Questioning Emerson: Dickinson's Rebellious Poetic Strategies In Nature Poetry

Dickinson's observation of and reflection on nature run through her process of creation.Her nature poetry presents her thinking about the relationship between the world and the individual,and her exploration on the language form and its significance.Dickinson is a mysterious poet who lives in seclusion for many years and her poetic origins are diversified.Among those origins,Emerson is regarded as the most important instructor to Dickinson's poetics.But the present studies primarily focus on the influence of Emerson's transcendentalism on Dickinson's poetic epistemology.Through comparative analysis,this thesis explores why and how Dickinson questions Emerson via her poetic strategies,and discusses how Dickinson threads her sublation of Emersonian philosophy of nature and aesthetic perception of nature together in her nature poetry,which is what previous studies are lack of.This thesis investigates,in the Emersonian context,Dickinson's identity as a poet and her view of nature,the perceptive model and the formal strategies of her poetics in three chapters respectively.The first chapter studies the poet's identity and their relationships with nature.Emerson believes that a poet is the scholar who solves the dilemma of his era,and he needs to illustrate nature for the fulfillment of one's duty.Dickinson,inspired by Emerson,becomes a nature poet.But different from Emerson,she opposes the integrity of nature.Emerson separates nature into the “me” and the “not me”,and views nature as the object which is opposite to the self and tries to obtain a complete impression of nature.Dickinson emphasizes human subjectivity but seeks for multiple interactions between human and nature.The second chapter analyzes the different perceptive mechanisms of nature and their disparate cognitive paths of truth in Emerson and Dickinson.Dickinson is influenced deeply by Emerson's visual centralism in her earlier poetic writing.She regards the vision as the leading one to perceive nature and uses it to know the relation between the self and the world.Although Dickinson's visual sensory mechanism derives from Emerson,their preferences for visual approaches and development directions are different.Emerson insists that vision is the dominant perception,while Dickinson adopts the poetic strategy of synaesthesia which combines visual,auditory and tactile senses after she recognizes the limitations of vision.The establishment of synaesthetic mechanism in Dickinson's perceptive poetics enables her to achieve a multifaceted understanding of the truth and the anti-rational,decentralized poetic philosophy of recognition.The third chapter studies Dickinson's rebellious formal strategies and the poetic effects of diversity and ambiguity.Dickinson explores the divergence of thinking and spiritual freedom.The unconventional form of her poetry creates the effects of indeterminacy and ambiguity,reflecting the modernity in Dickinson's poetics.Dickinson attempts to “tell all truth but tell it slant” and the linguistic forms and rhetorical devices of her poetry prove that she believes “success in circuit lies”.Dickinson's anti-grammatical use of punctuations and unconventional use of line breaks are more radical than Emerson's.The use of rhetoric devices such as metaphor and pun enables her to convey the truth through diversified expressions.By threading together her philosophy of nature and aesthetic perception of nature,Dickinson responds to Emerson's view of nature skeptically.She rejects the holistic interpretation of nature and emphasizes the individual experience in natural aesthetics.In the pluralistic interaction between the self and nature,she develops a synaesthetic mechanism.Through the poetic strategies of aesthetic synaesthesia and semantic extensions,Dickinson realizes her rebellion against Emerson and poeticizes her anti-rational and decentralized philosophy of nature.