Chapter 1 - The Manuscript Variants

Summary

What do Dickinson’s habitual composition strategies indicate about her poetics? I argue that Dickinson and her peers wrote the way they did, generating variants and saving their writings in hand-bound booklets, because of the education they received in composition and rhetoric. This chapter draws on archival evidence to argue that many of Dickinson’s contemporaries composed in similar ways because of ideas about the importance of diction in the New Rhetoric. Dickinson’s training in varieties of skeptical, realist, and nominalist semiotic theory derived from Locke contribute to her persistent doubt and fragile faith in language. In a reading of several of Dickinson’s poems reflecting upon the composition process, I demonstrate both the presence of these rhetorical theories and their consequences in repeatedly staged crises of reference and articulation. This chapter lays the groundwork for subsequent chapters by depicting Dickinson’s poetics as evolving out of conflicts in a particular philosophical milieu.