A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson

Although Dickinson’s writings explore a variety of affects and psychological states, she is often seen as a poet of pain, lack, and despair. By contrast, this essay argues that Dickinson views delight as the primary affect that creates the basis for all other feelings. Throughout her career Dickinson tests the expressive and representational limits of language against an excess of happiness, and she meditates on happiness when it eludes her. Emmanuel Levinas’s idea that selfhood originates in happiness helps to elucidate both the importance of delight in Dickinson’s poetry and Dickinson’s insistence that poetic subjectivity originates in amplitude rather than lack. Her early poems of delight reveal a subjectivity happily immersed in the elemental world, secure in its happiness, drawing strength from the most basic, physical level of being. This happy, empowered subjectivity never entirely disappears from Dickinson’s poetry. While scholars of female sentimentalism have demonstrated that physical pain offers nineteenth-century American women a culturally acceptable opportunity for embodiment, Dickinson shows that delight provides an alternative opportunity to experience the body through sensual satisfaction. Moreover, Dickinson asserts that female creativity arises from an emotional, intellectual, and verbal abundance that demands to be expressed in language. This insistence on delight allows Dickinson to affirm female poetic subjectivity, which many of her female contemporaries found problematic.

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/emily_dickinson_journal/v021/21.1.zapedowska.pdf

Dickinson's Delight

Ackmann, Martha. “I’m Glad I Finally Surfaced”: A Norcross Descendent Remembers Emily Dickinson V:2 (1996) 120-126 Alawi, Nabil. Translating Dickinson’s “There came a Day at Summer’s full” into Arabic VI:2 (1997) 84-90 Alfrey, Shawn. Against Calvary: Emily Dickinson and the Sublime VII:2 (1998) 48-64 ________. The Function of Dickinson at the Present Time XI:1 (2002) 9-20 Altieri, Charles. Dickinson’s Dialectic V:2 (1996) 66-71 Anderson, Susan M. “Regard[ing] a Mouse” in Dickinson’s Poems and Le�ers II:1 (1993) 84-102 Ando, Midori. Emily Dickinson’s Vision of “Circumference” and Death from a Japanese Perspective V:2 (1996) 221-225 Ardanaz, Margarita. Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: On Translating Silences V:2 (1996) 255-260 Axelrod, Rise B. and Steven Gould Axelrod. Dickinson’s Dickens: “Tim” and “Dollie” XI:1 (2002) 21-32 Baker, Dorothy Zayatz. Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson: A Reading of Dissonance and Harmony XII:1 (2003) 1-24 ________. A Russian Translation/Imitation of Emily Dickinson: “A�er great pain, a formal feeling comes—” II:2 (1993) 147-152 Baranczak, Stanislaw: Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death —”: Remarks of a Polish Translator VI:2 (1997) 121-126 Barre�, Faith. Inclusion and Exclusion: Fictions of Self and Nation in Whitman and Dickinson V:2 (1996) 240-246 Bauerlein, Mark. Emily Dickinson, Harper’s, and Femininity V:2 (1996) 72-77 Bauerly, Donna. Emily Dickinson’s Rhetoric of Temporality I:2 (1992)1-7 Benne�, Paula. “By a Mouth That Cannot Speak”: Spectral Presence in Emily Dickinson’s Le�ers I:2 (1992) 76-99 Berkove, Lawrence I. “A Slash of Blue!”: An Unrecognized Emily Dickinson War Poem X:1 (2001) 1-8 Bernhard, Mary Elizabeth Kromer. Mary Landis Hampson: Guardian of the Dickinson Universe VIII:1 (1999) 24-35 Bulgheroni, Marisa. “There came a Day at Summer’s full” A Tale of Heretical Love VI:2 (1997) 90-94 Cappeluti, Jo-Anne. Fading Ratios: Johnson’s Variorum Edition of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry I:2 (1992) 100-120 Carney, Mary. Dickinson’s Poetic Revelations: Variants as Process V:2 (1996) 134-138 Cazé, Antoine. “Tropic Show”; or, Dickinson’s Heliotropes XI:1 (2002) 33-48 Chaichit, Chanthana. Dickinson Abroad: “The Paradox of Seclusion” V:2 (1996) 162-168 ________. Seeking an Artistic Translation of Emily Dickinson: A Thai Perspective VI:2 (1997) 140-144 Cody, David. Blood in the Basin: The Civil War in Emily Dickinson’s “The name – of it – is ‘Autumn’ –” XII:1 (2003) 25-52 Correia, Maria Helena De Paiva. Translating “A�er great pain” into

Index to Volumes I-XIII (1992-2004)

This essay reads Emily Dickinson's nature poetry through Susan Howe's analytic reading of Dickinson's nature poetry in My Emily Dickinson, analyzing how the two poets share a particular capacity for material and perceptual attention, and arguing that that attention is historically contextualized by war, the repressed in both their works.

How(e) to Read Dickinson (W)riting Nature

As a pedagogical experiment, the students in a graduate seminar set out to produce a miniature edition of some Dickinson poems, annotated in detail with the help of library and Web resources. However, Dickinson's language bears only a nominal relation to the normative languages of nineteenth-century New England culture, and that indeterminacy of reference worked against the class's efforts to find stable definitions for her words. Dickinson's lines "Not unto nomination / The Cherabim reveal" (Fr1243) have to be taken as their own warning against being too far understood.

"Not Unto Nomination": Dickinson at the Limits of Philology

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Kyla Pocock

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

"Not Unto Nomination": Dickinson at the Limits of Philology