Is Emily Dickinson a Metaphysical Poet

Emily Dickinson has been called “a major metaphysical poet of the nineteenth century” (Thota 161) and even, “if any nineteenth-cen­tury writer can be called this, the American metaphysical” (Keller 203). In recent years, criticism of Dickinson has tended to focus more on investigating aspects of her immediate historical context than on exploring her use of the conventions of metaphysical poetry, but the question of whether or not she can usefully be considered a meta­physical poet is worth raising once more.1 Does she think about ideas in ways that are distinctly metaphysical? Does she explore techniques that are specifically metaphysical? She frequently engages with both metaphysical ideas and metaphysical techniques, and she is often, if not always, a metaphysical poet. Reading her poems in light of the characteristics of metaphysical poetry shows how her work is connected with the larger tradition of this complex approach to questions about the nature of existence. Metaphysical poetry is not limited to the seventeenth century, any more than the ontological and cosmological questions it addresses are limited. Sev­eral critics have identified Dickinson’s poetry as metaphysical, and by investigating what definitions they have used, it will be possible to examine in what sense she can be called a metaphysical poet

Art · Context (archaeology · Criticism · Epistemology · Literature · Metaphysics · Poetry · Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education

• Compound Manner

  Judith Banzer•American Literature•1961

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• This was a Poet

  Louis Untermeyer, George Frisbie Whicher•American Literature•1939

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