Postscript

This work is not complete. Above, a method of close, receptive, and attentive observation and a description of such observation has been applied, in following changes over the years in Dickinson's use of linguistic structures and, within these, also single words. This method has substantial roots in Coleridge: what he described as “steady meditation on the facts vitally present and distinctly felt”, leading to “the conveyal of Knowledge by words” which “is in direct proportion to the stores and faculties of Observation (internal or external) of the person, who hears or reads them”;153 then in William Empson and I. A. Richards, in the field of literature. Certainly such a method has had wider resonance than only in this field. It finds congruent, progressive formulation, for example, in Donald Meltzer's description regarding psychoanalysis, which could equally well regard poetry:

there can be little doubt … the foundation of truthfulness [as a mental function] resides in the quality of observation … [Now a Model of the Mind—as opposed to a theory] of course … has

153. Notebooks, III, 3948; 4309, respectively.

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no explanatory power because in psychoanalysis we are working in a non-causal system, where events are factors in a field and everything is symbolic of meaning, metaphorical. For this reason it is essential that models be used for discovery and not as rules or guides to action. … [It] is essential that it be done by individuals who can think for themselves. This means loneliness, uncertainty, and an inescapable sense of incipient persecution by the group. … [But it] is not possible to make observations and find a language for transformations without there being a Model of the World in the back of the mind. The process of discovery of new phenomena is completely dependent on the explicit and conscious use of a model, in order to recognize the emergence into one's awareness of phenomena which cannot be described by the existing model. The evolution of the science [I ad