position is often the place

used to name what is not named in the poem itself (an object, phenomenon,

occasion), not titling can be an extension of the not naming within the poem.

That is, not titling defamiliarizes the thing that is the subject of the poem. But

not titling also defamiliarizes the poem itself, forcing the reader into a more

immediate experience of the poem as itself a thing - a word-thing.”23

Like other stylistic characteristics of her poetry - its compression, inverted

syntax, neologisms - nontitling is a purposeful subversion of conventional poetic

practice.”24 Dickinson is the first modern poet who systematically and decisively

21 Ibidem: http://community.livejournal.com /em_dickinson/4195.html

22 the act of prevailing over another by arts, address or fraud; deception; fraud; imposture;

delusion.

23 Ibidem: http://community.livejournal.com /em_dickinson/4195.html24 On Dickinson's stylistic experiments, see Cristanne Miller's Emily Dickinson: A Poet's

Grammar 160-86.

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did not provide titles for her poems. To borrow Marianne Moore's words: her

"Omissions are not accidents."

Notes

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