Dickinson, Emily , 1830-1886

Emily Dickinson was a poet who existed at the center of her nineteenth-century United States culture and yet wrote from a periphery located at the edge of her being. Integral to understanding her poetry is a contextual awareness of her spiritual struggle. The experience of cultural marginalization and the way it informs art through a peripheral perspective has been the focus of examination in much of modern and post-modern literary studies where attention is given as much to an author's cultural station as to his or her artistic creation. A close study of Emily Dickinson's poetry reveals a spiritually marginalized perspective which closely resembles the structural framework of cultural marginalization. While there are areas of Dickinson's poetic perspective where these two experiences merge, my examination of Dickinson concentrates on her personal spiritual liminality in her relationship with God as expressed in the context of her poetry and letters.

The Greek term synaesthesia, which literally translates into 'perceiving together,' is known among most literary critics as the mixing of sensations. The term is applied in literature to the description of one kind of sensation in terms of another. For instance: 'hearing' a color or 'seeing' a 'smell.' That is, the description of sounds in terms of colors such as a "blue note;" of colors in terms of sound such as "loud shirt;" of sound in terms of taste such as "how sweet the sound;" and of colors in terms of temperature such as a "cool green." Although synaesthesia has been used by a variety of poets throughout the centuries, my focus will be on its use in the poetry of John Keats and Emily Dickinson. While critics and scholars have considered this subject before, normally it is approached in terms of its specific meaning within a particular poem. In contrast, I argue that Keats and Dickinson employ synaesthesia to crystallize a poetic perspective, a literary world view, and that this perspective significantly pertains to a variety of gender issues in the nineteenth century. Consequently, I contend that both poets were dealing with the large theme of an imaginative poetic world in which synaesthesia transmutes and synthesizes gender so that a "blue note," male and female, are radically the same and yet "other." After reviewing the scholarship of synaesthesia in Keats's and Dickinson's poetry, I will analyze a series of poems that illustrate my thesis, fleshing out the implications of a gender synthesis that makes us see both poets challenging and subverting the gendered commonplaces of the 19th century.