Figure of Speech

An expressive, nonliteral use of language. Figures of speech include tropes (such as hyperbole, irony, metaphor, and simile) and schemes (anything involving the ordering and organizing of words—anaphora, antithesis, and chiasmus, for example). Browse all terms related to figures of speech.

The theorists I have mentioned are not only close readers, but are sensitive to questions of literary form. And this is where they differ from most students today.

Emily Dickinson

“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way” (L 473–4, no. 342a). This visceral, concrete, and highly personal definition of poetry is the most fitting way to view Dickinson’s own work. Whether a poem is true “poetry” does not depend for Dickinson on its use of meter, rhyme, stanzas, or line length, but on the almost physical sensation created in the reader by the poem’s words, the arctic chill in the marrow of the bones or the stunning blow to the mind that the reader experiences in the act of reading.

Her letters and poems provide fresh ways to investigate and understand the emotional, intellectual, and psy- chological nature of humanity.

Poetry enabled Dickinson to achieve an equilibrium between personal auton- omy and emotional dependence. Her comprehensive vision and her com- mitment to “circumference,” or the inner and outer experiences that drive the individual, allowed her to accept and celebrate life despite its dualistic inevitabilities of grief and joy, despair and hope. Dickinson sought connecting patterns in life rather than metaphysical explanations. Less concerned with what should be than with what was, she focused her energy on the concrete details of the present moment. Through her writing, Dickinson expresses anxiety about the uncertainty of life while paradoxically stressing the value and profound importance of life’s journey. Her moral and artistic vision was essentially holistic, generative, and comprehensive rather than linear, compart- mentalized, and categorical. Dualism,

contradiction, and oxymoron all played critical roles in Dickinson’s life and works. Rejecting the male-centered Victo- rian worldview that divided flesh and spirit and seeking to explain away life’s contradictions, Emily Dickinson fostered a more feminine vision of the world. “Instead of willful individualism and an effort to transcend the temporal world, Dickinson evolved a nurturing vision based on a cyclical flux of interconnected life forms.”1 Dickinson rejected standard dualisms that divided the world into flesh and spirit, saved and damned, mortal and immortal. She represents Emer- son’s “transparent eyeball” – that is, someone who embodies life’s fullness and complexity with complete objectivity – and acts as a guide to reveal the world in its harmoniously disparate fullness.

Robert Frost

At first a shy performer, Frost became a charming reader of his own work. The sound of a poem was so important to him that he insisted on “saying” a poem, never “reading” it. Each performance could become a slightly new interpretation. He was also a masterful talker, and he cultivated a brilliant way of sounding off-handed while being incisive and profound. For many, Frost the figure of the genial farmer-poet and prophet of American individualism became one of the great acts of American literary culture; the real Frost was a far more elusive shapeshifter and trickster, a learned and trenchant intellect with a sometimes terrifyingly bleak vision of human existence.