On The Resolution Of Metaphorical Ambiguity In Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Ambiguity is one of the prominent characteristics of Emily Dickinson's poetry. As a rhetoric vessel for conveying infinite significances, the Dickinsonian metaphor has opened to endless disputes. This thesis attempts to explore a strategy for the resolution of metaphorical ambiguity in Dickinson's poetry through a cross reference of synchronic and diachronic study approaches.After a scholarly introduction in the first Chapter, Chapter Two advance the research into Dickinson's poetics of ambiguity. Dickinson's "Circumference", her special term for ambiguity, requires an all-round inspection to quest the truth. In Chapter Three, a diachronic study approach is thereby presented and illustrated. This approach aims at interpreting Dickinson's poems through her own idioms, so as to provide relatively objective assumptions for interpretation. In Chapter Four, those interpretative assumptions are specified and validated by a synchronic study, that is, a reconstruction of the writing milieu of the target poem through the study of contemporaneous poems and letters. A case study thus exemplifies this cross reference strategy on the way to resolve the metaphorical ambiguity and locate the realm of truth in Dickinson's poetry.