Dickinson's Embodied Eyeball: Transcendentalism and the Scope of Vision

Dickinson's private, embodied treatment of poetic "vision" challenges other contemporary characterizations of the figural link between eyesight and poetry at a time when rhetorical connections among the material American continent, vision, and poetry were fundamental components of the nation's burgeoning literary discourse. Her poems that focus on vision and visual metaphors assert a disjunction between the insular vision of lyric poetry and the poetic vision endorsed by writers like Emerson who equated poetry with public meaning and place. An examination of this disjunction in four poems reveals in particular Dickinson's critique of the grammar and metaphors associated with vision in Emerson's Transcendentalist account of nature.