Dickinson’s Uncertainty Principle: We Grow Accustomed To The Dark by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson would not likely survive a contemporary poetry workshop.  She rarely follows the contemporary maxim “show, don’t tell,” and her poems are sometimes vague and often do not contain many specific images.  She would be criticized for her seemingly arbitrary use of capitalization and her odd punctuation of exclamation points and hyphens.  Dickinson defies the modern “rules” of poetry, often creating metaphorical linkages and unlikely comparisons by simply thrusting two disparate concepts together. She didn’t title her works, with only a few rare exceptions, and often left stanzas and poems hanging by ending them with a dash—

As a contemporary poet and critic who is not a specialist in Dickinsonian studies, Emily Dickinson’s interpretation of her own poetry is immaterial to me.  Perhaps someday I will revisit her work with the intent of understanding it in her context, rather than my own.  Right now it is imperative that I find a meaning of Dickinson’s poetry for myself — someone who is living at the end of the twentieth century.

Postmodern methods of reading poetry do not shed much light Dickinson’s work, however, because her often elusive work defies strict intellectualization.  Whenever I think I’ve pinned her down, she resists the three-count and surprises me with yet another possible interpretation. Like any piece of fine art, Dickinson’s poetry affects the reader as an emotional experience rather than a rational one. Always smart, her poems rarely feel overworked – they seem to flow deftly from one idea to another.

Her poem “

Dickinson, Emily.  The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson.  Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1955.