The Implicit Intimacy of Dickinson's Dashes The dash in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, initially edited away as a sign of incompletion, has since come to be seen as crucial to the impact of her poems. Critics have examined the dash from a myriad of angles, viewing it as a rhetorical notation for oral performance, a technique for recreating the rhythm of a telegraph, or a subtraction sign in an underlying mathematical system.1 However, attempting to define Dickinson’s intentions with the dash is clearly speculative given her varied dash-usage; in fact, one scholar illustrated the fallibility of one dash-interpretation by applying it to one of Dickinson’s handwritten cake recipes (Franklin 120). Instead, I begin with the assumption that “text” as an entity involving both the reading and writing of the material implies a reader’s attempt to recreate the act of writing as well as the writer’s attempt to guide the act of reading. I will focus on the former, given the difficulties surrounding the notion of authorial intention a.k.a. the Death of the Author. Using three familiar Dickinson poems—“The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” “The Soul selects her own Society,” and “This was a Poet—It is that,”—I contend that readers can penetrate the double mystery of Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life and lyrically dense poetry by enjoying a sense of intimacy not dependent upon the content of her poems. The source of this intimacy lies in her remarkable punctuation. Dickinson’s unconventionally-positioned dashes form disjunctures and connections in the reader’s understanding that create the impression of following Dickinson through the creative process towards intimacy with the poet herself. This implicit intimacy becomes clear ... ... middle of paper ... ...ickinson’s highly personal notations. Ironically, what at first seems an idiosyncratic stylistic effect operates to create a deep sense of intimacy between the reader and the creative process of a highly reclusive individual. Far from distancing the reader, the dash actually provides a gateway between the act of reading and the poet’s moment of creation, only possible if we view the text as a shifting co-creation of reader and poet. Works Cited: Edith Wylder, The Last Face: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971). Jerusha Hall McCormack, “Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,” American Quarterly 55.4 (2003) 569-601. Michael Theune, “’One and One are One’…and Two: An Inquiry into Dickinson’s Use of Mathematical Signs,” The Emily Dickinson Journal 10.1 (2001) 99-116.
any scholars shudder at the idea of dissecting any of the simple, yet strikingly complex, poems of the great American author Emily Dickinson. When a reader first views one of the multitudes of Dickinson’s texts, their first response is one of simplicity. Due to the length of her poetry, many people believe that they will turn out to be simple. Yet, once someone begins to read one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, it does not take long to realize the utter complexity of the text. As said by Wiggins, author of Prentice Hall’s, American Experience Volume 1, “Dickinson’s poetry was printed as she had meant it to be read, and the world experienced the power of her complex mind captured in concrete imagery and simple but forceful language.” Through this,
Martin, Wendy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Much has been said about Emily Dickinson’s mystifying poetry and private life, especially during the years 1860-63. Allegedly it was during these years that the poetess, at the most prolific phase of her career, withdrew from society, began to wear her “characteristic” white dress and suffered a series of psychotic episodes. Dickinson tended to “theatricalize” herself by speaking through a host of personae in her poems and by “fictionalizing” her inner life as a gothic romance (Gilbert 584). Believing that a poem is “the best words in the best order” (to quote S.T. Coleridge) and that all the poems stemming from a single consciousness bring to surface different aspects / manifestations of the same personal mythology, I will firstly disregard biographical details in my interpretation of Dickinson’s poems 378, 341 and 280 and secondly place them in a sort of “continuum” (starting with 378 and ending with 280) to show how they attempt to describe a “plunge” into the Unconscious and a lapse into madness (I refrain from using the term “journey,” for it implies a “telos,” a goal which, whether unattainable or not, is something non-existent in the poems in question). Faced with the problem of articulating and concretizing inner psychological states, Dickinson created a totally new poetic discourse which lacks a transcendental signified and thus can dramatize the three stages of a (narrated) mental collapse: existential despair, withdrawal from the world of the senses and “death” of consciousness.
...r works, and certainly, the more the traditional the establishment, book or website, the more invisible this possibility becomes. Since Dickinson's works were unintended for publication, the public is entitled via her family to make their own assumptions about her and her work. I contend that the writing style of Dickinson's letters and poetry was conceived with genius, edited and re-edited with that same genius. To take pen to her works, which are by their nature, concise and spare in language, but rich in symbolism, ingenuity, punctuation and grammatical engineering is an insult to her work, and frankly few would succeed in retaining that genius unless merely replacing gender indicative words and imagery.
Reading a poem by Emily Dickinson can often lead the reader to a rather introspective state. Dickinson writes at length about the drastically transformative effect a book may have upon its’ reader. Alternating between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, Dickinson masterfully uses the ballad meter to tell a story about the ecstasy brought by reading. In poem number 1587, she writes about the changes wrought upon the reader by a book and the liberty literature brings.
Some historians describe Emily’s letters to Susan Gilbert as representative of the writing style during the Victorian era. Others, including Dickinson’s biographer Rebecca Patterson, saw the letters as evidence of Emily’s homosexuality (Sullivan, ...
Black South Africans were treated unjustly through racial discrimination, unfair laws and segregation. These injustices eventually led to racial tensions and even violence. The autobiography of one South African and other
"Emily Dickinson: The Writing Years (1865-1886)." Emily Dickinson Museum . N.p.. Web. 4 Apr 2014. .
On September 19, 2008 David Goldman, a staff writer for CNNMoney.com, reported that The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) placed a temporary ban on the short selling of financial companies’ securities. The action was taken as a defensive maneuver to help stabilize trading in the 799 financial companies named in the ban. The SEC reasoned that short sellers where manipulating the stock prices of the named companies and that banning the practice of short selling would restore regularity to the markets (Goldman, 2008).
Saluzzi. "Introduction to Broken Markets: How High Frequency Trading and Predatory Practices on Wall Street Are Destroying Investor Confidence and Your Portfolio." Broken Markets: How High Frequency Trading and Predatory Practices on Wall Street Are Destroying Investor Confidence and Your Portfolio. N.p.: FT, 2012. N. pag. Financial Times Press. FT Press, 6 Aug. 2012. Web. 06 Feb. 2015.
The poetry of Emily Dickinson is shrouded in an air of mystery, and rightly so. The fact that not much is known about Dickinson’s personal life makes it somewhat difficult to grasp her strikingly complex subject matter and unusual writing style. Her rebellion of the traditional poetic form seems to have made it rather difficult to publish any of her work—Norton tells us that she did, in fact, try to have some of her poetry published, but that she was unhappy with how the editors tried to make the format of her work appear more conventional (“Emily Dickinson” 1661). When her poems finally were published following her death in 1886, it was through the tedious efforts of some of her closest friends. Initially, Dickinson’s poetry was disliked by critics who thought that her verse “violated the laws of meter” (“Emily Dickinson” 1662), but they began to gain popularity in the mid-1900s when Dickinson’s niece resumed publication of the poems. Without such efforts, Dickinson’s work may not have made it to the eyes and ears of audiences today. While her poems still cause some confusion among her readers, she is nonetheless revered as one of America’s greatest poets.
Sometimes known as one of America’s greatest poets, Emily Dickinson has made a name for herself in American literature books throughout the world. Dickinson’s work has become increasingly popular over the last century; only being truly discovered in 1955. Since then Dickinson’s work has been the study of many philosophers and literary critics; who strive to understand Dickinson’s poetry with little help coming from the now deceased author. Emily Dickinson was born December 10th, 1830 in Amherst Massachusetts. Dickinson lived a rather normal childhood
The poetry of the Imagists is short, simple, and quite literal in its meaning in order to create a vivid picture in the reader’s mind. When they describe an object, it means just what they say. A tree is a tree, a flower is a flower, and a bird is a bird. Imagists have little use for abstract words or ideas, and tend to shy away from them as much as possible. Emily Dickinson doesn’t fall under the same category as the Imagists, as she doesn’t use the same techniques as the Imagists.
Emily Dickinson was born at 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts in a wealthy family. She attended an Amherst Academy, which was founded by Emily’s grandfather Samuel Fowler Dickinson. In 1847, she went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary where she spent a year and decided to withdraw. After returning from the seminary, she only traveled to Washington DC and Philadelphia at 1955, and remained in Amherst for the most part of her life. In 1960, she became very introverted and the only connection with world were her letters that she wrote to her friends and family members. Her alienation from the world and her refusal to get merried made her to become a legend in her town and because of that she received a title of “The Myth” and ‘New England Nun”.
Scribner, Charles. “Emily Dickinson.” American Writers. Ed. Walton Litz. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1998