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THE POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON
oxford studies in philosophy and literature
Richard Eldridge, Philosophy, Swarthmore College
Editorial Board
Anthony J. Cascardi, Comparative Literature, Romance, Languages, and Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
David Damrosch, Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Moira Gatens, Philosophy, University of Sydney
Garry Hagberg, Philosophy, Bard College
Philip Kitcher, Philosophy, Columbia University
Joshua Landy, French and Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Toril Moi, Literature, Romance Studies, Philosophy, and Theater Studies, Duke University
Martha C. Nussbaum, Philosophy and Law School, University of Chicago
Bernard Rhie, English, Williams College
David Wellbery, Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago
Paul Woodruff, Philosophy and Classics, University of Texas at Austin
PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES
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Jane Austen’s Emma: Philosophical Perspectives
Edited by E. M. Dadlez
Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji: Philosophical Perspectives
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Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: Philosophical Perspectives
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Joyce’s Ulysses: Philosophical Perspectives
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The Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Philosophical Perspectives
Edited by Elisabeth Camp
THE POETRY OF EMILY
DICKINSON
Philosophical Perspectives
Edited by Elisabeth Camp
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Camp, Elisabeth, editor.
Title: The poetry of Emily Dickinson : philosophical perspectives / Edited by Elisabeth Camp.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Series: Oxford studies in philosophy and literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020027496 (print) | LCCN 2020027497 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190651190 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190651206 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190651220 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886—Criticism and interpretation. | Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886—Philosophy. | Philosophy in literature. Classification: LCC PS1541.Z 5 .P55 2020 (print) | LCC PS1541.Z 5 (ebook) | DDC 811/.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027496 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027497
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190651190.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Series Editor’s Foreword vii
Contributors xi
Introduction: Emily Dickinson’s Epistemic Ambitions for Poetry 1 Elisabeth Camp
1. Forms of Emotional Knowing and Unknowing: Skepticism and Belief in Dickinson’s Poetry 31 Rick Anthony Furtak
2. Interiority and Expression in Dickinson’s Lyrics 59 Magdalena Ostas
3. How to Know Everything 83 Oren Izenberg
4. Form and Content in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry 108 Antony Aumann
5. The Uses of Obstruction
David Hills
6. Dickinson and Pivoting Thought
Eileen John
SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
At least since Plato had Socrates criticize the poets and attempt to displace Homer as the authoritative articulator and transmitter of human experience and values, philosophy and literature have developed as partly competing, partly complementary enterprises. Both literary writers and philosophers have frequently studied and commented on each other’s texts and ideas, sometimes with approval, sometimes with disapproval, in their efforts to become clearer about human life and about valuable commitments—moral, artistic, political, epistemic, metaphysical, and religious, as may be. Plato’s texts themselves register the complexity and importance of these interactions in being dialogues in which both deductive argumentation and dramatic narration do central work in furthering a complex body of views.
While these relations have been widely recognized, they have also frequently been ignored or misunderstood, as academic disciplines have gone their separate ways within their modern institutional settings. Philosophy has often turned to science or mathematics as providing models of knowledge; in doing so it has often explicitly set itself against cultural entanglements and literary devices, rejecting, at
least officially, the importance of plot, figuration, and imagery in favor of supposedly plain speech about the truth. Literary study has moved variously through formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and cultural studies, among other movements, as modes of approach to a literary text. In doing so it has understood literary texts as sample instances of images, structures, personal styles, or failures of consciousness, or it has seen the literary text as a largely fungible product, fundamentally shaped by wider pressures and patterns of consumption and expectation that affect and figure in non-literary textual production as well. It has thus set itself against the idea that major literary texts productively and originally address philosophical problems of value and commitment precisely through their form, diction, imagery, and development, even while these works also resist claiming conclusively to solve the problems that occupy them.
These distinct academic traditions have yielded important perspectives and insights. But in the end none of them has been kind to the idea of major literary works as achievements in thinking about values and human life, often in distinctive, open, self-revising, selfcritical ways. At the same time readers outside institutional settings, and often enough philosophers and literary scholars too, have turned to major literary texts precisely in order to engage with their productive, materially and medially specific patterns and processes of thinking. These turns to literature have, however, not so far been systematically encouraged within disciplines, and they have generally occurred independently of each other.
The aim of this series is to make manifest the multiple, complex engagements with philosophical ideas and problems that lie at the hearts of major literary texts. In doing so, its volumes aim not only to help philosophers and literary scholars of various kinds to find rich affinities and provocations to further thought and work, they also aim to bridge various gaps between academic disciplines and
between those disciplines and the experiences of extra-institutional readers.
Each volume focuses on a single, undisputedly major literary text. Both philosophers with training and experience in literary study and literary scholars with training and experience in philosophy are invited to engage with themes, details, images, and incidents in the focal text, through which philosophical problems are held in view, worried at, and reformulated. Decidedly not a project simply to formulate A’s philosophy of X as a finished product, merely illustrated in the text, and decidedly not a project to explain the literary work entirely by reference to external social configurations and forces, the effort is instead to track the work of open thinking in literary forms, as they lie both neighbor to and aslant from philosophy. As Walter Benjamin once wrote, “new centers of reflection are continually forming,” as problems of commitment and value of all kinds take on new shapes for human agents in relation to changing historical circumstances, where reflective address remains possible. By considering how such centers of reflection are formed and expressed in and through literary works, as they engage with philosophical problems of agency, knowledge, commitment, and value, these volumes undertake to present both literature and philosophy as, at times, productive forms of reflective, medial work in relation both to each other and to social circumstances and to show how this work is specifically undertaken and developed in distinctive and original ways in exemplary works of literary art.
Richard Eldridge Swarthmore College
CONTRIBUTORS
Antony Aumann is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northern Michigan University. He has previously held positions at The Ohio State University, St. Olaf College, and Fordham University in the Bronx. Aumann’s research engages both the continental and analytic traditions of philosophy, and he specializes in issues related to aesthetics, existentialism, and religion. His work has appeared in journals and collections such as The Kierkegaardian Mind, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Continental Philosophy Review. His 2019 monograph with Rowman & Littlefield is entitled Art and Selfhood: A Kierkegaardian Account. Aumann is also the co-editor of New Kierkegaard Research, a series of monographs and edited collections published by Lexington Books.
Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College. The main areas of his research are the philosophy of emotions, existential thought (in particular, Kierkegaard and his legacy), and the contested relationship between philosophy and literature. His books include Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”: A New English Version, with a Philosophical Introduction (2007), Thoreau’s
Importance for Philosophy (2012), and most recently Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience (2018). He is currently writing about love and subjectivity in the work of Proust.
David Hills is Associate Professor of Philosophy (Teaching) at Stanford University, having previously taught at Harvard University; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Pennsylvania; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and University of California, Berkeley. He has written and spoken widely on aesthetics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and the history of modern philosophy, especially Kant and Wittgenstein. He prepared a bibliography on metaphor for Oxford Bibliographies in 2018 and is at work on two books: one on metaphor and the other on Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment.
Oren Izenberg is Associate Professor in the Department of English at University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on the long history of poetry and poetics, and on intersections between literary and philosophical explorations of personhood, mind, and action. He is the author of Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (2011), and a member of the editorial board of nonsite.
Eileen John is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Her research is in aesthetics and philosophy of literature, and she has broad interests in art and values. She has directed Warwick’s Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts, and co-edited the Blackwell anthology “The Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings.”
Magdalena Ostas has served on the faculty in the English Department at Rhode Island College, Boston University, and Florida Atlantic University. She works and teaches at the crossroads of
nineteenth-century literature and literature, philosophy, and the arts, and has written on a range of figures at this intersection, including Kant, Wordsworth, Keats, Jane Austen, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Jeff Wall, and Michael Fried. Her essays have appeared in International Studies in Philosophy, symploke, Studies in Romanticism, and nonsite and in the collections Michael Fried and Philosophy and MLA Approaches to Teaching Jane Austen’s Persuasion. She is at work on a study about art, expression, and interior life in poetry, philosophy, and the novel around 1800.
Emily Dickinson’s Epistemic Ambitions for Poetry
ELISABETH CAMP
All of the contributors to this volume argue that poetry is capable of a kind of epistemic achievement, and that Emily Dickinson in particular is an epistemically ambitious poet. On the view that emerges, poetry is a means for getting a better grip on how the world is and one’s place within it; and Dickinson uses poetry both to understand the world and to advocate for poetry as a tool of understanding. Many of the contributors also argue that Dickinson offers a distinctive construal of what knowledge is: as an ongoing, inevitably unfinished process rather than a fixed state. The unfinished nature of knowledge, on this view, arises in part because the world transcends complete grasp by any finite agent, and in part because as long as the knowing agent is alive, she is never a complete, static entity. But it arises especially because the species of robust connection to reality required for knowledge is something that must be continually earned, through daily cognitive, emotional, and practical labor.
Some aspects of the resulting portrait fit smoothly with the stereotype of Dickinson as a reclusive poet. She has an acute sense of a
The Poetry of Emily Dickinson. Elisabeth Camp, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190651190.003.0001
gulf between herself and the rest of the world. She engages in close observation of nature and of her own mental states. She is especially concerned with “small moments” and creatures in nature—birds, snakes, frost—and with the “what it’s like” of pain and death. But the Dickinson we encounter here is also decidedly more determined, argumentative, and hopeful than that stereotype allows. She strides “Vast Prairies of Air” in search of a “Missing All.” She instructs her audience on aspects of reality they have ignored. Although the promised “All” is elusive, she at least sometimes finds the right words in the right form to situate herself at home in the world. And when understanding does fail her, so that her cognitive and emotional “strings are snapt,” she doesn’t give up, but gets back up and sets herself to work. This portrait of Dickinson as a striving, inquisitive poet stands in stark contrast to the more pessimistic, even nihilistic construal of Dickinson articulated by many recent interpreters. Ted Hughes, for instance, characterizes her as in the grip of “almost a final revelation of horrible Nothingness,” such that
Remaining true to this, she could make up her mind about nothing. . . . Registering everywhere and in everything the icy chill of its nearness, she did not know what to think . . . all other concerns floated free of finality, became merely relative, susceptible to her artistic play.1
Moreover, this portrait of Dickinson as an epistemically ambitious poet also provides us with substantive lessons for philosophy itself, by offering alternative characterizations of what knowledge is, and of the methodologies through which it can be achieved.
1. Hughes, “Introduction to A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse,” 358–359; cited in John, ch. 6 of this volume.
The first essay in the volume, by Rick Anthony Furtak, focuses on Dickinson’s attitudes toward knowledge of the external world, especially God and nature. The poet’s initial findings are skeptical: when she sets out to find a person-like God who inspects our actions from his residence in Heaven, and who we will eventually encounter faceto-face after death, Dickinson encounters no “sign” from which she can “infer his Residence,” only “Vast Prairies of Air / Unbroken by a Settler.” However, when she pauses in this “Infinitude,” she finds that the “Silence” “condescends” to “stop for her,” and she is awed to encounter a Creation that transcends what she sought. Similarly, when Dickinson observes practices of institutionalized prayer in church, she finds only empty religious vestments and incantations. But when she “keeps the Sabbath” by “staying at Home” in her garden, guided by the local songbirds, then she is on her way toward Heaven “all along.”
Furtak thus locates Dickinson as belonging to Emerson and Thoreau’s Transcendentalist tradition of “natural supernaturalism,” on which being perceptually and emotionally attuned to nature is the only authentic form of worship. Dickinson does at least sometimes feel she knows the reality of divinity, and more generally of a meaningful external world, in a way that is “immediately present as a fact of experience, available to those who have ears to hear and eyes to see,” as Furtak says. At the same time, it is not easy, nor always possible, to maintain this confidence, for at least two reasons.
First, Dickinson’s epistemic confidence is grounded in a suite of feelings—of awe and wonder, and of being “at home”—which one must experience firsthand. One can “keep the Sabbath” by implementing practices of mindful attention that make these feelings more likely. But how one feels is not ultimately under one’s control; and the poet does frequently feel estranged from her social and natural environments: a “Stranger[] in a foreign World.”
Second, even when these feelings are present, Dickinson worries that they are mere projections onto an empty void, and hence selfgratifying delusions rather than epistemic achievements. Thus, in
To hear an Oriole sing May be a common thing Or only a divine.
she suggests that it is possible that the “Tune” or “Rune” of an Oriole’s song—its being a melody, being beautiful, and/or having its being a sign of the divine—is “only” a matter of interpretation, rather than of “common” fact: something that depends on how the “Fashion of the Ear” “attires” bare sound waves, rather than a feature inherent in reality, ready to be discovered.
Interpreters like Farhang Erfani2 take such passages to establish that Dickinson embraces the skeptical conclusion that there is a fundamental gap between us and the world, and that meaning and divinity are merely human projections. Furtak agrees that the skeptic’s hypothesis, combined with the poet’s own firsthand experiences of meaning as fluctuating in accordance with her “Mood,” invalidates a naïve view that the “song” is real in an absolute, objective sense; but he argues that they leave open the possibility that the song is a joint creation of bird and listener. On this neo-Kantian reading, a mind that is properly attuned to nature is genuinely responding to something external to itself which it cloaks in distinctively human form, so that “in the meeting of mind and world, both the subject and the object make essential contributions.”
A key reason for taking Dickinson to reject the skeptical conclusion is that she consistently takes Nature to transcend our powers
2. See, e.g., Erfani, “Dickinson and Sartre on Facing the Brutality of Brute Existence,” cited in Furtak, ch. 1 of this volume.
of perception and understanding. Like the philosophers, Dickinson craves knowledge; and she takes their methodology of analysis and inference very seriously. But to endorse the skeptical conclusion, one would need first, to accept the assumption that our cognitive capacities are indeed adequate to analyze the evidence we acquire through perception, and second, to infer from this that an oriole’s chirp is nothing more than bare sounds mis-dressed by us with merely mental “attire.” And for Dickinson, such an assumption of epistemic adequacy is undermined: first, by her frequent negative experiences of limitation in the course of “this timid life of Evidence”; and second, by her positive albeit intermittent experiences of divine transcendence:
This World is not Conclusion
A Species stands beyond Invisible, as Music But positive, as Sound -
For Furtak’s Dickinson, then, we are essentially finite beings stuck in a perpetual state of epistemic in-between-ness. This is not just agnosticism, understood as the refusal to endorse either a positive or negative conclusion about the reality of divinity (or of melody, or of sound). Rather, it is an active condition of “Wonder,” of “not precisely Knowing / And not precisely Knowing not”: a search for understanding that can only ever be partially accomplished. Further, in contrast to philosophers, who fetishize analysis and inference and take themselves to know only what they can conclude via those means, Dickinson takes herself to have other epistemic tools at her disposal. We’ve already seen that she appeals to first-person experiences of awe and comfort. But as Furtak notes, and as Hills will argue at greater length, she also takes it that in those cases where “Philosophy - don’t know,” some measure of “Sagacity” can still be achieved by going “through a Riddle,” in the distinctive manner afforded by poetry.
In considering why the ultimate reality of nature and God should transcend our finite epistemic capacities, it is natural to focus on the fact that they are outside of, and in this sense “other” to, us. But as Magdalena Ostas argues, Dickinson often finds her own self to be at least as mysterious as the external world: “Ourself behind ourself, concealed - Should startle most,” as she says. Indeed, the “self” she discerns is sometimes almost comically “haunted”: her mind and brain are “cleaved,” full of hidden “corridors,” and divided across time in a way that leaves her brain “giggling” at the “odd” mismatch between “That person that I was - And this One.” Such internal “otherness” makes the sort of introspection required for self-knowledge into a monumentally challenging task. In particular, much as with Dickinson’s confrontation with nature’s “Vast Prairies of Air,” so too does examining her own self require not just precise attentiveness, but also emotional courage in the face of alienation:
I do not know the man so bold He dare in lonely Place
That awful stranger - Consciousness Deliberately face -
Passages like this might seem to supply clear grounds for attributing a nihilistic vision to Dickinson. Perhaps, as Geoffrey Hartmann claims, Dickinson’s “spectatorial” gaze is a coping mechanism which allows her to “elide the agony of self-consciousness.”3 Or perhaps she has mustered the courage to introspect, and has discovered that there lurks only an empty void, rendering her own life irrevocably “other.” However, much as Furtak argues that Dickinson entertains but
3. Hartmann, “Language from the Point of View of Literature,” 350, cited in Ostas, ch. 3 of this volume.
ultimately rejects external-world skepticism in favor of a neo-Kantian constructivism about nature, so Ostas argues that Dickinson rejects epistemic and metaphysical pessimisms about the mental in favor of an innovative form of self-constructivism.
To see why, it helps to bracket questions of self-knowledge for a moment, to first consider what self-expression means for Dickinson. Given Dickinson’s frequent interest in close observation of inner states, there is a persistent tendency to read her as a broadly “confessional” poet: an intrepid phenomenological ornithologist documenting shy species of qualia in order to place them on display for the rest of the world. Along similar lines, it is tempting to read Dickinson’s many poems about death, such as “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died ,” as attempts to accurately simulate qualitative states that are real but otherwise cognitively inaccessible.
As we will see in discussing Izenberg’s contribution, it is plausible that Dickinson is at least sometimes engaged in such projects of documentation and simulation. But Ostas argues that Dickinson’s poems of self-expression are more actively creative than the confessional model allows. More specifically, she argues that Dickinson’s frequent trope of “self-splitting” does not function (just) to diagnose an antecedently existing state of alienation between multiple personalities, but instead serves as an imaginative technique for “serious, forceful investigation,” in which the poet “dares” to stage various possibilities, in order to probe how they strike her.
More specifically, Ostas argues that in writing her poems Dickinson assigns herself the role of curious reader as much as that of documentary reporter. Poetry gives her “the Art to stun myself / With Bolts - of Melody!”: that is, by “hear[ing] the words as they make an entry into the world, suddenly concrete, as though they had not issued from her own pen and voice,” Dickinson gains a new, alternative perspective on the thoughts and attitudes they express. Just as Dickinson inspects her bodily features, like her hair and dimples, to
see whether they “twinkle back / Conviction . . . of me - ,” so too she “turns [her] Being round and round” verbally in her poetry:
I felt my life with both my hands
To see if it was there I held my spirit to the Glass, To prove it possibler -
Confronting herself with the “sounds” she generates in her writing thus provides the poet with a mechanism for assessing whether she can accept the contents they express as her “own.”
Instead of deploying “a logic of pressing thoughts or feelings outward from inside,” then, Ostas takes Dickinson to exemplify a model of self-expression as self-construction—a model that has also been articulated by philosophers like Stanley Cavell, Charles Taylor, and Richard Eldridge. On this view, the task of self-expression is as much epistemic as it is communicative. But beyond this, self-expression also becomes a constitutive project of constructing a self, for at least two reasons. First, at a local level, verbal articulation helps to make the particular feelings and thoughts expressed into what they are, by assigning them a form and a location in relation to a network of other possible and actual feelings and thoughts. Indeed, Ostas argues that insofar as their verbal articulation essentially contributes to constituting those thoughts and feelings, the self they express is distributed externally, on the page. Second and more globally, the poet’s response to the thoughts and feelings she “stages” at least partially constitutes them as hers: she embraces some as belonging to her, at least for this moment, while marginalizing others as odd, past, merely simulated, or otherwise “other.”
This constructivist model of self-expression and selfhood in turn produces a model of self-knowledge that neatly echoes the constructivist account of nature articulated by Furtak. In both the outer
and inner realms, our contributors attribute to Dickinson a view of knowledge as a relationship, one that must be continually achieved by a highly complex but limited self grappling to make contact with a transcendently complex reality. And in both cases, the way in which the self receives and interprets that reality partially, but only partially, constitutes it as reality. Further, both Furtak and Ostas argue that in this quest, inner sensations and emotional responses function not just as objects of knowledge, but also as epistemic tools. The poet begins with a felt yearning to understand: an often “irritable” curiosity “That nibbles at the soul.” Like the philosopher, she observes, infers, and hypothesizes from the evidence she accumulates. But this never suffices: knowledge, when it comes, involves an immediate feeling of kinship, one which can be cultivated but not summoned and that is often elusive.
Where Furtak and Ostas argue that Dickinson embraces the possibility of partial knowledge in the face of skeptical threats, Oren Izenberg tackles the more basic question of whether poetry in general, and Dickinson in particular, are even in the business of attempting to achieve knowledge. Echoing Francis Bacon, who claimed that poetry “is rather a pleasure or play of imagination, than a work or duty thereof,”4 many theorists of disparate stripes today hold that poetry lacks any (warranted) epistemic ambition. Instead, they take it either to be just another entry in the field of “cultural production,” interesting for what it reveals about its sociopolitical environment; or else to function as an antidote to reality, “resisting by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads,” as Adorno says.5
Against this, Izenberg argues that an interest in poetry is justified by a manifest, albeit typically implicit, commitment by poets
4. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 82, cited in Izenberg, ch. 3 of this volume. 5. Adorno, “Commitment,” 78, cited in Izenberg, ch. 3 of this volume.
themselves to “epistemic payoff.” This, he claims, is what poets usually present themselves as doing, and what we as readers usually take them to be doing. Redeeming this commitment requires fending off a classic pair of threats. On the one hand, if a poem merely records what one person once happened to think or feel on one occasion, then it offers nothing more than an entry in a cabinet of curiosities, unverifiable by and uninteresting for others. But on the other hand, if the poem achieves general applicability by being stripped of its specificities, then the content that remains is typically either a banal triviality, a substantive fact known only on the basis of some other source of authority, or a patent falsehood.
One option for avoiding this dichotomy is to claim that poems propose possibilities, in the form of thought experiments. On its own, this might not seem like a marked improvement over the cabinet of curiosities. Given the vast expanse of modal space, merely knowing that one’s conception is metaphysically possible is disappointingly meager reward: we want to know, and poets appear to take themselves to offer, some insight into how this world actually is.
Izenberg claims that the payoff is more substantive, and that the very features of lyric poetry that make it seem remote from genuine knowledge are in fact sources of epistemic value. His argument proceeds by way of an analogy, or a “pleasing, if slant rhyme,” between lyric poems and David Chalmers’s “Cosmoscope.” Chalmers aims to resuscitate the Leibnitzian/Laplacean dream that an ideal reasoner could know everything about the world by knowing a highly restricted, privileged subclass of truths about it. To motivate the plausibility of such an accomplishment, and to get a grip on what it would involve, Chalmers suggests that we imagine possessing a virtual reality device into which all the facts of the world have been entered, and which has the power to calculate all entailments of those facts. Such a device wouldn’t do anything that a non-ideal reasoner couldn’t accomplish in principle; it “simply offloads” some of the burden of
storage and calculation “from ourselves onto the world.” But armed with such a device, “one could come to know anything that could be known.”6
Similarly, Izenberg suggests, many lyric poems should be treated as “investigatory devices” that deploy poetic rhetorical performances to provide evidence about a restricted base of facts, from which the poet and readers can draw inferences. More specifically, he argues that Dickinson makes contributions to each of the four classes of facts that Chalmers identifies as inputs to the Cosmoscope. These are first, the class of micro- and macrophysical physical truths and their governing laws; second, the class of phenomenological or experiential truths: what it’s like to be in various psychological states, plus the psychophysical laws connecting them to matter; third, a class of indexical truths, specifying where and when one actually is; and finally, a “that’s all” clause, affirming that P, Q, and I exhaust the totality of truths.
First, in the domain of physical facts, Izenberg argues that Dickinson deploys the laser-like focus of poetry to home in on specific aspects of nature. One such technique presents “ribbons” of time, much as a timelapse camera records an unfolding empirical “Experiment”:
At half-past Three a single Bird
Unto a silent Sky
Propounded but a single term
Of cautious melody -
By focusing attention on a sequence of temporal moments, the poet is able to observe the details of those moments as simultaneously separate and connected, in a way that “allows space for the drawing
6. Chalmers, Constructing the World, 117, cited in Izenberg, ch. 3 of this volume.
