"The Plucked String": Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore and the Poetics of Select Defects

1998 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Hogue
Keyword(s):  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Marianne Moore

scholarly journals Marianne Moore, Kenneth Burke and the Poetics of Literary Labour

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-452
Author(s):  
VICTORIA BAZIN
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Kenneth Burke ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
The Political ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
National Importance ◽  
Critical Interpretation

Writing to Morton Zabel in 1932, Marianne Moore praised Zabel’s review of Emily Dickinson for Poetry magazine but also took the opportunity to remind her addressee that ‘‘Emily Dickinson cared about events that mattered to the nation.’’ In his review, Zabel had repeatedly insisted upon Dickinson’s ‘‘fast seclusion’’ from her community, locked as she was within an ‘‘asylum of the spirit.’’ This emphasis upon ‘‘isolation’’ and ‘‘introspection’’ represented the woman poet as being oddly detached from the ‘‘real’’ and implicitly masculine world of political and social change, a critical strategy Moore would have been all too familiar with, her own work having been repeatedly constructed in terms of aesthetic ‘‘purity.’’ Moore’s defence of Dickinson as a poet fully engaged with the political and social issues of her day is also, implicitly, a reminder to Zabel that women’s poetry need not be confined by critical interpretation to the private and feminized sphere of ‘‘introspection’’ but could be related to public affairs of national importance.

Just Letters: Corresponding Poets

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Haughton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Poetry And Poetics ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Philip Larkin ◽  
Ted Hughes ◽  
Art Form

This chapter explores poets’ letters as ‘an art form’ in the post-Romantic period, exploring the bearing of poets’ letters on their poems (and vice versa). It reflects on the key role played by epistolary dialogue in the creation and circulation of poetry in the modern period, documenting the ways poets first launched poems in letters to friends, and used letters to sketch out their ideas about poetry and poetics. It comment on the practice of a number of nineteenth-century poets who used letters to launch ideas about their poetry (including Keats, the Brownings, Hopkins and Emily Dickinson), before moving on to consider the equally crucial role of correspondence in the work of twentieth-century poets (including Bishop, Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Philip Larkin). In offering a survey of this broad epistolary territory, it also outlines an idea of an epistolary poetics.

Semantic and stylistic aspects of using geographical vocabulary in Emily Dickinson’s verse

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-99
Author(s):  
В. В. Колівошко ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Unique Color ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Empirical Methodology ◽  
Qualitative Characteristics ◽  
Individual Style

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.

The Poetics of American Civil War Sacrifice

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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