Notes
Notes Introduction 1. All Dickinson citations are from R. W. Franklin’s variorum edition, with poem numbers cited parenthetically. I include variants after the quotations from her poems, and I retain Dickinson’s idiosyncratic spelling of “it’s” for its and of “opon” for upon. 2. The “Heaven” has been read variously as sunset, the northern lights, or some other extravagant natural scene, or as a spiritual epiphany or, more acerbically, as an evangelical tent revival. More interesting, though, is the fact that the poem does not name its subject. 3. Here and throughout the book, I use tenor to refer to the thing meant, or the metaphor’s main subject, and vehicle to refer to the metaphorical object, or the thing that carries or embodies the tenor. These terms are used most famously by I. A. Richards in his 1936 book The Philosophy of Rhetoric. In the ensuing decades, critics have in many ways complicated the notion of metaphor that Richards attached to his reintroduction of these terms. I find them useful here as a way to name each of the two parts of a metaphor, not as a way to espouse a particular theory of metaphor or of how tenor and vehicle relate to one another. Indeed, each author I examine redefines the nature of the relationship between tenor and vehicle, and these complex redefinitions of the tenor-vehicle relationship by authors themselves are precisely the subjects of the book’s chapters. 4. Classic studies of the American visionary or seer include Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self and The American Jeremiad; Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation; Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation; and Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence. See also Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land; Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye; and Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being. Other thematic studies of vision include Christopher Collins, The Uses of Observation; Michael T. Gilmore, Surface and Depth; and Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Visionary Poetry. 5. Of course, many of the transcendentalists’ Victorian contemporaries in England were simultaneously turning from the imagination toward perception as they 182 Notes to Pages 7–10 became invested in modes of literary realism. So, on the one hand, it seems insufficient to say that American romanticism hinges on Emerson’s vital shift from a European figure since arguably everyone was turning away from the inward imagination and toward an outward-facing vision. On the other hand, neither is it sufficient to say that antebellum American writers, like Victorian writers, pivot toward vision, for while the Victorians of the 1840s and 1850s turned at once from imagination and romanticism toward vision and realism, American writers during the same decades embraced figures of vision rather than the creative imagination while still embracing the other primary concerns of romanticism—particularly its heightened emphasis on subjective faculties and on bridging the gap between subject and object. This study takes as its starting point the effects of the unique confluence of romanticism and an outward-facing vision in antebellum American literature. 6. This is not to dismiss the usefulness of accounts of vision from Bercovitch, Jehlen, and so forth, which have been fundamental to our understanding of the ideological problems running through canonized texts—and are, in fact, fundamental to my own thinking about the stubborn explanatory power of the transparent eyeball and other foundational texts that are so provocative for writers throughout the century. 7. See Elisa New’s The Line’s Eye and Joan Richardson’s A Natural History of Pragmatism (as well as James E. von der Heydt’s At the Brink of Infinity, which finds a distinctly nonpragmatic lineage of writers gazing somewhat helplessly at boundlessness ). My argument aims to supplement rather than to displace their important work—to situate their focus on various forms of experiential perception within a larger field of literary visions. 8. Miles of Stare joins recent studies by scholars such as Thomas M. Allen and Robert S. Levine, who have offered similarly disjunctive, heterogeneous accounts of nineteenth-century American literature and nationhood. Allen’s A Republic in Time argues that while temporality was a central construct for imagining American national identity, it functioned not as a homogenous container for an “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson has argued; rather, it was precisely the conflicts among disparate ways of thinking about time that constituted that identity. Levine argues in Dislocating Race and Nation that while many writers share a concern with the relationship between race and literary nationalism...
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