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The purpose of this thesis is to show upon what aspects of nature Emily Dickinson's poems touch, to what extent and in what manner she uses nature terms in expressing her philosophy of life, what ideas she expresses through these terms, and finally what her own philosophy of nature is.

Emily Dickinson's use of water as a dominant poetic trope differs from typical religious archetypal associations with baptism, cleansing, and rebirth. Dickinson transforms rather than recapitulates established theological concepts, borrowing and adapting Biblical themes to suit her artistic purposes. Dickinson's water poems are the poet's means of initiating a discourse with God. Dickinson's poems, however, portray the poet's seeking communion and finding only a silent response to her attempts to initiate an exchange with God. Unable to find requital to her needs for discourse, Dickinson uses Biblical imagery to vindicate ultimately abandoning the orthodox tenets of Calvinism. Resenting the unresponsiveness of God, particularly if the solitude she experiences has been imposed through His will rather than her own, Dickinson poetically reverses roles with God to establish her autonomy, looking instead to the reader of her poetry to requite her need for discourse. And as interaction is seen as a need that Dickinson must have realized, poetry may then be understood as the poet's invitation of the reader into the discourse she finds lacking in God. Refuting Calvinist doctrines allows the poet to validate her autonomy as well. Instead of following a course of life prescribed by God, Dickinson demonstrates her resistance to suppliance through water. Dickinson refuses to follow God's guidance unquestioningly because merely being part of a collective who follow an indifferent god provides no lasting distinction for a poet seeking immortality. Having broken the union with God and established her god-like identity as a poet, Dickinson turns to the similar use of Biblical language in her poetry to establish the communion with her reader that she finds lacking in her relationship with God. Dickinson then strengthens this bond with the reader by asserting that divinity is present in every individual not suppressed by the restraining presence of God.

Emily Dickinson's seclusion is explored in light of her family's strange entanglement with the Todds. Austin Dickinson's affair with Mabel Loomis Todd, and the effect on the lives of Susan Dickinson, Lavinia Dickinson, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, David Todd, and Millicent Todd Bingham, provide a steamy context for the posthumous publication of Emily Dickinson's poetry. The screenplay includes original music (inspired by the dashes and an old hymn) for two poems: "Wild Nightsl Wild Nights!" and "Better - than Music!" Also included are visualizations of many of Dickinson's images, including "circumference," "Eden," "the bee," and "immortality."

In this study the author compares the broad outlines of Blake's and Dickinson's thought, pointing out evidence of decisive Biblical influence not only on the content of their thought but on their attitude toward language as well. the author argues that both poets assumed the philosophical position of Job as they interpreted the Bible independently and as they explored many dimensions of experience in the fallen world. The author represents their thought not as a fixed system but as a faith-based pattern of Christian/Platonic questing for truth.

Historically, women have not been "speaking subjects" but "spoken objects" in Western culture--the ground on which male-dominated constructions have been erected. In literature, women have been conventionally held as the silent and silenced other. Lyric poetry especially has idealized not only the entrenched figures of masculine subject/feminine object, but poetry itself as the site of prophecy, vision, Truth. Most dramatically in lyric poetry then, the issue of women as subjects has been collapsed into Woman as object, that figure who has been the sacrifice necessary for the production of lyric "song" and the consolidation of the unified masculine voice. It has thus been difficult for women poets to take up the position of speaking subject, most particularly because of women's problematic relationship to Woman. Recent feminist theorists have explored female subjectivity, how women put into hegemonic discourse "a possible operation of the feminine." This dissertation analyzes that possibility in poetry as exemplified in the works of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and H.D. I contend that these paradigmatic American poets constitute speaking subjects in their poetry that both figure Woman conventionally and reconfigure it, i.e. subvert the stability of those representations, thereby disturbing our view. I argue that this double identification produces, in effect, a divided or split subjectivity that is enabling for the female speaker. As an alternative to the traditionally specularized figure of Woman then, such a position opens up distinctly counter-hegemonic spaces in which to constitute the female subject, rendering problematic readerly consumption of the image of Woman as a totality. I explore the attempts to represent women's difference differently--the tenuous accession to, rejection of, or play with the lyric "I" in these poets' works. Dickinson, Moore, and H.D. reconfigure Woman and inscribe female speakers as grammatically and rhetorically, but not necessarily visually, present, thereby frustrating patriarchal economies of mastery and possession.

This dissertation engages in a critical analysis of the poetry of Emily Dickinson which, to me, suggests that the poet suffered from a type of manic-depression known specifically in psychiatric parlance as bipolar disorder. I argue that although Dickinson experienced much pain and suffering she learnt, through time, to address, understand and contain adversity - that ultimately, she transformed these experiences into the raw materials for poetic creation. Dickinson's poetic achievements are often obscured by a misunderstanding of her mental and emotional constitution. This thesis provides an alternative to the views of those commentators who maintain that Emily Dickinson was insane, neurotic or delusional. I intend, ultimately, to offer the reader a fresh insight into Emily Dickinson's poetry by reading it from the assumption that she suffered from bipolar disorder. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

This dissertation works against the longstanding literary critical premise that aesthetics and ethics are at odds. I challenge this notion by foregrounding the verse of four nineteenth-century-born and Northeastern-based poets who unapologetically prioritize aesthetic perception and experience in their writing. These poets—Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Emily Dickinson, Olivia Ward Bush, and William Stanley Braithwaite—were well aware of the criticism politicians, social reformers, educators, business proponents, and even other writers leveled against the functional and ethical utility of poetry in an era when transatlantic industrial revolutions and innovations in manufacturing and transportation technology contributed to a national ethos that celebrated progress and productivity in the most concrete terms. These developments, coupled with moral and political divisions over slavery and the economic and psychic strain of a nationwide war that brought life’s precariousness into relief, spurred citizens to contemplate their sense of purpose in contexts ranging from the vocational to the existential. Writers and poets in particular faced continual pressures to defend the practical value of their work. What makes the four poets in this dissertation unparalleled, I suggest, is the way they challenge readers to revise and expand their understanding of the aesthetic by devoting poetic attention to unsettling and unsightly products and processes in the natural world. Moldering plant matter, heaps of manure, broom-ravaged spiderwebs, and fragments of driftwood; the kinds of waste and remains normally deemed indecorous for nineteenth-century verse become vibrant and arresting in the work of these poets. Yet while each poet approaches humble and neglected phenomena as worthy of aesthetic treatment, they do so without idealizing the unpalatable and disregarded subjects they portray in verse. The attention they devote to the abject—a witnessing they extrapolate from literal to human nature—is, as I show over the course of this dissertation, an ethical and political act. In addition to upholding the unsettling and unglamorous qualities of the natural subjects they honor, these poets also abstain from sentimentalizing the elements of lived experience that inform their writing, and refuse to downplay the often demanding process of poetic composition itself. While this dissertation’s insistence on regarding aspects of nature that nineteenth-century poetry has traditionally neglected is, in part, an ecocritical intervention, my project is also a call to dignify the artistic labors that reframe overlooked natural phenomena as worthy of aesthetic attention. To portray writing as work is to regard the craft as just as substantial and legitimate a pursuit as occupations whose effects are more straightforwardly measurable in practical terms. Indeed, each poet in this dissertation insists upon depicting poetic making as a labor that requires the same dexterity as the construction of an architectural structure and that has as dramatic and far-reaching effects as military and legislative developments. Far from posing an escapist diversion from the social and civic realities of their day, I argue, these poets frame aesthetic creation and experience as fundamental to human nature, especially during wartime and periods of political upheaval.

This dissertation centers around the impact that geology and its ideas had on nineteenth writers just as it was defining itself from other natural sciences. Geological questions about how rocks and dirt were formed, where they came from, and what kinds of forces act on them are at the heart of the texts I engage here: the writings of Orra White Hitchcock in her travel journals, Emily Dickinson, Edmund Ruffin, and Charles W. Chesnutt; along with the stories told about spirits who inhabit bodies of water in South Carolina, and the illustrations and paintings of Orra Hitchcock. The central concept that the dissertation explores is geopoetics: the modelling of literary and artistic form on geologic processes. In its formal strategies, geopoetic writing aims to establish relationships, explicitly or implicitly, between many changing conditions and across many different temporal moments, all at once. As geologists and average people alike struggled to understand the place of the human in developing theories of how the planet was formed and reformed, the writers I engage here used these theories in their own texts as models for thinking about a series of relationships, both between persons and between humans and the nonhuman world. Though informed by geological research and ideas, geopoetics are not the static transposition of geology’s theories onto the texts I engage with here. Instead, these texts are the means by which their writers explore geologic ideas and the longue dureé natural processes that shape them. Geopoetics occur when an author’s writing strategy recalls the connections between natural and human-made networks in its form, by creating an interplay of literary or poetic structure and geologic imagery. What I mean by this is that the majority of these texts don’t simply feature allusions to geologic features, but, as I show, fundamentally engage with understandings of geological processes in their formal composition. If a volcano in a Dickinson poem, for example, is the vehicle of a metaphor, the volcano doesn’t simply take on the meanings which the metaphor aims to convey. It also causes Dickinson to write in ways that are particularly volcanic – through expansive, oozing analogies that ingest the external world. Hitchcock, Ruffin and Chesnutt, along with believers in bisimbi all make use of the ecosystemic layers that are embodied by rock formations in their writings. For Chesnutt, this looks like the gradual accumulation of conjure stories in his imagination which, though heard when he was a child, come back to retell their stories in his writing as though they had possessed him. In his narratives, conjure stays imbedded in locations throughout his landscapes, catching characters off-guard and radically changing them, sometimes with no clear origin point or conjurer to attribute the spells to. As the above paragraph suggests, Chesnutt, Dickinson, Hitchcock, Ruffin, and tellers of simbi stories each have specific geopoetic strategies with which they explore geologic theories. Subsequently, they each create the interplay of geologic allusion and literary form I describe above in their own, particular ways.