Emily Dickinson and the Poetry of Hypothesis
Andrew Gibson
è ‘She makes her statements in the knowledge that other attitudes are always possible and viable’
è In a letter to T.W Higginson, Emily Dickinson writes: “When I state myself, as representative of the Verse-it does not mean –me- but a supposed person’
è Hence there is a distinction although one could argue it is superficial between poet and speaker. However as extension students would know it is not as obvious to the extent of Browning’s poetry
è Of the speakers, “there is nothing specific about their personalities or circumstances, and their tones and concerns are identical with those in a host of other poems’
è Poems are ‘imaginative experiments’
è ‘not dramatic monologues’ but similar to them
è She uses many conventions of poetry à ‘lyric al expression of personal feeling and the kind of self-enactment we associate with dramatic art’
è Her poetry is significant as she ‘is the difficulty of characterising feeling, of ascertaining the boundaries within in which it can be defined’
è Her poetry represents both paradox and perspectives
· Public and private
· Serious and trivial
· Microcosm and macrocosm
è Identity plays an important role in her poetryà she seems to ‘oscillate between extremes’
o Relevant to Keat’s ‘assertion that the imagination of a poet has identity
è ‘Reversibility is a character of ED grammar and syntax. Verbs may be read as either active or passive. A clause, a phrase, a line of verse often seems to belong to two sentences at once. Nouns may be both the object of a sentence and its object. ‘
è Verbs maybe third person singular or subjunctive
è ‘the grammatical ambiguities make sense seem possible, in spite of confusion and uncertainty’
è Uses subjunctives
o ‘make propositions seem more conditional and less universal, less like absolute truths’
o May seem unorthodox but it is ‘in the context which she uses it’
è Poems ‘suspend conclusion, undermine the positions from which they start, balance different and often antithetical attitudes, and play them off against one another. Assertions class, and leave each other weakened and frail’
è ED ‘chooses a phrase that both sustains and results the mood and meaning of the lines around it’
è poems are ‘frequently on the point of exchanging one view for another and very different one’
No comments:
Post a Comment