Positive as Sound
Emily Dickinson's Rhyme
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4375747 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lilach Lachman, Judy Jo Small |
| Year | 1992 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 399 |
| Publication date | 1992-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1772547 |
| OpenAlex | W2061696007 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
The strange rhymes of Emily Dickinson's verse have offended some readers, attracted others and proved a stumbling block for critics. In this analysis of the poet's rhyming practices, Judy Jo Small goes beyond simple classification and enumeration to reveal the aesthetic and semantic value of Dickinson's rhymes and show they help shape the meaning of her lyrics. Considering Dickinson's rhyming technique in light of its historical context, Small argues that the poet's radical innovations were both an outgrowth of 19th-century aesthetic ideas about the music of poetry and a reaction against conventional constraints - not the least of which was the image of the female poet as a songbird pouring forth her soul's joys and sorrows in lyrical melody. Unlike other scholars, Small attaches special importance to Dickinson's own musical bakcground. Revealing Dickinson's auditory imagination as a primary source of her poetic power, she shows that sound is an important subject in the verse and that the phonetic texture contributes to the meaning. By looking closely at individual poems, Small demonstrates that Dickinson's deviation from normal rhyme schemes play a significant part in her artistic design her modulations and dislocations of rhyme serve to structure the poems and contribute to their dynamic parts of mood and meaning. Analyzing Dickinson's more daring experiments, she shows how the poet achieved uneanny effects with fluctuating partial rhymes in some poems and with homonymic puns in others. It is in the interplay between the musical and the written aspects of Dickinson's language, Small contends, that her poetry comes alive. Particular note is taken of the use of rhyme at the ends of poems, illustrating Dickin son's brilliant effects in closing some poems decisively and in leaving others tantalizingly open-ended
Acoustics · Art · Literature · Physics · Poetry · Rhyme · Poetry Analysis and Criticism
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,19 |
| Citation span | 1999 - 2021 (23) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |