INTERPRETATION OF OMITTED WORDS OR THE UNSAID INFORMATION IN EMILY DICKINSON’S POETRY

The use of omissions by Emily Dickinson is one of the major characteristics of her poetry. She tried to reach maximum ellipsis and achieve the tightest structural compression. The unique feature in her use of omission is that most of the unsaid information in her poems is portrayed with the help of dashes. They indicate a missing word, phrase, emphasize a break, or they depict a sudden change in thought. Throughout the author's writing, the imagery and metaphors are drawn from her observations of nature and imagination. Emily’s use of specific words resulted in one - inability of comprehending her poetry with just one reading. The present article focuses on the examination of the omitted words in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. The analysis shows that she refined and removed inessential language and punctuation from her poetry. In many of her poems, abstract concepts and material things are used to describe one another, but the relationship between them remains elusive and uncertain.

Beauty be not caused. It is. Pedagogical reflections on beauty experience through books and pictures

As Emily Dickinson suggests, beauty be not caused. It is. It is up to us finding traces of it even in the most unexpected and difficult contexts. During pandemic fragile time, looking for the beauty in our environments is a pedagogical imperative and necessary to surviving fear and loneliness. It becomes important the immersion in stories as strategic way to experience the beauty through fictional worlds. Stories, in fact, are “mind’s Flight Simulator” (Oatley), through the fiction “we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end” (Gottschall). It is possible, through the stories, safely experiment the unheimliche, taking the beauty even if in isolation and immobility. From this perspective, the article focus on the educational potential of reading as strategic way to embrace the beauty, researching beauty between lines and in the depth of the imagines. It is also a crucial opportunity to have access to the potential of unheimliche and the resulting “Collateral beauty”

3. Convention and idiosyncrasy

“Convention and idiosyncrasy” shows how the successful use of recognizable artistic conventions can help a poet to enter a literature and a culture that seeks to exclude them. It can moderate skepticism, even hostility, and sanction an outsider’s admittance into a community. At the same time, respect for poetic convention hardly reigns uncontested in American literary culture. With several notable exceptions, American poetry and, even more so, its scholarly discussions value a different quality. American poets and readers alike often appreciate idiosyncrasy and the associated values of disruption, originality, innovation, strangeness, and surprise. Poets as different Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Charles Bernstein, and Maggie Smith consider the competing imperatives of convention and idiosyncrasy.

American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction

American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction proposes a new theory of American poetry showing that two characteristics mark the vast, contentious literature. On the one hand, several of its major poets and critics claim that America needs a poetry equal to the country’s own distinctiveness. On the other hand, American poetry welcomes techniques, styles, and traditions that originate from outside the country. Its influences range far beyond America’s borders. The force of these two competing characteristics drives both individual accomplishment and the broader field. The story moves through historical periods and honors the poets’ artistry by paying close attention to the verse forms, meters, and styles they employ. Its examples range from Anne Bradstreet, writing a century before America’s establishment, to the poets of the Black Lives Matter movement. Individual chapters consider how other major figures such as T. S. Eliot, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson emphasize convention or idiosyncrasy and turn to American English as an important artistic resource.

Isomorphic mapping in fictional interpretation

This chapter investigates how readers/hearers come to assign a subjective interpretation to a fictional text. It argues that fictional texts use a speech act operator that involves an inference from the text worlds to the reader’s reality (Bauer and Beck 2014). The inference is based on a mapping from concepts in the text to real objects, properties, and relations which has isomorphic features, i.e., it is a structure-preserving mapping. We illustrate the workings of our semantic framework by applying it to two poems by Emily Dickinson and offer some generalizations regarding plausible vs. implausible mappings and what governs their choice.