The Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Philosophical Perspectives ed. by Elisabeth Camp

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Philosophical Perspectives ed. by Elisabeth Camp Gary Lee Stonum (bio) Camp, Elisabeth, editor. The Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford UP, 2021. 224 pp., $29.95. Part of a series entitled Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature, The Poetry of Emily Dickinson would seem designed to challenge the silos separating academic disciplines. Yet, as the editor rightly notes, the central concern of most of its contributors is to explore why philosophers should care about what our poet says and does. Apart from the commentary on specific poems—sometimes brilliant but too often humdrum—literary scholars are offered little of interest and with one major exception are given almost no reason to look to philosophy for insight into Dickinson. The work of philosophy here is uncontroversially understood as a seeking for knowledge that, by implicit contrast, it may not share with poetry and, by explicit contrast, with such dicta as Sidney's that the poet nothing affirmeth. Dickinson, each of the seven contributors agrees, seeks truth, and her philosophic significance thus resides almost entirely within epistemology. Most essays here accordingly and predictably address the long-recognized struggle in the poems (and letters) between skepticism and belief. On the other hand, Rick Anthony Furtak notes in an essay entitled "Forms of Emotional Knowing and Unknowing: Skepticism and Belief in Dickinson's Poetry" that "a poem can suggest, without making [End Page 70] lucid univocal statements, asserting theses, or elaborating in further detail" (39). Dickinson's suggestiveness, however, seems to make philosophers more nervous than stimulated. The question broached in the book but never quite addressed is what might be the difference between philosophy and poetry with regard to truth. One answer would be poetic form, which the contributors generally and sometimes exclusively identify with prosody, and they are unafraid to make strong epistemic conclusions from slender or questionable metrical evidence. For example, Furtak argues that in "The Frost was never seen-" (Fr1190, M 554), the absence of a supposedly expected four-beat first line produces in experienced Dickinson readers, who know about Isaac Watts and hymn meter, an "audible pause" or "astonished gasp" that influences their interpretation apart from any direct statement made by the poem (52). The claim would be more persuasive if the entire poem did not consist of 3 3 4 3 stanzas, a perfectly acceptable variant of common meter and one that Dickinson uses regularly. A more telling example of flat-footed reading can be found in Antony Aumann's "Form and Content in Emily Dickinson's Poetry," which posits a one-to-one relation between poetic forms and specific ideologies. For Aumann, any departure from hymn meters indicates moments where Dickinson fails to be an unwavering supporter of the Puritanism Watts represents. Apart from the unlikely claim that any prosody necessarily entails ideological commitment, Aumann seems unaware that another name for Dickinson's most common metrical practice is ballad meter, widespread throughout the nineteenth century (and earlier) and used by poets and singers of many persuasions. Were there a necessary link between some poetic technique and a corresponding epistemic stance, the problem of poetic form would disappear. The problem is not just the labeling or historical associations of 4 3 4 3 stanzas and their variants, however. Aumann doubles-down on the connection of belief to form in proposing that despite her schoolgirl familiarity with Lord Kames she could not accept his rationalism and therefore she "had to use what would have been for Kames non-standard meter, punctuation, rhyme scheme, and the like" (122, emphasis added). The best essay here is Oren Izenberg's "How to Know Everything." Unlike many of the contributors, Izenberg's disciplinary home is literary studies, yet he is the only one who draws directly on a philosopher. David Chalmers, inventor of an epistemological instrument called the Cosmoscope, is his guide. Combining Laplace's zone of factual truths and Carnap's of logical truths, the imagined Cosmoscope sees the world as scrutable according to four basic classes of fact: [End Page 71] P: physical truths about what we can see as well as what underlies the visible and the laws that govern these truths...