Ghosts of Meter: Dickinson, After Long Silence

Recent criticism of Dickinson's work, written by both manuscript scholars and poets, largely ignores her poems' use of meter in order to characterize them as experimental avant la lettre and predominantly visual in emphasis. Formalist poets, surprisingly, show equally little interest in Dickinson's metrical poems. This essay argues that Dickinson was an innovator of poetic meter. I suggest that by playing rhetorical dashes against the well-known templates of her favored shorter meters, Dickinson multiplies "ghosts of meter," thus revealing uncanny and even transgressive elements at work within the metrical project itself.