The purpose of this study is to examine the possible causes of the at-
titudes toward love and death in the person and the poetry of Emily Dickinson,
the psychological and metaphysical interaction of these experiences in her
poetry, and the way in which this interaction concretizes, individualizes,
and tensions her lyrics.
In the mind and art of Emily Dickinson there is a peculiar ambivalence
toward all significant experience. This ambivalence is especially evident in
her handling of love and death. She presents them as simultaneously desirable
and fearful, fulfilling and destructive. She dramatizes them in an existential
frame in which they reveal the contradictory elements that she considers the
essence of the human condition. Close reading of her canon shows that the
poet's fundamental ambivalence toward love and death contributes to the psycho-
logical, metaphysical, and dramatic quality of her better poems.
Chapter II considers the possible historical, biographical, psychological,
and theological sources of Emily Dickinson's polar approach to love and death.
It relates her inclusive and ambivalent attitudes toward these encounters to
her cultural matrix, personal experience, psychic bent, and religious position.
It demonstrates the effects upon her creative handling of the love-death theme
of the poet's belief that expectation exceeds reality, that satisfaction
destroys desire, and that the physical is valuable primarily as a symbol of
the spiritual. It establishes the relation between the poet's reluctance to
accept the limitations of finite knowledge, love, and duration to her dual
presentation of love and death as ultimate transcendence and/or annihilation.
It traces her aesthetic suspension between the poles of desire and fear to her
fundamenta 1 uncertainty about the nature of God and so of man 1 s position in
relation to him and to all reality. It shows that while wanting to believe
in a loving deity, Emily Dickinson was not sure that he might not be an indif-
ferent or a malignant creator. Finally, it examines the effect of this scepti-
cism upon her poetic treatment of love and death and especially demonstrates
why, as a result, the expectation of love and death becomes the most desirable
human posture.
Chapter III explores poetry in which love operates at one of three levels:
1) metaphorical:reference; 2) dramatizing conditioner; and 3) essential sub-
ject. It examines the typical use of love at these three levels. It particu-
larly analyzes the situations, attitudes, imagery, and language patterns in
poems whose central experience is love. Setting up ten categories in which
love functions as the core of the poetic experience, it examines love as:
1) painful deprivation; 2) fearful threat; 3) rejection; 4) renunciation;
5) separation; 6) erotic encounter; 7) transforming grace; and 8) divine union.
It also considers categories which present the nature of love or trace its
effects. It organizes poems according to whether they present love as a ful-
filling or destructive experience. It reveals a movement in Emily Dickinson's
concept of love and in her handling of it as a poetic motif.
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