Emily Dickinson's Self-Exploitation

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how the vision of Emily Dickinson's poetry is focused on the identification of man's relation with reality mainly in the pursuit of the meaning of death. It looks at how the unique quality of her poetic vision is constituted through what the author defines as self-exploitation, which is completed by the strategies of self-denial, "microscopic" perspective, "smallness" and cyclic vision. In particular, the paper identifies what Emily Dickinson's self-exploitation is by explaining her poetic strategies presented and concretized in poems, and then, in each case, discusses why she uses these strategies to gain a vision of eternity and the meaning of death as the key to man's relation with reality.

From the Paper:

"Finally, Emily Dickinson's self-exploitation is arranged as the stages from self through nature and death to eternity and, in the process, her efforts to destruct the barriers of circumference and to go out the limited world of self in order to gain the vision of reality and eternity are revealed painfully with unconventionally restricted formation of poetry. Seemingly, compared to the vision of Christianity which is toward the world of God, Emily Dickinson's vision is fatally attached to this world of man and his existential life. Unfortunately, her ambitious desire toward "the final Circumference" just arrives at the intoxication and the intoxicated ecstasy of eternity only comes from her temporary discovery of man's real life, reality and also the ultimate reality, the ultimacy, as shown in J. 214: "When "Landlords" turn the / drunken Bee / Out of the Foxglove's door / When Butterflies renounces their "drams" / I shall but drink the more!" It is resulted from her tragic inversed vision and man's existential limitation. "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Anderson, Charles R. Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963.
• Carey, Hilda. "The Lure of Circumference: A Study of the meaning of the term "Circumference" in the writing of Emily Dickinson." 8 (1977): 53-94.
• Davis, Thomas M. 14 by Emily Dickinson: With Selected Criticism. Chicago, N. J.: Scott Foresman and Co., 1964.
• Eberwein, Jane Donahue. Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation. Amherst: The Univ. of Massachusetts P, 1985.
• Ferlazzo, Paul J. Critical Essays on Emily Dickinson. Boston, G. K. Hall and Co., 1984.

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