Hollowness in Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Discourse Essay example -- Biog

Hollowness in Emily Dickinsons Poetic Discourse more has been said about Emily Dickinsons mystifying poetry and private biography, 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 hold 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 definition of Dickinsons 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 des cribe a plunge into the Unconscious and a occur 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 come apart existential despair, withdrawal from the world of the senses and death of consciousness. In poem 378 the reader is introduced to the mental world of a speaker whose relentless questioning of metaphysical truths has guide her to a state of complete faithlessness l... ...sons Poetry Stairway of Surprise. current York Holt, 1960.Eberwein, Jane Donahue. Dickinson Strategies of Limitation. Amherst U of Massachusetts P, 1985.Feit Diehl, Joanne. Ransom in a Voice lyric as Defense in Dickinsons Poetry. Feminist Critics in dicate Emily Dickinson. Ed. Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington Indiana UP, 1983. 156-75. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic The Woman Writer and the 19th Century Literary Imagination. New Haven Yale UP, 1979. Homans, Margaret. Oh, Vision of Language Dickinsons Poems of Love and Death. Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Ed. Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington Indiana UP, 1983. 114-33. Miller, Cristanne. How Low Feet Stagger Disruptions of Language in Dickinsons Poetry. Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Ed. Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington Indiana UP, 1983. 134-55.