“Things overlooked before”: Details in Dickinson’s Poems of Scale

This essay ties an examination of Dickinson’s chirography to an emergent topic of literary criticism: the problem of scale. Addressing debates surrounding the transference of Dickinson’s handwriting into text, I first emphasize the importance of the minute detail and demonstrate how it disrupts reading. The disturbance of the detail, I argue, becomes especially forceful as it analogously disrupts scalar concepts of size and proximity that ground falsely naturalized perspectives. The essay links poems that express scalar concerns to show that Dickinson’s seemingly small, inconsequential details have very big interpretive implications; the details not only disrupt the reading of her poems, but also the conceptual topics they address, in a form that parallels and accentuates the small. In this way, I distinguish Dickinson from her contemporaries, who were also preoccupied with issues of scale, and show how she predates recent critical discourse by dismantling concepts of proportion and perspective.