1 - Approaching Dickinson's Rhetoric, Poetics, and Stylisti

Summary

“Speech” — is a prank of Parliament

“Tears” — a trick of the nerve —

(Fr193A; J688)

Being the most subjective and confidential of poetic genres, the lyric nevertheless exists as much to communicate with others as does verse narrative and drama.

— Willis J. Buckingham, “Emily Dickinson and the Reading Life”

Dickinson's use of her poems in letters suggests one way in which she may have intended them to be read: they are private messages universalized by a double release from private circumstance.… [First,] their audience is limited; their addressee is “the World,” although she would speak to its members one by one under the ambiguity of the pronoun “you.” Second, the speaker in the poems is more a dramatic than a personal “I.”

— Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar

ALTHOUGH EMILY DICKINSON left us with no ars poetica per se, many of her poems can be regarded as “dramatic speeches” in Aristotle's sense of the term. Archibald MacLeish notes that more than 150 of her poems begin with the word “I,” which he calls “the talker's word,” adding that “few poets … have written more dramatically than Emily Dickinson, more in the live locutions of dramatic speech, words born living on the tongue, written as though spoken” (103–4; emphasis MacLeish's). But is Emily Dickinson engaging in oratory? Helen McNeil, for one, says no. Unlike Whitman, who seems to be “returning poetry to its authentic basis in human speech, Dickinson reverses these priorities” (83).