Dickinson’s Mastery

My paper links Emily Dickinson’s notorious obscurity to her resistance towards conclusion. This tendency to refuse closure marks what I call the lyric death drive, a formal technique that flirts with narrative sequencing before disappointing the reader’s hope for a satisfying end. It is this lyric death drive, I contend, that incites the critical desire to master her poems, whether by constructing a particular temporality for them or arguing for the primacy of their materiality. The poems themselves espouse a strategy of letting go, indicative of the nonteleological death drive that reaches down and down without extinguishing itself. By reading Dickinson alongside theories of the death drive, I provide an account for her poetics of disinclination both formally and, considering the critical turn towards manuscripts and fascicles as a reading practice, materially. I consider Dickinson’s radical poetics as a way of leaving a remainder without an intention for the future.