“Itself is all the like”: Selfsameness in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson

Abstract

This essay explores how Dickinson’s conflicted relationship to speech and silence influences her formal experimentation. It asks why Dickinson, a poet deeply invested in figuration, so often appears to elevate extreme experiences as silently self-sufficient and beyond the knowing-by-relation that is the province of artful language. Poems that describe a thing as selfsame or an experience as self-defined are, on some level, about the insufficiencies of language; they are about the failure of the voice of the poet and the boundaries beyond which poetic authority cannot reach. However, because of the overwhelmingly relational nature of much of Dickinson’s poetry, statements of the self-sufficiency of experience cannot be simply admissions that poetic comparison fails as an explanatory tool. Instead, I argue that Dickinson’s statements of selfsameness are simultaneously literal and figurative. As literal statements, claims of selfsameness suggest indivisible self-identity that transcends or precludes comparative language. As figures, self-referential comparisons make more things speakable; they make even the idea of the insufficiency of language the subject of figurative exploration. Selfsameness as a figure does not deny the creative and communicative possibilities of poetic language but dramatizes the multiplicity of comparative figures in tension with the singular self-sufficiency and inexpressibility of experience conveyed by literal selfsameness. Through close readings of Dickinson’s poems, this essay also explores how Dickinson simultaneously employs literal and figurative selfsameness in her use of rhyme and multivalent syntax.