Figure of Speech

An expressive, nonliteral use of language. Figures of speech

include tropes (such as hyperbole, irony, metaphor, and
simile) and schemes (anything involving the ordering and
organizing of wordsanaphora, antithesis, and chiasmus, for
example). Browse all terms related to figures of speech.

The theorists I have mentioned are not only close readers, but are
sensitive to questions of literary form. And this is where they differ
from most students today.


Emily Dickinson

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me
I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I
know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way (L
4734, no. 342a). This visceral, concrete, and highly personal definition of poetry
is the most fitting way to view Dickinsons own work. Whether a poem is true
poetry does not depend for Dickinson on its use of meter, rhyme, stanzas, or line
length, but on the almost physical sensation created in the reader by the poems
words, the arctic chill in the marrow of the bones or the stunning blow to the mind
that the reader experiences in the act of reading.
Her letters and poems provide fresh ways to investigate and understand the
emotional, intellectual, and psy- chological nature of humanity.
Poetry enabled Dickinson to achieve an equilibrium between personal auton- omy
and emotional dependence. Her comprehensive vision and her com- mitment to
circumference, or the inner and outer experiences that drive the individual,
allowed her to accept and celebrate life despite its dualistic inevitabilities of grief
and joy, despair and hope. Dickinson sought connecting patterns in life rather than
metaphysical explanations. Less concerned with what should be than with what
was, she focused her energy on the concrete details of the present moment.
Through her writing, Dickinson expresses anxiety about the uncertainty of life
while paradoxically stressing the value and profound importance of lifes journey.
Her moral and artistic vision was essentially holistic, generative, and
comprehensive rather than linear, compart- mentalized, and categorical. Dualism,
contradiction, and oxymoron all played critical roles in Dickinsons life and
works. Rejecting the male-centered Victo- rian worldview that divided flesh and
spirit and seeking to explain away lifes contradictions, Emily Dickinson fostered
a more feminine vision of the world. Instead of willful individualism and an
effort to transcend the temporal world, Dickinson evolved a nurturing vision based
on a cyclical flux of interconnected life forms.
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Dickinson rejected standard
dualisms that divided the world into flesh and spirit, saved and damned, mortal
and immortal. She represents Emer- sons transparent eyeball that is, someone
who embodies lifes fullness and complexity with complete objectivity and acts
as a guide to reveal the world in its harmoniously disparate fullness.
Robert Frost

At first a shy performer, Frost became a charming reader of his own work. The
sound of a poem was so important to him that he insisted on saying a poem,
never reading it. Each performance could become a slightly new interpretation.
He was also a masterful talker, and he cultivated a brilliant way of sounding off-
handed while being incisive and profound. For many, Frost the figure of the genial
farmer-poet and prophet of American individualism became one of the great acts
of American literary culture; the real Frost was a far more elusive shapeshifter and
trickster, a learned and trenchant intellect with a sometimes terrifyingly bleak
vision of human existence.