NOT IN VAIN

Emily Dickinson Journal, 2005

Emily Dickinson and Philosophy (ed. Elisabeth Camp), 2021

The goal of this paper is to reconcile two competing camps of thinking regarding Dickinson’s poetry. According to the first camp, the form and content of her poems cannot be pulled apart. What she says is tightly bound up with how she says it. According to the second camp, we can paraphrase her poems; we can say what they say in other words. To resolve the tension between these views, I defend the following two claims. First, we tend to ask too much of paraphrases. We wrongly demand they reproduce everything contained in the original poem. Second, poets and critics are engaged in different kinds of activities. These activities are governed by different norms. In particular, form and content must be tied together for a poet such as Dickinson but not for a critic intent on a paraphrase.

Literary Imagination, 2013

2016

An article prepared at the request of Kang Yanbin for the Jinan Journal of Foreign Languages.