“Internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are—”: Dickinson’s Animate Poetics

Abstract:This paper, a psychoanalytic, vitalist, materialist investigation, uses a new critical lens and takes up Emily Dickinson’s poetics as the active, irreducible labyrinth of the psyche itself. Specifically, it argues how four defining psychical features—the presence of contradiction and predicament, movement, process and passage, and unconscious forces—are also the distinguishing elements of Dickinson’s work, in content and practice, both aesthetically and ontologically.