{"title":"‘I gave him Leave to Live’: Emily Dickinson’s Non-service and Ralph Waldo Emerson","authors":"Yanbin Kang","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2020.1852694","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Considering assistance ‘the finest of Joys’ (Fr1729), Dickinson singularly espouses withdrawing or withholding giving, regarding at times ‘leaving alone’ as an essential aspect of perfect assistance. This essay offers a reading of several of Dickinson’s poems that relate to the ethics of withholding: including ‘To offer brave assistance’ (Fr492), ‘We grow accustomed to the Dark -’ (Fr428), ‘I rose - because He sank -’ (Fr454), and ‘It came his turn to beg -’ (Fr1519), arguing that Dickinson’s idiosyncratic non-service stems from a creative conversation with the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"63 1","pages":"82 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00138398.2020.1852694","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2020.1852694","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Considering assistance ‘the finest of Joys’ (Fr1729), Dickinson singularly espouses withdrawing or withholding giving, regarding at times ‘leaving alone’ as an essential aspect of perfect assistance. This essay offers a reading of several of Dickinson’s poems that relate to the ethics of withholding: including ‘To offer brave assistance’ (Fr492), ‘We grow accustomed to the Dark -’ (Fr428), ‘I rose - because He sank -’ (Fr454), and ‘It came his turn to beg -’ (Fr1519), arguing that Dickinson’s idiosyncratic non-service stems from a creative conversation with the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.