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In this paper, I shall try to shed light on some aspects of the psychologies of the poet and the poetic process, especially as it concerns Emily Dickinson and her use of language and imagery. I will also speculate about what was “wrong” and what was “right” with Dickinson, herself.
As with certain artists, Dickinson's poetic images and themes and her “lived life” were inextricably interwoven and, at times, isomorphically interconnected. The extent of this parallel phenomenon varies from artist to artist; to some degree it is probably present in all (the dramatic examples of Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, Yukio Mishima, Virginia Woolf, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery come to mind). Perhaps this interconnection can be understood in psychoanalytic terms.
My general understanding of Emily Dickinson as poet and person is greatly informed by the views of D. W. Winnicott (1951) and his interweaving developmental lines of the individual's formation of object relations and the capacity to create meaningful, affective symbols. It was Ruth Miller (1978), a Dickinson scholar, who first suggested that Dickinson's 1775 poems, her “letter to the world” (as the poet put it), functioned as transitional bridges to humanity. Whereas Dickinson's immediate reaching out toward her contemporaries for the most part failed, her conscious and unconscious grasping for literary as well as spiritual immortality succeeded, transcendently.
To aid our general understanding, the psychoanalytic concept of transitional language (Weich, 1978) will be used. Transitional