“He fumbles at your Soul”: Emily Dickinson between the piano and the cosmos

This article reports a study according to the tenets of empirical methodology in addressing research questions. The project tests the principles of using geographical vocabulary in Emily Dickinson’s verse. It focuses on the study of stylistic and semantic aspects of the usage of geographical vocabulary. The results demonstrate the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the usage of geographical vocabulary. Emily Dickinson’s poems are full of geographical names, which she uses with both positive and negative connotations. As we can see, the negative connotations prevail. The results point out how Emily Dickinson manipulates geographical names at all levels of the language. In addition, the findings indicate specific color gamma of Emily Dickinson’s poems. The use of colors is different for each geographical object; especially it applies to the names of countries, towns etc. Emily Dickinson associates every continent with its own unique color. These findings demonstrate the individual style of Emily Dickinson, which is distinctive among other poets.

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Traductologie et poésie : Emily Dickinson entre la dérive des règles et les règles de la dérive

Cahiers Charles V ◽

10.3406/cchav.1994.1105 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 17 (1) ◽

pp. 111-186 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

André Davoust

Keyword(s):

Emily Dickinson

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The Poems of Emily Dickinson

10.2307/j.ctvqsf0fv ◽

2005 ◽

Keyword(s):

Emily Dickinson

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The Poetics of American Civil War Sacrifice

10.1093/oso/9780198806516.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Randall Fuller

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Herman Melville ◽

Walt Whitman ◽

Body Politic ◽

Emily Dickinson ◽

American Civil War ◽

The Body ◽

The Sacrifice

The nature and meaning of sacrifice were fiercely contested in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Historians have documented a long struggle by veterans to ensure the continuing remembrance of their sacrifice. At the same time, American politicians tended to demur from acknowledging these sacrifices, as doing so would reopen the rift that had prompted war in the first place. This chapter probes the work of three Civil War poets—Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—to uncover the meaning of sacrifice during and after the war. Dickinson’s verses about psychic pain and dislocation are increasingly understood as simultaneous expositions of the personal and political: Melville’s knotty, multi-perspectival poems about the war, Battle-Pieces, question the ideological freight of sacrifice, and Whitman sought to honour the sacrifice of soldiers through a poetics he hoped would heal the body politic. Ultimately only Whitman’s consolatory poetry would find a postwar audience.

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