The Implicit Intimacy of Dickinsons Dashes Essay -- Emily Dickinson a

The Implicit Intimacy of Dickinsons DashesThe dash in Emily Dickinsons poetry, initially edited away as a distinction of incompletion, has since come to be seen as crucial to the impact of her poems. Critics have examined the dash from a myriad of angles, viewing it as a rhetorical notation for oral exam performance, a technique for recreating the rhythm of a telegraph, or a subtraction sign in an underlying mathematical system.1 However, attempting to define Dickinsons ends with the dash is distinctly speculative given her varied dash-usage in fact, one scholar illustrated the fallibility of one dash-interpretation by applying it to one of Dickinsons handwritten cake recipes (Franklin 120). Instead, I begin with the premiss that text as an entity involving both the adaptation and writing of the material implies a readers attempt to recreate the act of writing as salubrious as the writers attempt to guide the act of reading. I will focus on the former, given the difficulties s urrounding the notion of authorial intention a.k.a. the Death of the Author. Using three familiar Dickinson poemsThe Brainis wider than the Sky, The Soul selects her own Society, and This was a PoetIt is that,I contend that readers can penetrate the double mystery of Emily Dickinsons reclusive life and lyrically dense poetry by enjoying a sense of engagement not dependent upon the content of her poems. The source of this intimacy lies in her remarkable punctuation. Dickinsons unconventionally-positioned dashes form disjunctures and connections in the readers understanding that create the impression of following Dickinson through the creative process towards intimacy with the poet herself.This understood intimacy becomes clear ... ...ickinsons highly personal notations. Ironically, what at first seems an idiosyncratic stylistic effect operates to create a deep sense of intimacy between the reader and the creative process of a highly reclusive individual. Far from distancing the re ader, the dash actually provides a gateway between the act of reading and the poets moment of creation, only possible if we view the text as a shifting co-creation of reader and poet. Works CitedEdith Wylder, The Last Face Emily Dickinsons Manuscripts (Albuquerque University of New Mexico Press, 1971).Jerusha dormitory room McCormack, Domesticating Delphi Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph, American Quarterly 55.4 (2003) 569-601.Michael Theune, One and One are Oneand Two An Inquiry into Dickinsons Use of Mathematical Signs, The Emily Dickinson Journal 10.1 (2001) 99-116.