Structural Patterns in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson

Abstract

T HE QUESTION OF THE PRESENCE or absence of recurrent structural patterns in Emily Dickinson's poetry has never been thoroughly examined by students of her work. Considerable attention has been given to the biographical implications of her subject matter, to her sources of imagery and use of metrics and rhyme, to her wit and satirical intent; and numbers of explications of individual poems have been made in the hope of exposing, in part at least, her manner of composition. With the notable exception of the work of Whicher and Johnson on metrics and rhyme, studies which attempt to isolate the technical characteristics of the entire Dickinson canon are conspicuous by their absence. The reasons for this lack of full technical analysis are many, without doubt, and chief among them is possibly the necessity of analyzing in detail nearly eighteen hundred poems, correlating the data, and attempting to determine if patterns of any sort reveal themselves and if these patterns are meaningful at all. Whether or not Emily Dickinson's poetry contains definite structural patterns is a matter of considerable scholarly importance and bears strongly on any attempt to evaluate her work aesthetically; establishing technical range is generally a starting point in determining the quality and nature of any artist's performance as an artist. As well, any attempt to judge whether this or that poem in the Dickinson canon is the product of refinement of technique or of a happy or unhappy accident simply cannot be made without first determining whether or not she habitually cast her thought into certain demonstrable patterns which were capable of refinement. As a consequence, upon the question of pattern rests the question of whether or not Emily Dickinson was, as some critics believe, an instinctive, automatic writer whose knowledge of