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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.
Emily Dickinson's America was heavily influenced by the romantic idealization of inner vision and the consequent capacity of poets to discover human significance and national meaning in the natural landscape. While conceptually such "inner vision" is a mode of imaginative thought frequently deployed as a transcendent supplement or contrast to the limits of the material senses, metaphorically it employs as its central figure the very limited, physical process of "vision" that it claims to transcend. For many of Dickinson's contemporaries, this metaphor relies on constructions of sight that in fact disembody the human perceiver while personifying the perceived world, evidenced most strikingly, and most influentially, in Emerson's Transcendentalist account of nature. Dickinson challenges the conceptual and rhetorical integrity of such visual metaphors in a number of her poems by approaching the idealization of insight through the grammar and poetic language conventionally used to articulate it.1 These poems employ figures for privacy and limitation that question the confidence and publicity of metaphors for transparent vision, posing private, physical perception as a challenge to these cultural metaphors at a time when poetry was valorized for its public role in "discovering" and representing the nation's geography and democracy.
Emerson and Walt Whitman celebrated the individual poet's special capacity to serve as America's "eyesight" (Whitman 444), aligning the poetic and even physical vision of the artist with national ambitions for meaning and the formation of an American literature. Emerson, for instance, proclaimed that "America is a poem in our eyes" ("Poet" 331), and Whitman, seer and visionary, deemed America "the greatest poem" (439). These rhetorical connections among the material continent, vision, and poetry...