Title: The art within the soul
Description: As an abiding theme, space of questions, and provocation to speech, soul occupies a central, if highly ambiguous, role in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. This dissertation is a response to the inadequacy of the various glosses that have been proposed or merely assumed for the word, and an attempt to refocus critical attention upon the poet's relentless quest for concentrated acts of expressive speech that capture with the greatest intensity and vividness the paradoxes of thought and feeling she finds residing at the core of being she calls her soul. Soul is Dickinson's preferred name for the aspect of the self that both reads and writes poetry, and is thus intimately linked to Dickinson's poetic practice and to her sense of vocation as a poet. Moreover, given the soul's association with futurity and its provision of a notional perspective from which experiences may be evaluated sub specie aeternitatis, the soul is the primary concept Dickinson uses to pass judgment upon the world and the self. Insofar as religion itself is held to the standards of the soul and found wanting, however, the poet is brought to question the origins, and thus the very existence, of what is for her indispensable. Her poetry of the soul thereby anticipates and clarifies a major trend in modern poetry and thought, in which a perceived cultural lack provokes a creative effort at remediation.

As the agent and scene of inner being, the soul plays a crucial role in Dickinson's poetry of exultation and despair, at once buttressing her sense of creative autonomy as well as questioning, more subtly, the narrative unity of an individual life. The poet's obsession with the limits of experience and language culminates in the expressive soul's confrontation with the unknowable silence of death: for Dickinson, it is the soul that feels most keenly the agony and terror of human finitude and aspires at the same time to transcend this final limitation, at once cognitive, epistemological, expressive and existential, by hailing it as an incomparable good, by calling it "best."