Emily Dickinson and Her Metonymical Way of Knowing Nature

This paper is aimed at dealing with the cognitive and epistemological significance in Emily Dickinson’s use of metonymy in her poems of nature which earlier critics termed enigmatic or definitional. Based on textual analysis, the author of this paper attempts to illustrate that, as opposed to Emerson’s ideal of transcendence, Dickinson takes worldly contingency as necessary elements of her poetry and proceeds metonymically rather than metaphorically in presenting her everyday encounter with nature and her meditative observation of it. The author also holds that Dickinson’s concern about contiguity and contingency, her preference for the metonymical way of knowing, sets her apart from the Emersonian visionary tradition and implicates her perspectival stand with regard to man’s potential to know nature with language as the medium.