7 - Scholarship on Archetypal and Philosophical Themes in Dickinson's Poetry

Summary

September's Baccalaureate

A combination is

Of Crickets — Crows — and Retrospects

And a dissembling Breeze

…

That makes the Heart put up its Fun

And turn Philosopher.

(Fr1313; J1271)

The central paradox of Dickinson's thought — her awareness that the ratio of actual loss to visionary gain formed the controlling, measurable condition of existential life — ultimately energized her thought itself, made her quest vital and meaningful.

— Greg Johnson, Emily Dickinson: Perception and the Poet's Quest (1985)

Her agon was waged with the whole of tradition, but particularly with the Bible and with romanticism.

— Harold Bloom, introduction to Modern Critical Views: Emily Dickinson (1985)

TO PERCEIVE A LITERARY WORK FROM an archetypal perspective is to disregard the author as an “isolate self” — to use Frank Lentricchia's term from After the New Criticism (1980) — in order to foreground the author's universal patterns of thought, or the Jungian “collective unconscious.” Such universal patterns or archetypes are what, presumably, have given rise to the ancient myths. Myth, according to Northrop Frye in his landmark Anatomy of Criticism (1957) “is the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire” (136). For Frye any school of criticism that searches for “a limiting principle in literature … is mistaken” (17). Of course he has in mind the formalists, who regard the work of art under scrutiny as a self-contained, complex aesthetic system.