The Latin Imprint on Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Theory and Practice

Abstract

fl HE INFLUENCE of Emily Dickinson's classical education on the I style and content of her poetry is only now being explored in criticism.2 Concerning that issue, I have suggested in a paper published in Comparative Literature Studies that the Stoddard and Andrews Latin textbook used by Dickinson in her student days at Amherst Academy be considered an important source for her style and voice.3 That article contends that Dickinson's forms-the functional metres, capitalization, and internal punctuation-are integrally linked to Latin quantitative metrics and caesurae. The present study expands on that theory of influence by revealing how Dickinson's scrambled syntax and grammatical idiosyncrasies may also derive from the rules in her Latin textbook.4 In fact, her