Dickinson and Pivoting Thought, Eileen John

Emily Dickinson’s poems hold a constructive response to an epistemic and practical predicament. We are aware of an overwhelmingly expansive reality, and we know that our knowledge is limited. Must we be disoriented or stymied as knowers and agents? I will highlight Dickinson’s attention to devices that link different planes and materials, such as hinges and seams. These devices have a bearing on our predicament, as they can be understood to orient us in relation to a multiply demanding reality. Competence with using or maintaining a seam or hinge shows some understanding of what “pulls” us toward different domains, of what is relevant to multiple fields of knowledge and action, without simultaneous grasp of the whole.

Interiority and Expression in Dickinson’s Lyrics, Magdalena Ostas

The argument in this chapter is that Dickinson’s poetics of inner life makes us see anew the long-standing philosophical problem of expression. Dickinson’s poetry invests itself in an understanding of subjectivity that rearranges the anchors we often turn to in thinking about how lives and identities take on shape in expressive forms. Poetry forces this essentially inward poet to conclude that introspection leads to blindness and rather than to self-knowledge and understanding. Dickinson presents us with a new picture of a human subject unable to find comfort or satisfaction in pursuing itself on the inside. Poetry, instead, gives Dickinson evidence of herself and allows her to encounter the particular what and how of her own inner life as it takes shape outside of her. What literature and philosophy at their crossroads can gain by engaging the idea that poems probe hypotheses about subjectivity is a central concern in the readings.

Forms of Emotional Knowing and Unknowing: Skepticism and Belief in Dickinson’s Poetry, Rick Anthony Furtak

Continually at issue in Dickinson’s verse are the possibilities and limits of knowing the surrounding world, including the minds of others. Many of her poems give voice to wonder, frustration, and the feeling of illumination or insight, along with other emotional states involved in exploring the promise of knowledge and confronting skeptical questions. My chapter is focused especially on moments in Dickinson’s poetry when an encounter with the natural or human world is portrayed as moving the speaker toward either an intensification or a partial resolution of doubt—a dialectic through which she articulates the affective struggle to make sense of the world and to find herself at home in it. As I show, the philosophical thinking that unfolds in her lyrics is preoccupied with a characteristic human lament about our finite limitations and with a contrary, but intimately related, longing to be reconciled with our finitude.

Form and Content in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, Antony Aumann

The goal of this chapter is to reconcile two competing camps of thinking regarding Dickinson’s poetry. According to the first camp, the form and content of her poems cannot be pulled apart. What she says is tightly bound up with how she says it. According to the second camp, her poems can be paraphrased; what they say can be said in other words. To resolve the tension between these views, the chapter defends the following two claims. First, poets and critics tend to ask too much of paraphrases, wrongly demanding they reproduce everything contained in the original poem. Second, poets and critics are engaged in different kinds of activities. These activities are governed by different norms. In particular, form and content must be tied together for a poet such as Dickinson but not for a critic intent on a paraphrase.

Introduction

The contributors to this volume all argue that poetry is a tool for epistemic achievement, and that Emily Dickinson uses poetry both to understand the world and to advocate for poetry as a tool of understanding. Many also argue that Dickinson offers a distinctive construal of knowledge, as a continual process of grappling with a world that transcends complete grasp, through daily cognitive, emotional, and practical labor. While some aspects of the resulting portrait fit the stereotype of Dickinson as a reclusive poet observing “small moments” in nature and in her own mental life, the Dickinson we encounter here is decidedly more determined, argumentative, and hopeful than that stereotype allows. This not only re-writes our conception of Dickinson; it provides lessons for philosophy, by offering alternative characterizations of what knowledge is, and of the methodologies through which it can be achieved.

How to Know Everything, Oren Izenberg

Poetry’s critics and defenders have tended to agree that whatever the achievements of the art may be, knowledge (in the “ordinary” philosophical sense) is not among them. This chapter mounts a defense of the epistemic ambitions of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. It offers an extended comparison between Dickinson’s poetry and the “Cosmoscope,” the imaginary tool offered in David Chalmers’s Constructing the World. The Cosmoscope allows Chalmers to consider what basic truths would be required to make an entire universe of truths accessible to reason. By highlighting the parallels between Chalmers’s basic classes of truth and Dickinson’s recurrent poetic emphases on descriptive precision, phenomenological sensitivity, formal indexicality, and thematic totality, the chapter aims to show that Dickinson understands her poems as assays in knowledge seeking within a knowable world—and to suggest that we should evaluate them accordingly.

The Uses of Obstruction, David Hills

It is said that metaphor and other forms of figurative language exist to afford people an access they otherwise lack to objects they are eager to understand. In two important poems Dickinson stands this familiar conception on its head, suggesting that figures of speech exist to obscure, obstruct, and soften our view of objects that are entirely too accessible already. This view of metaphor’s work comes as a surprise, given Dickinson’s reputation for vehemence, bluntness, and imagistic violence. This chapter explores Dickinson’s professed motives for metaphor, puts them to work in the interpretation of representative poems, and reflects on their relation to familiar structural features of her work: the hymn forms, the telegraphic diction, the slant rhymes, the dashes.