The Poetry of Emily Dickinson:

Philosophical Perspectives Elisabeth

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THE POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON

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oxford studies in philosophy and literature

Richard Eldridge, Philosophy, Swarthmore College

Editorial Board
Anthony J. Cascardi, Comparative Literature, Romance, Languages, and Rhetoric,
University of California, Berkeley
David Damrosch, Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Moira Gatens, Philosophy, University of Sydney
Garry Hagberg, Philosophy, Bard College
Philip Kitcher, Philosophy, Columbia University
Joshua Landy, French and Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Toril Moi, Literature, Romance Studies, Philosophy, and Theater Studies, Duke University
Martha C. Nussbaum, Philosophy and Law School, University of Chicago
Bernard Rhie, English, Williams College

David Wellbery, Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Committee on Social

Thought, University of Chicago
Paul Woodruff, Philosophy and Classics, University of Texas at Austin

PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES

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Jane Austen’s Emma: Philosophical Perspectives

Edited by E. M. Dadlez

Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji: Philosophical Perspectives

Edited by James McMullen

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: Philosophical Perspectives

Edited by Robert E. Guay

Joyce’s Ulysses: Philosophical Perspectives

Edited by Philip Kitcher

The Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Philosophical Perspectives

Edited by Elisabeth Camp
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THE POETRY OF EMILY

DICKINSON

Philosophical Perspectives

Edited by Elisabeth Camp

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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Camp, Elisabeth, editor.
Title: The poetry of Emily Dickinson : philosophical perspectives /​
Edited by Elisabeth Camp.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Series: Oxford studies in philosophy and literature |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020027496 (print) | LCCN 2020027497 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190651190 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190651206 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780190651220 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Dickinson, Emily, 1830–​1886—​Criticism and interpretation. |
Dickinson, Emily, 1830–​1886—​Philosophy. | Philosophy in literature.
Classification: LCC PS1541.Z 5 .P55 2020 (print) |
LCC PS1541.Z 5 (ebook) | DDC 811/​.4—​dc23
LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2020027496
LC ebook record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2020027497

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190651190.001.0001

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Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
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CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Foreword vii

Contributors xi

Introduction: Emily Dickinson’s Epistemic

Ambitions for Poetry 1
Elisabeth Camp
1. Forms of Emotional Knowing and Unknowing:
Skepticism and Belief in Dickinson’s Poetry 31
Rick Anthony Furtak
2. Interiority and Expression in Dickinson’s Lyrics 59
Magdalena Ostas
3. How to Know Everything 83
Oren Izenberg
4. Form and Content in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry 108
Antony Aumann

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Contents

5. The Uses of Obstruction 145

David Hills
6. Dickinson and Pivoting Thought 182
Eileen John

Index 207

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SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

At least since Plato had Socrates criticize the poets and attempt to
displace Homer as the authoritative articulator and transmitter of
human experience and values, philosophy and literature have devel-
oped as partly competing, partly complementary enterprises. Both
literary writers and philosophers have frequently studied and com-
mented on each other’s texts and ideas, sometimes with approval,
sometimes with disapproval, in their efforts to become clearer about
human life and about valuable commitments—​moral, artistic, politi-
cal, epistemic, metaphysical, and religious, as may be. Plato’s texts
themselves register the complexity and importance of these inter-
actions in being dialogues in which both deductive argumentation
and dramatic narration do central work in furthering a complex body
of views.
While these relations have been widely recognized, they have also
frequently been ignored or misunderstood, as academic disciplines
have gone their separate ways within their modern institutional set-
tings. Philosophy has often turned to science or mathematics as pro-
viding models of knowledge; in doing so it has often explicitly set
itself against cultural entanglements and literary devices, rejecting, at

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S e r i e s E d i t o r’ s F o r e w o r d

least officially, the importance of plot, figuration, and imagery in favor

of supposedly plain speech about the truth. Literary study has moved
variously through formalism, structuralism, post-​structuralism, and
cultural studies, among other movements, as modes of approach to
a literary text. In doing so it has understood literary texts as sample
instances of images, structures, personal styles, or failures of con-
sciousness, or it has seen the literary text as a largely fungible product,
fundamentally shaped by wider pressures and patterns of consump-
tion and expectation that affect and figure in non-​literary textual pro-
duction as well. It has thus set itself against the idea that major literary
texts productively and originally address philosophical problems of
value and commitment precisely through their form, diction, imag-
ery, and development, even while these works also resist claiming
conclusively to solve the problems that occupy them.
These distinct academic traditions have yielded important per-
spectives and insights. But in the end none of them has been kind to
the idea of major literary works as achievements in thinking about
values and human life, often in distinctive, open, self-​revising, self-​
critical ways. At the same time readers outside institutional set-
tings, and often enough philosophers and literary scholars too, have
turned to major literary texts precisely in order to engage with their
productive, materially and medially specific patterns and processes
of thinking. These turns to literature have, however, not so far been
systematically encouraged within disciplines, and they have generally
occurred independently of each other.
The aim of this series is to make manifest the multiple, complex
engagements with philosophical ideas and problems that lie at the
hearts of major literary texts. In doing so, its volumes aim not only
to help philosophers and literary scholars of various kinds to find
rich affinities and provocations to further thought and work, they
also aim to bridge various gaps between academic disciplines and

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S e r i e s E d i t o r’ s F o r e w o r d

between those disciplines and the experiences of extra-​institutional

readers.
Each volume focuses on a single, undisputedly major literary
text. Both philosophers with training and experience in literary study
and literary scholars with training and experience in philosophy are
invited to engage with themes, details, images, and incidents in the
focal text, through which philosophical problems are held in view,
worried at, and reformulated. Decidedly not a project simply to for-
mulate A’s philosophy of X as a finished product, merely illustrated
in the text, and decidedly not a project to explain the literary work
entirely by reference to external social configurations and forces, the
effort is instead to track the work of open thinking in literary forms,
as they lie both neighbor to and aslant from philosophy. As Walter
Benjamin once wrote, “new centers of reflection are continually
forming,” as problems of commitment and value of all kinds take on
new shapes for human agents in relation to changing historical cir-
cumstances, where reflective address remains possible. By consider-
ing how such centers of reflection are formed and expressed in and
through literary works, as they engage with philosophical problems
of agency, knowledge, commitment, and value, these volumes under-
take to present both literature and philosophy as, at times, productive
forms of reflective, medial work in relation both to each other and to
social circumstances and to show how this work is specifically under-
taken and developed in distinctive and original ways in exemplary
works of literary art.

Richard Eldridge
Swarthmore College

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CONTRIBUTOR S

Antony Aumann is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northern

Michigan University. He has previously held positions at The
Ohio State University, St. Olaf College, and Fordham University
in the Bronx. Aumann’s research engages both the continental and
analytic traditions of philosophy, and he specializes in issues related
to aesthetics, existentialism, and religion. His work has appeared in
journals and collections such as The Kierkegaardian Mind, Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Continental Philosophy Review. His
2019 monograph with Rowman & Littlefield is entitled Art and
Selfhood: A Kierkegaardian Account. Aumann is also the co-​editor
of New Kierkegaard Research, a series of monographs and edited
collections published by Lexington Books.
Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at
Colorado College. The main areas of his research are the philosophy
of emotions, existential thought (in particular, Kierkegaard and his
legacy), and the contested relationship between philosophy and
literature. His books include Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”: A New
English Version, with a Philosophical Introduction (2007), Thoreau’s

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Co n t r i b u to r s

Importance for Philosophy (2012), and most recently Knowing

Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience (2018).
He is currently writing about love and subjectivity in the work of
Proust.
David Hills is Associate Professor of Philosophy (Teaching) at
Stanford University, having previously taught at Harvard University;
University of California, Los Angeles; University of Pennsylvania;
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and University of California,
Berkeley. He has written and spoken widely on aesthetics,
philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and the history of
modern philosophy, especially Kant and Wittgenstein. He prepared
a bibliography on metaphor for Oxford Bibliographies in 2018 and
is at work on two books: one on metaphor and the other on Kant’s
Critique of the Power of Judgment.
Oren Izenberg is Associate Professor in the Department of English
at University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on the long
history of poetry and poetics, and on intersections between literary
and philosophical explorations of personhood, mind, and action. He
is the author of Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life
(2011), and a member of the editorial board of nonsite.
Eileen John is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Warwick.
Her research is in aesthetics and philosophy of literature, and she has
broad interests in art and values. She has directed Warwick’s Centre
for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts, and co-​edited the
Blackwell anthology “The Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary
and Classic Readings.”
Magdalena Ostas has served on the faculty in the English
Department at Rhode Island College, Boston University, and Florida
Atlantic University. She works and teaches at the crossroads of

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Co n t r i b u to r s

nineteenth-​century literature and literature, philosophy, and the arts,

and has written on a range of figures at this intersection, including
Kant, Wordsworth, Keats, Jane Austen, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein,
Stanley Cavell, Jeff Wall, and Michael Fried. Her essays have
appeared in International Studies in Philosophy, symploke, Studies in
Romanticism, and nonsite and in the collections Michael Fried and
Philosophy and MLA Approaches to Teaching Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
She is at work on a study about art, expression, and interior life in
poetry, philosophy, and the novel around 1800.

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Introduction
Emily Dickinson’s Epistemic Ambitions for Poetry

E L I S A B ET H C A M P

All of the contributors to this volume argue that poetry is capable of

a kind of epistemic achievement, and that Emily Dickinson in par-
ticular is an epistemically ambitious poet. On the view that emerges,
poetry is a means for getting a better grip on how the world is and
one’s place within it; and Dickinson uses poetry both to understand
the world and to advocate for poetry as a tool of understanding. Many
of the contributors also argue that Dickinson offers a distinctive con-
strual of what knowledge is: as an ongoing, inevitably unfinished pro-
cess rather than a fixed state. The unfinished nature of knowledge,
on this view, arises in part because the world transcends complete
grasp by any finite agent, and in part because as long as the knowing
agent is alive, she is never a complete, static entity. But it arises espe-
cially because the species of robust connection to reality required for
knowledge is something that must be continually earned, through
daily cognitive, emotional, and practical labor.
Some aspects of the resulting portrait fit smoothly with the ste-
reotype of Dickinson as a reclusive poet. She has an acute sense of a

The Poetry of Emily Dickinson. Elisabeth Camp, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190651190.003.0001
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T h e P o e t r y o f E m i ly D i c k i n s o n

gulf between herself and the rest of the world. She engages in close
observation of nature and of her own mental states. She is especially
concerned with “small moments” and creatures in nature—​birds,
snakes, frost—​and with the “what it’s like” of pain and death. But the
Dickinson we encounter here is also decidedly more determined,
argumentative, and hopeful than that stereotype allows. She strides
“Vast Prairies of Air” in search of a “Missing All.” She instructs her
audience on aspects of reality they have ignored. Although the prom-
ised “All” is elusive, she at least sometimes finds the right words in the
right form to situate herself at home in the world. And when under-
standing does fail her, so that her cognitive and emotional “strings are
snapt,” she doesn’t give up, but gets back up and sets herself to work.
This portrait of Dickinson as a striving, inquisitive poet stands
in stark contrast to the more pessimistic, even nihilistic construal of
Dickinson articulated by many recent interpreters. Ted Hughes, for
instance, characterizes her as in the grip of “almost a final revelation
of horrible Nothingness,” such that

Remaining true to this, she could make up her mind about noth-
ing. . . . Registering everywhere and in everything the icy chill
of its nearness, she did not know what to think . . . all other con-
cerns floated free of finality, became merely relative, susceptible
to her artistic play.1

Moreover, this portrait of Dickinson as an epistemically ambitious

poet also provides us with substantive lessons for philosophy itself,
by offering alternative characterizations of what knowledge is, and of
the methodologies through which it can be achieved.

1. Hughes, “Introduction to A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse,” 358–​359; cited in John, ch. 6
of this volume.

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The first essay in the volume, by Rick Anthony Furtak, focuses on

Dickinson’s attitudes toward knowledge of the external world, espe-
cially God and nature. The poet’s initial findings are skeptical: when
she sets out to find a person-​like God who inspects our actions from
his residence in Heaven, and who we will eventually encounter face-​
to-​face after death, Dickinson encounters no “sign” from which she
can “infer his Residence,” only “Vast Prairies of Air /​Unbroken by
a Settler.” However, when she pauses in this “Infinitude,” she finds
that the “Silence” “condescends” to “stop for her,” and she is awed
to encounter a Creation that transcends what she sought. Similarly,
when Dickinson observes practices of institutionalized prayer in
church, she finds only empty religious vestments and incantations.
But when she “keeps the Sabbath” by “staying at Home” in her gar-
den, guided by the local songbirds, then she is on her way toward
Heaven “all along.”
Furtak thus locates Dickinson as belonging to Emerson and
Thoreau’s Transcendentalist tradition of “natural supernaturalism,”
on which being perceptually and emotionally attuned to nature is the
only authentic form of worship. Dickinson does at least sometimes
feel she knows the reality of divinity, and more generally of a mean-
ingful external world, in a way that is “immediately present as a fact of
experience, available to those who have ears to hear and eyes to see,”
as Furtak says. At the same time, it is not easy, nor always possible, to
maintain this confidence, for at least two reasons.
First, Dickinson’s epistemic confidence is grounded in a suite of
feelings—​of awe and wonder, and of being “at home”—​which one
must experience firsthand. One can “keep the Sabbath” by imple-
menting practices of mindful attention that make these feelings more
likely. But how one feels is not ultimately under one’s control; and
the poet does frequently feel estranged from her social and natural
environments: a “Stranger[] in a foreign World.”

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Second, even when these feelings are present, Dickinson worries

that they are mere projections onto an empty void, and hence self-​
gratifying delusions rather than epistemic achievements. Thus, in

To hear an Oriole sing

May be a common thing -​
Or only a divine.

she suggests that it is possible that the “Tune” or “Rune” of an Oriole’s

song—​its being a melody, being beautiful, and/​or having its being a
sign of the divine—​is “only” a matter of interpretation, rather than of
“common” fact: something that depends on how the “Fashion of the
Ear” “attires” bare sound waves, rather than a feature inherent in real-
ity, ready to be discovered.
Interpreters like Farhang Erfani2 take such passages to establish
that Dickinson embraces the skeptical conclusion that there is a fun-
damental gap between us and the world, and that meaning and divin-
ity are merely human projections. Furtak agrees that the skeptic’s
hypothesis, combined with the poet’s own firsthand experiences of
meaning as fluctuating in accordance with her “Mood,” invalidates a
naïve view that the “song” is real in an absolute, objective sense; but
he argues that they leave open the possibility that the song is a joint
creation of bird and listener. On this neo-​Kantian reading, a mind
that is properly attuned to nature is genuinely responding to some-
thing external to itself which it cloaks in distinctively human form,
so that “in the meeting of mind and world, both the subject and the
object make essential contributions.”
A key reason for taking Dickinson to reject the skeptical conclu-
sion is that she consistently takes Nature to transcend our powers

2. See, e.g., Erfani, “Dickinson and Sartre on Facing the Brutality of Brute Existence,” cited in
Furtak, ch. 1 of this volume.

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of perception and understanding. Like the philosophers, Dickinson

craves knowledge; and she takes their methodology of analysis and
inference very seriously. But to endorse the skeptical conclusion, one
would need first, to accept the assumption that our cognitive capaci-
ties are indeed adequate to analyze the evidence we acquire through
perception, and second, to infer from this that an oriole’s chirp is
nothing more than bare sounds mis-​dressed by us with merely men-
tal “attire.” And for Dickinson, such an assumption of epistemic ade-
quacy is undermined: first, by her frequent negative experiences of
limitation in the course of “this timid life of Evidence”; and second, by
her positive albeit intermittent experiences of divine transcendence:

This World is not Conclusion

A Species stands beyond -​
Invisible, as Music -​
But positive, as Sound -​

For Furtak’s Dickinson, then, we are essentially finite beings

stuck in a perpetual state of epistemic in-​between-​ness. This is not
just agnosticism, understood as the refusal to endorse either a posi-
tive or negative conclusion about the reality of divinity (or of melody,
or of sound). Rather, it is an active condition of “Wonder,” of “not
precisely Knowing /​And not precisely Knowing not”: a search for
understanding that can only ever be partially accomplished. Further,
in contrast to philosophers, who fetishize analysis and inference and
take themselves to know only what they can conclude via those means,
Dickinson takes herself to have other epistemic tools at her disposal.
We’ve already seen that she appeals to first-​person experiences of awe
and comfort. But as Furtak notes, and as Hills will argue at greater
length, she also takes it that in those cases where “Philosophy -​don’t
know,” some measure of “Sagacity” can still be achieved by going
“through a Riddle,” in the distinctive manner afforded by poetry.

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In considering why the ultimate reality of nature and God

should transcend our finite epistemic capacities, it is natural to
focus on the fact that they are outside of, and in this sense “other”
to, us. But as Magdalena Ostas argues, Dickinson often finds her
own self to be at least as mysterious as the external world: “Ourself
behind ourself, concealed -​Should startle most,” as she says.
Indeed, the “self ” she discerns is sometimes almost comically
“haunted”: her mind and brain are “cleaved,” full of hidden “cor-
ridors,” and divided across time in a way that leaves her brain
“giggling” at the “odd” mismatch between “That person that I was
-​And this One.” Such internal “otherness” makes the sort of intro-
spection required for self-​knowledge into a monumentally chal-
lenging task. In particular, much as with Dickinson’s confrontation
with nature’s “Vast Prairies of Air,” so too does examining her own
self require not just precise attentiveness, but also emotional cour-
age in the face of alienation:

I do not know the man so bold

He dare in lonely Place
That awful stranger -​Consciousness
Deliberately face -​

Passages like this might seem to supply clear grounds for attribut-
ing a nihilistic vision to Dickinson. Perhaps, as Geoffrey Hartmann
claims, Dickinson’s “spectatorial” gaze is a coping mechanism which
allows her to “elide the agony of self-​consciousness.”3 Or perhaps she
has mustered the courage to introspect, and has discovered that there
lurks only an empty void, rendering her own life irrevocably “other.”
However, much as Furtak argues that Dickinson entertains but

3. Hartmann, “Language from the Point of View of Literature,” 350, cited in Ostas, ch. 3 of this
volume.

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E m i ly D i c k i n s o n ’ s Ep i s t e m i c A m b i t i o n s f o r P o e t r y

ultimately rejects external-​world skepticism in favor of a neo-​Kantian

constructivism about nature, so Ostas argues that Dickinson rejects
epistemic and metaphysical pessimisms about the mental in favor of
an innovative form of self-​constructivism.
To see why, it helps to bracket questions of self-​knowledge for a
moment, to first consider what self-​expression means for Dickinson.
Given Dickinson’s frequent interest in close observation of inner
states, there is a persistent tendency to read her as a broadly “confes-
sional” poet: an intrepid phenomenological ornithologist document-
ing shy species of qualia in order to place them on display for the rest
of the world. Along similar lines, it is tempting to read Dickinson’s
many poems about death, such as “I heard a Fly buzz -​when I died ,”
as attempts to accurately simulate qualitative states that are real but
otherwise cognitively inaccessible.
As we will see in discussing Izenberg’s contribution, it is plausible
that Dickinson is at least sometimes engaged in such projects of doc-
umentation and simulation. But Ostas argues that Dickinson’s poems
of self-​expression are more actively creative than the confessional
model allows. More specifically, she argues that Dickinson’s frequent
trope of “self-​splitting” does not function (just) to diagnose an ante-
cedently existing state of alienation between multiple personalities,
but instead serves as an imaginative technique for “serious, forceful
investigation,” in which the poet “dares” to stage various possibilities,
in order to probe how they strike her.
More specifically, Ostas argues that in writing her poems
Dickinson assigns herself the role of curious reader as much as that
of documentary reporter. Poetry gives her “the Art to stun myself /​
With Bolts -​of Melody!”: that is, by “hear[ing] the words as they
make an entry into the world, suddenly concrete, as though they had
not issued from her own pen and voice,” Dickinson gains a new, alter-
native perspective on the thoughts and attitudes they express. Just as
Dickinson inspects her bodily features, like her hair and dimples, to

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T h e P o e t r y o f E m i ly D i c k i n s o n

see whether they “twinkle back /​Conviction . . . of me -​,” so too she

“turns [her] Being round and round” verbally in her poetry:

I felt my life with both my hands

To see if it was there -​
I held my spirit to the Glass,
To prove it possibler -​

Confronting herself with the “sounds” she generates in her writing

thus provides the poet with a mechanism for assessing whether she
can accept the contents they express as her “own.”
Instead of deploying “a logic of pressing thoughts or feelings out-
ward from inside,” then, Ostas takes Dickinson to exemplify a model
of self-​expression as self-​construction—​a model that has also been
articulated by philosophers like Stanley Cavell, Charles Taylor, and
Richard Eldridge. On this view, the task of self-​expression is as much
epistemic as it is communicative. But beyond this, self-​expression
also becomes a constitutive project of constructing a self, for at least
two reasons. First, at a local level, verbal articulation helps to make
the particular feelings and thoughts expressed into what they are, by
assigning them a form and a location in relation to a network of other
possible and actual feelings and thoughts. Indeed, Ostas argues that
insofar as their verbal articulation essentially contributes to consti-
tuting those thoughts and feelings, the self they express is distributed
externally, on the page. Second and more globally, the poet’s response
to the thoughts and feelings she “stages” at least partially constitutes
them as hers: she embraces some as belonging to her, at least for this
moment, while marginalizing others as odd, past, merely simulated,
or otherwise “other.”
This constructivist model of self-​expression and selfhood in turn
produces a model of self-​knowledge that neatly echoes the con-
structivist account of nature articulated by Furtak. In both the outer

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E m i ly D i c k i n s o n ’ s Ep i s t e m i c A m b i t i o n s f o r P o e t r y

and inner realms, our contributors attribute to Dickinson a view of

knowledge as a relationship, one that must be continually achieved
by a highly complex but limited self grappling to make contact with a
transcendently complex reality. And in both cases, the way in which
the self receives and interprets that reality partially, but only partially,
constitutes it as reality. Further, both Furtak and Ostas argue that in
this quest, inner sensations and emotional responses function not
just as objects of knowledge, but also as epistemic tools. The poet
begins with a felt yearning to understand: an often “irritable” curi-
osity “That nibbles at the soul.” Like the philosopher, she observes,
infers, and hypothesizes from the evidence she accumulates. But this
never suffices: knowledge, when it comes, involves an immediate
feeling of kinship, one which can be cultivated but not summoned
and that is often elusive.
Where Furtak and Ostas argue that Dickinson embraces the
possibility of partial knowledge in the face of skeptical threats, Oren
Izenberg tackles the more basic question of whether poetry in gen-
eral, and Dickinson in particular, are even in the business of attempt-
ing to achieve knowledge. Echoing Francis Bacon, who claimed that
poetry “is rather a pleasure or play of imagination, than a work or
duty thereof,”4 many theorists of disparate stripes today hold that
poetry lacks any (warranted) epistemic ambition. Instead, they take
it either to be just another entry in the field of “cultural production,”
interesting for what it reveals about its sociopolitical environment; or
else to function as an antidote to reality, “resisting by its form alone
the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s
heads,” as Adorno says.5
Against this, Izenberg argues that an interest in poetry is justi-
fied by a manifest, albeit typically implicit, commitment by poets

4. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 82, cited in Izenberg, ch. 3 of this volume.

5. Adorno, “Commitment,” 78, cited in Izenberg, ch. 3 of this volume.

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T h e P o e t r y o f E m i ly D i c k i n s o n

themselves to “epistemic payoff.” This, he claims, is what poets usu-

ally present themselves as doing, and what we as readers usually take
them to be doing. Redeeming this commitment requires fending off
a classic pair of threats. On the one hand, if a poem merely records
what one person once happened to think or feel on one occasion,
then it offers nothing more than an entry in a cabinet of curiosities,
unverifiable by and uninteresting for others. But on the other hand, if
the poem achieves general applicability by being stripped of its speci-
ficities, then the content that remains is typically either a banal trivi-
ality, a substantive fact known only on the basis of some other source
of authority, or a patent falsehood.
One option for avoiding this dichotomy is to claim that poems
propose possibilities, in the form of thought experiments. On its
own, this might not seem like a marked improvement over the cabi-
net of curiosities. Given the vast expanse of modal space, merely
knowing that one’s conception is metaphysically possible is disap-
pointingly meager reward: we want to know, and poets appear to take
themselves to offer, some insight into how this world actually is.
Izenberg claims that the payoff is more substantive, and that the
very features of lyric poetry that make it seem remote from genuine
knowledge are in fact sources of epistemic value. His argument pro-
ceeds by way of an analogy, or a “pleasing, if slant rhyme,” between
lyric poems and David Chalmers’s “Cosmoscope.” Chalmers aims
to resuscitate the Leibnitzian/​Laplacean dream that an ideal rea-
soner could know everything about the world by knowing a highly
restricted, privileged subclass of truths about it. To motivate the plau-
sibility of such an accomplishment, and to get a grip on what it would
involve, Chalmers suggests that we imagine possessing a virtual real-
ity device into which all the facts of the world have been entered, and
which has the power to calculate all entailments of those facts. Such
a device wouldn’t do anything that a non-​ideal reasoner couldn’t
accomplish in principle; it “simply offloads” some of the burden of

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storage and calculation “from ourselves onto the world.” But armed
with such a device, “one could come to know anything that could be
known.”6
Similarly, Izenberg suggests, many lyric poems should be treated
as “investigatory devices” that deploy poetic rhetorical performances
to provide evidence about a restricted base of facts, from which the
poet and readers can draw inferences. More specifically, he argues
that Dickinson makes contributions to each of the four classes of
facts that Chalmers identifies as inputs to the Cosmoscope. These are
first, the class of micro-​and macrophysical physical truths and their
governing laws; second, the class of phenomenological or experiential
truths: what it’s like to be in various psychological states, plus the psy-
chophysical laws connecting them to matter; third, a class of indexical
truths, specifying where and when one actually is; and finally, a “that’s
all” clause, affirming that P, Q, and I exhaust the totality of truths.
First, in the domain of physical facts, Izenberg argues that Dickinson
deploys the laser-​like focus of poetry to home in on specific aspects of
nature. One such technique presents “ribbons” of time, much as a time-​
lapse camera records an unfolding empirical “Experiment”:

At half-​past Three
a single Bird
Unto a silent Sky
Propounded but a single
term
Of cautious melody -​

By focusing attention on a sequence of temporal moments, the poet

is able to observe the details of those moments as simultaneously
separate and connected, in a way that “allows space for the drawing

6. Chalmers, Constructing the World, 117, cited in Izenberg, ch. 3 of this volume.

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of inferences from data.” Similarly, in poems like “Ashes denote that

Fire /​was” Dickinson infers from what she sees at one moment to
something unobserved in the past—​while also, as we’ve seen, noting
the limits of what can be grasped through analysis and inference.
Within the second class, of phenomenological truths, we have
already seen that Dickinson is often concerned to describe actual and
possible phenomenological states that confound comprehension,
especially pain and madness, with a precise particularity absent from
ordinary language. Much like Ostas, Izenberg argues that Dickinson
frequently strives to draw experiences that are unnameable in virtue
of being noncognitive and phenomenal —​for instance, Pain, which
“has an Element of Blank”—​into the realm of knowledge by imposing
partial, provisional conceptualizations on them. Crucially, Izenberg
argues, the poet doesn’t merely describe, but actually instances those
experiences within the poem. Thus, in “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,”
we don’t just learn that Dickinson felt an experience which was
like hearing “Mourners” treading with “Boots of Lead”; we feel the
pounding, numbing repetition in the poem’s own sounds. By con-
veying experience via exemplification, poetry escapes the worrisome
limitations of self-​report. And by inducing analogous imaginative
states in its readers, such poems offer an opportunity for knowledge
of experiences as “idiosyncratic but not private”: as indexed to a
highly specific, but not essentially individual, context.
Third, also in the indexical class, Izenberg argues that first-​person
lyric poetry is invested in anchoring the speaker to specific locations
in space and time by pointing to their context of utterance, in a way
that enables the reader to instantiate for themselves contexts that are
similar in relevant respects to the speaker’s, as for example in

This is a Blossom of
the Brain -​
A small -​italic Seed.

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As we saw, Ostas also drew attention to the importance of context

in Dickinson’s poems, and to the way that indexicality can bridge
the gap between speaker and audience. However, where Ostas
focuses on Dickinson’s own role as reader, testing whether she can
encompass the described experiences at the moment of reception,
Izenberg argues that Dickinson’s indexical elements point toward
a more broadly available “fictive present”: a possible here-​and-​now
that other readers can implement for themselves, through actual re-​
enactment or imaginative projection.
Finally—​in marked contrast to Furtak and Ostas—​Izenberg
claims that what he calls “figures of totality” are “endemic” to lyric
poetry in general and to Dickinson’s poems in particular. Here he
cites Dickinson’s common invocations of noon as “an hour of undi-
vided illumination that leaves nothing in shadow,” and her frequent
skepticism of anything like Heaven as an undisclosed domain inac-
cessible to thought, as in:

I have no
Life but this -​
To lead it
here -​
Nor any Death -​
but lest
Dispelled from
there -​

If we grant that Dickinson does make entries into each of

Chalmers’s four categories, what does the “slant rhyme” with the
Cosmoscope show? Dickinson and other lyric poets obviously
shouldn’t, and don’t, claim to have amassed the kind of complete
privileged data set that would fuel a Leibnitzian/​Laplacean reasoning
engine. Rather, Izenberg takes the analogy with the Cosmoscope to

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show that lyric poets like Dickinson are making potentially valuable
contributions to the project of achieving knowledge. First, they are
using their powers of observation, description, and imagination to
furnish actual reasoners—​at least themselves, and often their (other)
readers—​with the same basic types of data that ordinary epistemic
agents typically invoke. Second, they are deploying their cognitive
powers of reason and imagination to amplify that base into a more
compendious set. And third, they are doing so in the service of a sin-
cere investigation into reality.
Indeed, the fact that lyric poetry typically presents its contents
in what Chalmers calls an “empirical” rather than “conditional”
mode—​as claims about actuality rather than speculations about
what would follow if certain states were to be actual—​suggests
that poetry may provide a more promising basis for establishing
aesthetic “cognitivism” than fiction, which has been the more com-
mon target of philosophers’ interrogations of learning from litera-
ture. For her own personal Cosmoscopic purposes, the poet needs
no independent verification of the phenomena she encounters. She
knows directly that she has experienced them; her challenge is to
articulate them in a form that renders them comprehensible to her,
and to test whether she can affirm them as reflective of a wider, per-
sisting reality. Thus, for a poet like Dickinson, the possibility that
her experiences are highly particular, even idiosyncratic may not
be troubling: like Descartes in the Meditations, her epistemic ambi-
tions may be directed simply at comprehending the world around
and within her, for her own sake. For other poets—​Walt Whitman,
say—​the overt need for affirmation in a common experience with
other people is more central. In either case, regardless of the poet’s
intentions and desires, a reader may use a poem’s data and its asso-
ciative connections as scaffolding for their own epistemic projects,
by directing their attention toward the same species of phenomena

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the poet has noticed, by marshaling their conceptual and imagina-

tive resources in the same types of structures, and by tracing out the
same types of inferential patterns.

WHY POETRY?

So far, our contributors have focused on establishing that poets

like Dickinson are seeking knowledge in some recognizable sense
of the term. But if that is their aim, why should we think that they
are doing a good job: that their ambitions are sufficiently well
placed that we as readers, and perhaps specifically as philoso-
phers, should take them seriously in those terms? More specifi-
cally, Furtak, Ostas, and Izenberg all argue that Dickinson and
other poets are presenting contents or claims about philosophi-
cally interesting topics like the ontological status of God, or the
self, or the expressibility of phenomenal states. But granting them
this status threatens to undermine their value as poets. Why are
they not then just doing mediocre philosophy, cloaked in cum-
bersome fancy attire?
Here, it is useful to distinguish two subsidiary questions. First, if
poets like Dickinson are attempting to supply the same basic types
of claims as other folks inquiring after truth, why should they articu-
late those contents in such a strange way? Call this the question of
poetic form and content. Second, how does the form and status of
lyric poetry affect the epistemic status of those claims? In Izenberg’s
Chalmersian terms, supposing that poets do supply the Cosmoscope
with contents as input, why think that poetry makes any distinctive
contribution over and above the usual labor of churning out truths
through standard inference rules? Call this the question of poetic form
and justification.

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Poetic Form and Content

While some poets, such as Alexander Pope, may be justly accused of
making versified philosophy, Dickinson insists that her truth must be
told “slant”: that to write in more standard prose would be a form of
“shutting her up,” of locking her in a cognitive “closet.” Why is this?
What difference does how she writes make to what she does?
We have already encountered one reason why Dickinson can’t
put her point “straight”: many of the states she is interested in defy
adequate categorization with ordinary concepts. As Izenberg argues,
many phenomenological states, especially pain, have an “Element
of Blank” which the poet attempts to fill in, or at least delineate,
using non-​literal tropes like metaphor. Further, as Ostas argues, in
at least some of these cases the process of articulation involves not
just matching stable inner states to either conventional or occasion-​
specific word meanings, but partially constituting those mental states
themselves.
However, the ineffability of phenomenal states covers only a
small portion of Dickinson’s expressive choices. What other moti-
vations are there for poetic form, and what implications might this
have for how we might integrate Dickinson’s insights into our own
philosophizing? Antony Aumann argues that in an important sense,
Dickinson “had to write how she did”; but that this is compatible
with what she says being paraphrased in ordinary terms. Building
on Martha Nussbaum’s insight that “form is not always neutral,”7
he argues that a speaker’s use of a certain form can contribute to
the content they express, by implying acceptance of a perspective
which in turn entails certain propositional contents. Prosaically,
this is illustrated by the way a speaker’s choice of gender-​neutral or

7. Nussbaum, “Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature,” in Love’s Knowledge, 15; cited in
Aumann, ch. 4 of this volume.

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-​specific pronouns reveals their attitudes toward certain assumptions

about gender equality. Poetically, Aumann argues, it is manifested by
Dickinson’s use of “hymn scheme”: an A-​B-​A-​B rhyming pattern plus
a 4-​3-​4-​3 or “common” meter with iambic stresses. Because hymn
scheme was strongly associated with Puritanism in 19th-​century
New England, and because Dickinson was herself deeply enmeshed
in Puritan ideas and images, it is expressively appropriate for her to
employ this form. But at the same time, insofar as a “straight” deploy-
ment would imply straightforward endorsement of Puritan doctrine,
this would be inappropriate given Dickinson’s contentious relation-
ship to established religion. Thus, her rhythmic and aural distortions
of hymn scheme appropriately reflect her substantive attitude of
challenging engagement with Puritanism.
Aumann argues that the operative notions of “appropriateness”
and “inappropriateness” here are stronger than the sort of aesthetic
harmony exemplified by the resemblances between, for instance,
the repeated “s” sounds in “His notice sudden is” and the hissing
of the snake being described, or between the slowing metrical pace
induced by the increasing flurry of hyphens in “This is the Hour of
Lead” and the described experience of freezing to death. It’s not just
that the form “fits” or fails to fit the expressed content. Rather, he
argues, the choice to use a certain form can generate genuine propo-
sitional inconsistency via a “performative contradiction,” much as
using gender-​specific language to articulate a progressive gender
policy would.
What implications does this connection between form and con-
tent have for the feasibility of paraphrasing poetic contents? Aumann
argues that while a candidate paraphrase may indeed fail to capture
a poem’s total intended effect, a paraphrase, in the “modest” sense of
an approximate statement of a poem’s main contents, is often both
possible and legitimate. The formal expressive constraints under
which poets operate are generated by the fact that they are engaged

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in a speech act of assertion, or something akin to it: “presenting their

own views, perspectives, and attitudes about some subject matter.”
By contrast, because the act of reporting others’ speech does not
involve a commitment to the truth of the reported contents, it does
not generate the same performative contradiction.
Aumann’s diagnosis presupposes again that poets are in the epis-
temic business, and specifically that they are engaged in something
like a conversation with their readers: proffering ideas that they take
to be “right or true,” and representing themselves as “standing behind
or endorsing” them. Much like Izenberg, Aumann argues that aban-
doning this presupposition entails an implausibly widespread error
theory about the interpretive practices of both scholarly and lay read-
ers. But even if we grant that poets are epistemically ambitious, we
might still want to deny that they are engaged specifically in asser-
tion. In particular, Dickinson often appears to be raising questions
without settling them, as Furtak claims; or staging possibilities to test
whether she can affirm them, as Ostas argues. Alternatively, she may
not be speaking in her own voice, but in that of “a supposed person,”
as she herself puts it. Aumann argues that none of these possibili-
ties threatens the basic conversational model, or its consequence that
poets operate under formal constraints that their interpreters don’t.
First, while some of Dickinson’s poems are presented in a hypo-
thetical or exploratory tone, others are more committal. Second
and more importantly, even if Dickinson herself doesn’t definitively
endorse the contents she expresses, those constraints on performa-
tive consistency still apply to the speaking persona. (We might add
that some models of communication and assertion-​like acts, such
as Stalnaker’s, are designed to accommodate both exploratory and
personified speech; and that expressive constraints are conditionally
inherited by such speech.)
While the objection to assertoric force doesn’t undermine the
claim that poets often proffer contents in a way that commits them to

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performative consistency and epistemic assessment, it does bring out

the importance of identifying the appropriate unit of assessment. At
a superficial level, we should be careful about citing isolated passages
as capturing “what Dickinson thinks”; rather—​as with exegesis more
generally—​we need to analyze how those utterances function within
their immediate contexts, and whether they reflect a broader position
that the speaking persona expresses on other occasions. At a deeper
level, if we accept Ostas’s argument that expression for Dickinson
is less a matter of “confessing,” in the sense of offering an outward
sign of an antecedently fixed inner state, and more a matter of grap-
pling with a continual series of mental phenomena as candidates for
affirmation, then we also need to question the simple conception of
selves as stable entities who “stand behind” their assertions. While
some might take this as the opening wedge for neo-​Wittgensteinian
skepticism about meaning and knowledge, we might also take it, as
our contributors do, as the impetus to develop a more realistic and
flexible model of knowledge and conversation generally.

Poetic Form and Justification

So far, we have canvassed two primary content-​based reasons why
poets in general and Dickinson in particular need to express them-
selves as they do: the inadequacy of any ordinary conventional
substitute, especially for representing phenomenal states; and the
requirement that one’s mode of expression be minimally consistent
with, and hopefully positively fitting for, the contents expressed.
In his contribution, David Hills focuses on a set of reasons for
employing certain forms of expression which is related to the process
of coming to understand a content. Even when the content in ques-
tion can be coherently expressed in ordinary terms, he argues, engag-
ing with the “Riddle” of poetry can afford a species of “Sagacity” not
provided by direct articulation.

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T h e P o e t r y o f E m i ly D i c k i n s o n

One of Dickinson’s characteristic modes is to describe an object,

like a hummingbird or frost, using a trope like metonymy and per-
sonification, in ways that seduce her reader into achieving a more
“distinct sight” of that object, by piquing their curiosity about what
it is that she might be talking about. In this way, expressive occlusion
produces a kind of cognitive clarity:

The thought beneath so slight a film -​

Is more distinctly seen -​
As laces just reveal the surge -​
Or Mists -​the Apennine

In some of these “riddle” poems, the “mists” of allusion and unex-

pected detail help to bring a familiar object into focus, by highlight-
ing its contours within our own established thinking; they clarify
and reconfigure what we already know, rather than teaching us
something new. In others, especially those employing extended
metaphors, the riddle’s target is less familiar, or less cognitively
tractable. The riddle is then correspondingly less straightforward: it
contains layers of observation and multiple, sometimes conflicting
threads of interpretation. Hills argues that tracing out each of these
threads forces the reader to spend extended time with the subject,
by approaching it from multiple angles and assembling multiple
distinct impressions into a whole that ultimately embodies a kind
of stable cognitive coherence, albeit one that may not be straight-
forwardly logically consistent.
This latter approach is especially appropriate when the riddle’s
subject is something as amorphous and terrifying as death, as in a
poem like

A Clock stopped -​
Not the Mantel’s -​

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In such cases, each successive layer of meaning informs and rewards

the reader by staging a different “performance” of the metaphor; but
it also entices and prepares the reader to move on to less familiar,
obvious, and stable aspects, in what Hills calls “a process of demy-
thologizing our initial understanding of its primary subject.” The
result is “metaphors that owe their lasting effectiveness as meta-
phors to their temporary effectiveness as euphemisms.” The poem’s
indirectness underwrites an epistemic gain even in cases where the
“whole truth” could in principle be articulated directly, because it
trains readers gradually into a truth that would otherwise cause their
brain to “giggle” in helpless paralysis. As Dickinson puts it,

Tell all the truth but tell it slant -​

Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind -​

Riddles and metaphors are both tropes: non-​literal or indi-

rect modes of description. What about poetry’s metrical and aural
schemes? Where Aumann links Dickinson’s distortion of traditional
hymn scheme to her conflicted relationship to Puritan doctrine,
Hills argues more broadly that it “constitutes a self-​questioning,
self-​correcting, self-​censoring mode of attention,” one which is also
reflected in her highly distinctive use of hyphens. Rhythmically, by
echoing traditional hymns, Dickinson doesn’t merely suggest, but
makes us feel the familiarity of her subject, even before we know what
that subject actually is. But for that same reason, when the steady
rhythm stumbles, the subject itself is also rendered alien. Similarly,

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the sonic similarities of slanting rhymes provide clues to the riddle

poem’s solution; but the slant’s dissonance also “sours” those associa-
tions, reminding us of substantive disparities between the denoted
objects. In both cases, Hills argues, the form engenders a feeling
of orientation and safety which is then unsettled by being twisted.
A prose format would miss out on both aspects of this dynamic.
Hills’s discussion focuses most directly on Dickinson’s use
of poetic devices to enact a heuristic process for the reader. Like
Hills, Eileen John attends closely to Dickinson’s use of specific
formal devices. But at the same time, like Furtak and Ostas, she
emphasizes the poet’s use of those devices as tools for her own
epistemic purposes, specifically in seeking to understand aspects
of the world for which no stable subsuming perspective can be
achieved.
Substantively, John argues that Dickinson embraces a proces-
sual model of knowledge highly consonant with those proposed by
Furtak and Ostas. Where traditional static accounts treat knowledge
as a state of an agent achieved by standing in a privileged relation
to a proposition, Furtak, Ostas, and John take Dickinson to offer a
model of knowledge as an ongoing process of getting a grip on an
overflowingly complex reality using limited perceptual and cognitive
resources that include bodily feeling and emotion. John further con-
nects this view to the development of expertise or know-​how, espe-
cially within the context of domestic labor. Thus, in

We play at Paste -​
Till qualified, for Pearl -​

the poet suggests that while we are tempted to dismiss activities like
making pretend gems as mere play, such practice actually develops
genuine practical skills. The same goes by implication, John argues,
for the higher-​order epistemic skill of distinguishing mere appearance

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from genuine value, especially as it applies to determining which of

our own activities are genuinely skillful. In each case, although the
transition from ignorance to ability involves a degree and depth of
difference that tempts us to “deem” our previous selves “a fool,” there
is also deep continuity in the skills involved. By extension, we can
add, although we might be tempted to dismiss poetry as mere play,
the skills of observation, distinction, and feeling it cultivates function
not just as proxies for, but as practice in and even instances of genuine
epistemic ability.
Formally, John traces out the model of knowledge as an ongoing
process of skillful but inevitably incomplete achievement through a
pair of metaphoric images: hinges and seams. She takes a hinge, as a
mechanism that allows one to swing between distinct planes, to be
an apt figure for Dickinson’s conviction that “there are radically dif-
ferent kinds of thought, that a human being is not in a position to
work with only one of them, and can move between them with some
competence.” Thus, in

The Missing All -​prevented Me

From missing minor Things.
If nothing larger than a World’s
Departure from a Hinge -​
Or Sun’s extinction, be observed -​
’Twas not so large that I
Could lift my Forehead from my work
For Curiosity.

the World swings out of view as the poet remains engaged in quotid-
ian labor such as needlework. Here again, we find the poet seeking,
and failing to find, the sort of positive hold on the global “All” sought
by philosophers, dogmatists, and skeptics alike. But at the same time,
John argues, this absence is not devastating: the poet is confident that

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“there are other things worth not missing, and we are capable of not
missing them, within the absorbing work . . . at hand.”
John’s other focal image is the seam, deployed most systemati-
cally in “Don’t put up my Thread and Needle,” in which Dickinson
describes falling asleep at her needlework, with her sight and her per-
formance becoming increasingly “crooked” even as she dreams she
is sewing fine, straight hems. In this poem, unlike “We Play at Paste,”
the poet displays confidence in herself as a “competent, discerning
agent,” in both practical and epistemic senses; the problem is that she
is temporarily unable to implement those abilities because exhaus-
tion has put her out of touch with her work—​much as a change
of Mood can render her unable to recognize God in nature, or to
embrace phenomenal states as her own.
A seam, like a hinge, is a familiar, functional feature of daily
domestic life, specifically one that creates a strong yet flexible con-
nection between two things while leaving them different. John’s argu-
ment is not that Dickinson is especially prone to employ hinges and
seams as metaphors for knowledge. Rather, she claims that when
these images do appear in Dickinson’s poems, they articulate a model
of knowledge that the poet often also expresses in other terms and
endorses more generally. In particular, as we have seen, Dickinson
frequently oscillates between the close observation of local, familiar
phenomena and values, especially those embedded in domestic life,
and the search for a more cosmic, impersonal, abstract perspective—​
a search which inevitably fails to discover a positive “All” distinct
from lived experience, but which does not therefore conclude that all
there really is a void or a bare physical substrate.
John’s argument is also not just that Dickinson sometimes
employs hinges and seams as tropes to describe an epistemic state
she finds interesting. Rather, she argues that formally, Dickinson
frequently employs words themselves as hinges and seams, or “piv-
oting points”: devices that aptly join two perspectives or systems of

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thought while leaving them distinct. The typical mechanism of junc-

ture is that of the pun: for instance, in “Don’t put up my Thread and
Needle” Dickinson plays on the sonic similarities between “seam”
and “seem,” and between “sew” and the multiple meanings of “so.”
Although the association between punning homophones is clearly
arbitrary—​we are palpably aware that their semantic values are
distinct—​the sonic similarity links those values in our minds, sets us
up to seek out more substantive similarities, and makes them espe-
cially satisfying once found.
Thus, much as with her distinctive use of hyphens and of hymn
scheme, Dickinson’s use of puns as “pivoting points” between incom-
mensurable perspectives provides her with an efficient mechanism
for articulating the sorts of complex relations among disparate
thoughts that she is especially invested in expressing. Any articula-
tion of her intended contents using more standard logical, causal, or
other connectives would be too coarse-​grained and determinate to
capture the open-​ended, multi-​dimensional relations that Dickinson
takes to obtain between the disparate perspectives she wants to stage.
In this sense, Dickinson needs such hinge words to place “planes of
thought” into relations that are “precise and yet somehow free,” in a
phrase John appropriates from Ted Hughes.8
Perhaps, given sufficient effort and ingenuity, this complex net-
work of relations could be articulated in ordinary prose. However,
such a prose paraphrase would still fail to enact the patterns of con-
nection that Dickinson’s poems do. And as such, it would also fail to
accomplish a crucial part of the task those poems perform: of enabling
her readers to trace out those patterns for themselves, by giving them
direct, experiential access to their performance. Moreover, it is plau-
sible that enacting such patterns itself has a substantive justificatory

8. Hughes, “Introduction to A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse,” 359; cited in John, ch. 6 of
this volume.

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function. First, it inculcates through practice a distinctive species of

know-​how: a “mode of attention” for navigating among and inter-
preting certain types of phenomena. In themselves, the resulting cog-
nitive traits might not be epistemically valuable. However, if we take
knowledge to be the achievement of a certain kind of acknowledg-
ment of and reconciliation with seemingly recalcitrant phenomena,
as Dickinson arguably does, then it becomes more plausible that such
cognitive know-​how is epistemically relevant. Further, by demon-
strating how to achieve that goal in a series of particular cases—​some
of which, like riddles about hummingbirds, are amusing; others of
which, like metaphors about death, are potentially horrifying—​it
also trains the reader to accomplish that goal in other cases, for
themselves.
The operative question, of course, is whether techniques of pun,
metaphor, rhythm and rhyme, do reliably conduce to knowledge
at least in the sense of getting a robust grip on the world, or instead
produce a dangerous simulacrum of reason. The worry that rhetori-
cal devices seduce readers into epistemic complacency is both long-​
standing and well-​placed. However, while the particular structures are
quite different from those employed in standard philosophical prac-
tice, the idea that formal structures have justificatory status because
they display, and thereby prompt readers to enact, certain trains of
thought is not especially alien; indeed it constitutes a core intuition
about the nature of proof. Moreover, both Hills and John argue that
Dickinson deploys these techniques in a way that brings them sig-
nificantly closer to philosophy. In her hands, these formal techniques
function, not to lull readers into comfortable streams of association,
but rather as prompts to scrutinize and analyze first-​order external
and internal phenomena to which the reader has evidential access.
More importantly, Dickinson also characteristically probes her own
trains of thought, so that the “precise and yet somehow free relations”

26
27

E m i ly D i c k i n s o n ’ s Ep i s t e m i c A m b i t i o n s f o r P o e t r y

that are expressed by what Hills calls Dickinson’s “argument-​making

metrical resources” are themselves called into critical question,
qualified, and sometimes rejected altogether. The “proofs” given by
Dickinson’s poems cannot provide indubitable signs of verity. But for
a particular, limited agent grappling with how best to stitch together
a comprehensive, authentic understanding of an overwhelmingly
complex reality, as Dickinson is, and as many of us are, they provide
a productive set of tools and products—​ones that her readers must
then put to the test for themselves.

WHY DICKINSON FOR PHILOSOPHY?

Stepping back from the specific contributions of our particular

authors, what can we now say about the relevance of Dickinson for
philosophy, given the overall picture of her poetry that has emerged?
We’ve canvassed Dickinson’s take on philosophical topics such as the
ontological status of God, sound, the self, and the nature and basis
of knowledge. We’ve also seen something about how and why she
deploys distinctively poetic techniques to express contents and per-
suade her readers, including herself. But in the absence of an anteced-
ent interest in Dickinson, why should philosophers care about what
she says and does?
First, Dickinson demonstrates a suite of productive epistemic
practices that complement standard philosophical techniques of
analysis and inference. We can work toward knowing by allocating
attention to particular familiar but puzzling phenomena which we
encounter within ourselves and in the world around us; by trying on
multiple, contrasting interpretations of those phenomena that link
them to other situations and scenarios; by probing our intuitive and
evaluative responses to them under those interpretations, to see if

27
28

T h e P o e t r y o f E m i ly D i c k i n s o n

we can affirm them as belonging to our reality; and by attempting

to reconcile, or at least find ways to navigate effectively among, the
resulting interpretations. And we can treat this epistemic work as a
kind of ongoing, quotidian labor, one that is often bound up with the
practical tasks of everyday life but that also roams to remote corners
of modal space.
We should expect this work to require sustained attention, cour-
age, and fortitude. We should acknowledge that it will never be fin-
ished, because we are constantly encountering new phenomena, and
because those phenomena are too complex to be susceptible to any
single, fully reconciled accounting. Sometimes we are stymied: our
“Strings are Snapt, [our] Bow -​to Atoms blown -​”; we face a “blank”
of pain or a “cleaving” of alienation that our brain can only “giggle” at,
agog. When that happens, it is profoundly terrible. In that case, the
best we can do—​the only thing to do if we are to remain alive—​is
to get up the next morning and set ourselves back to work, mending
those strings, sewing seams of partial comprehension, and learning
again to wonder at the world within and around us.
Second, contra the stereotype of a reclusive poet confined to her
Amherst drawing room and garden, Dickinson often appears to be
engaged in this epistemic labor with others, both by appropriating
other thinkers’ perspectives and claims, and also by inviting her read-
ers to observe and interpret structurally analogous phenomena for
themselves. But even when she does labor on her own, this already
involves a kind of conversation, in which she stages multiple perso-
nas, and she can “stun” herself by learning that she resonates to or
rejects possibilities in ways she would not have expected. In either
case, Dickinson demonstrates a suite of techniques for fruitful con-
versation that complement standard philosophical techniques of
argumentation. We can entice our interlocutors to pay close attention
to the relevant phenomena by employing precise, vivid descriptions
of concrete instances, or else by presenting them with intriguing

28
29

E m i ly D i c k i n s o n ’ s Ep i s t e m i c A m b i t i o n s f o r P o e t r y

puzzles to solve. We can offer them “kind” initial explanations to

avoid “dazzling” them into cognitive paralysis, which we replace with
successively richer interpretations. And we can employ expressions
and forms that are consistent with and reinforce the broader perspec-
tives being presented, and that in some cases actually exemplify the
contents being expressed.
Poetry is not philosophy. One of its constitutive aims is to please,
at least in the ecumenical sense of eliciting admiration at the apt-
ness of how it accomplishes what it sets out to do. But this aim is not
incompatible with engaging in a serious, self-​critical attempt to make
sense of the world, and oneself, and one’s place in the world. Writing
and reading poetry can be a mode of philosophizing, one that affords
epistemic payoffs not attainable via “straight” analysis and inference.
In that practice, Dickinson shows us a way.9

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor. “Commitment.” New Left Review 1, no. 87–​88 (1974): 78.
Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning. 1st Paul Dry Books Edition. Edited by
G. W. Kitchin. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000.
Chalmers, David. Constructing the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Erfani, Farhang. “Dickinson and Sartre on Facing the Brutality of Brute Existence.”
In Emily Dickinson and Philosophy, edited by Jed Deppman et al., 175–​187.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Hartman, Geoffrey. “Language from the Point of View of Literature.” In Beyond
Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–​1970. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

9. Thanks to Richard Eldridge for the initial invitation to produce this volume and for sage
advice and substantive philosophical feedback throughout. Thanks to the departments of
English and Philosophy and the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University for spon-
soring a workshop at which many of these papers were first presented, and to workshop
participants including especially Avi Alpert, Ernie Lepore, Colin Jager, Doug Jones, Jonah
Siegel, and Abigail Zitin. Thanks above all to the contributors, for their insightful readings of
Dickinson and their incisive and sympathetic feedback on each others’ papers.

29
30

T h e P o e t r y o f E m i ly D i c k i n s o n

Hughes, Ted. 2002. “Introduction to A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse.” In Emily

Dickinson: Critical Assessments, vol. 2, edited by Graham Clarke, 355–​359.
Mountfield, East Sussex: Helm Information.
Nussbaum, Martha. “Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature.” In Love’s
Knowledge: Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992.

30
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