Gary Stonum

Emily Dickinson's poetry is deeply philosophical. Recognizing that conventional language limited her thought and writing, Dickinson created new poetic forms to pursue the moral and intellectual issues that mattered most to her. This collection situates Dickinson within the rapidly evolving intellectual culture of her time and explores the degree to which her groundbreaking poetry anticipated trends in twentieth-century thought. Essays aim to clarify the ideas at stake in Dickinson's poems by reading them in the context of one or more relevant philosophers, including near-contemporaries such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Hegel, and later philosophers whose methods are implied in her poetry, including Levinas, Sartre and Heidegger. The Dickinson who emerges is a curious, open-minded interpreter of how human beings make sense of the world - one for whom poetry is a component of a lifelong philosophical project.

Lists place names, mostly in former British colonies, derived from place names in Great Britain or from personal English names. The entries indentify the source, and recount what is known of who chose the name, when, and why. Appendixes list the names by type of source (place name, royal name, founder, etc.) and illustrate the naming process with entries from the ships log of Frederick Jackson's Arctic explorations, 1894-97. Stonum (English, Case Western Reserve U.) presents readings of key poems, analyzes the origins and implications of Dickinson's idiosyncratic style, and generalizes about her aesthetics within the context of romantic theories of the sublime. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.