“The Brain - is wider than the Sky - ” or: Re-Cognizing Emily Dickinson

Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems present operations of the human mind as physiological processes. These poems invite us to re-cognize Dickinson, that is, first, to reflect on what it can mean to approach her poetry by way of the cognitive sciences and secondly, to situate her poetics at the threshold of fundamental transformations of our media ecology and thus of common ways of perceiving, remembering, and creating the world. Interrogating how interactions between brain, mind, world, and media figure in Dickinson’s poems, this essay explores cognition as both individually embodied and embedded in a history of metaphor and mediation.