"So Anthracite - to live": Emily Dickinson and American Literary History

Abstract

This essay argues that Dickinson's non-normative poetic diction should be understood as an outgrowth of her engagement with nineteenth-century American culture in general, and American women's poetry in particular. Through comparative analysis of Dickinson's diction with that of more normative nineteenth-centrury American texts, I argue that Dickinson transfigures common nineteenth-century linguistic materials by tipping the balance of what Bakhtin calls "centripetal and centrifugal forces" from the centripetally-weighted modes characteristic of most nineteeenth-century poets to centrifugally-weighted modes popularized by twentieth-century American modernists. By examining early letters and poems, I show how Dickinson's centrifugal diction evolved from nineteenth-century literary practices.