Split the lark and find the music : constructing Emily Dickinson's poetics /

Abstract

Emily Dickinson had a comparatively systematic poetics that remained hidden in her poems and letters. Dickinson's poetics evolved from her worldview demonstrated in her independence of the established religion for ready-made perspectives. She valued individuated interpretation of the world around and emphasized subjectivity in such interpretation. Her independent thinking led her to view poetry unconventionally. Dickinson defined poetry in terms of its effect on the audience and built her poetics around the audience. Although her poetics is audience-centered, Dickinson anticipated the intentional fallacy of New Criticism by placing great emphasis on the study of the work itself. Her preference of ambiguity and tension also anteceded the New Critical notion of the poetic language. While Dickinson gives the poet the maximum autonomy and ultimate freedom in poetic creation, she is aware that the poet has to negotiate between her own normal psychology and the creative urge that is all too powerful and possessive. The poet is nothing but a representative of the Verse. On this point, Dickinson anticipates Jung's archetypal theory by many years. Dickinson also anticipates structuralism in that she believes that not only does the poetry of the past influence the poetry of the present, the poetry of the present changes the meaning of the poetry of the past. Dickinson does not only put her poetics to practice, she discusses it, in her poems and letters, intelligently. She anticipates many of the modern critical theories, and she combines them in a systematic way.