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Poetic Antagonyms

Poetic Antagonyms DaviD- aNToiNe williamS Bruised are our words and our full thought Breaks like dull rain from some rich cloud. Isaac Rosenberg My subject is lexical self-opposition in English poetry. I approach it at a time of aggravated national self-opposition, from the viewpoint of a poet who had separated herself from the common life of her society, but like her I am concerned less with passing, outward antagonisms and more with an enduring, inward antagonism. In early 1864, Emily Dickinson wrote a poem (Fr867B) about the experience of holding together a series of thoughts that seem both to resist each other and rebel against the thinker: I felt a Cleaving in my Mind As if my Brain had split I tried to match it - Seam by Seam But could not make them fit The thought behind, I strove to join Unto the thought before But Sequence ravelled out of Sound Like Balls - upon a Floor - (Fr867B) There are many ways of discussing the tropes of division in this remarkable poem about a mind divided against itself. Dickinson's distinctive dash, for instance, here performs most ambivalently (and so most fully) its dual role as joiner and divider, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Comparatist University of North Carolina Press

Poetic Antagonyms

Williams, David-Antoine
The Comparatist , Volume 37 (1) – May 12, 2013
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © Southern Comparative Literature Association.
ISSN
1559-0887
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Abstract

DaviD- aNToiNe williamS Bruised are our words and our full thought Breaks like dull rain from some rich cloud. Isaac Rosenberg My subject is lexical self-opposition in English poetry. I approach it at a time of aggravated national self-opposition, from the viewpoint of a poet who had separated herself from the common life of her society, but like her I am concerned less with passing, outward antagonisms and more with an enduring, inward antagonism. In early 1864, Emily Dickinson wrote a poem (Fr867B) about the experience of holding together a series of thoughts that seem both to resist each other and rebel against the thinker: I felt a Cleaving in my Mind As if my Brain had split I tried to match it - Seam by Seam But could not make them fit The thought behind, I strove to join Unto the thought before But Sequence ravelled out of Sound Like Balls - upon a Floor - (Fr867B) There are many ways of discussing the tropes of division in this remarkable poem about a mind divided against itself. Dickinson's distinctive dash, for instance, here performs most ambivalently (and so most fully) its dual role as joiner and divider,

Journal

The Comparatist – University of North Carolina Press

Published: May 12, 2013

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