A cognitive rhetoric of poetry and Emily Dickinson

Abstract

In this article, I examine three poems by Emily Dickinson. The poems are F372, ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’, F598, ‘The Brain - is wider than the Sky’, and F1381, ‘The Heart is the Capital of the Mind,’ from the Franklin edition. In particular, I study the figurative language in these poems, but rather than simply identify figures, I attempt to explain how they function persuasively in cognitive terms. This approach is meant to move rhetorical criticism beyond an exercise in figure identification and towards an exercise in the explanation of the persuasive function of figures. The emphasis on figures owes something to the prominence they play not only in Dickinson’s poetry but in all poetry. One implication of cognitive linguistic theories of figures is that they point towards what I envisage as a cognitive rhetoric of poetry. A cognitive rhetoric of poetry ought to be grounded in classical theories of rhetoric and poetics on the one hand, and in cognitive linguistic theories of figures on the other. Such scope would reveal continuity between the concerns of current critics and the concerns of classical rhetoricians. It would also place equal emphasis on the poet’s production of figurative language and the reader’s comprehensive processing of it. What Dickinson’s poems are meant to reveal, ultimately, is poetry’s profoundly rhetorical nature.