July 16-22, 1862: Poems on Circumference

On Choosing the Poems and Letter

Dickinson's Writing Desk
Dickinson’s Writing Desk

Scholars offer several frameworks for reading Dickinson’s notion of Circumference. Perhaps the most important is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Circles” from his Essays First Series (1841), supported by some key ideas from “The Poet,” published in Essays: Second Series (1844), both of which we are fairly certain Dickinson read. In “Circles,” Emerson describes the ancient symbol of the circle as having “no outside, no enclosing wall, no circumference.” The poet, Emerson declares, “is a sovereign, and stands on the center” (“The Poet”). He is

a self-evolving circle, which from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outward, to new and larger circles, and that without end. (“Circles”)

Echoing Romantic notions of the sublime, Emerson attributes to the poet an unlimited ability to expand, perceive, comprehend and name the world. In a word, the poet’s expanding consciousness has the potential to “transcend” the materiality of bodily existence and draw close to, even, merge with the ineffable and divine.

Some scholars read Dickinson’s use of circumference within this Emersonian framework. Albert Gelpi, for example, identifies Dickinson’s circumference with a consciousness that, unlike her Transcendental peers, embraces opposites and is not metaphysical but eminently concerned with lived reality. Still, Gelpi observes,

Circumference marks the border line between modes of existence, between being and Being, as the human presses into the absolute to enclose more and more within her frontiers. … Circumference measures and defines [Dickinson’s] capacity for personhood under God.

By contrast, Laura Gribbin argues that Dickinson’s conception of Circumference rejects Emersonian expansion, revises the patriarchal conceptions of the (male) poet’s encompassing consciousness, and resists being taken over by an outside power. It does so by calling attention to “the circle’s necessary boundary or perimeter without which it has neither shape nor meaning.” In Gribbin’s reading,

Circumference marks the borderline of symbolic and linguistic order.
This border is a highly charged point of convergence where oppositions are collapsed, boundaries are explored, and meaning originates. Circumference is also the space within a circle where life is lived, pain is felt, and death is observed.

In what amounts to a powerful critique of Romanticism, Dickinson stands not at the center but on the periphery, at the outer limits of knowledge and language, replacing, as Gribbin notes,

the Romantic impulse toward transcendence with an alternative concept of knowledge gained within the limits of experience.

Instead of the Emersonian emphasis on sight and specularity, Dickinson emphasizes touch and what can be felt. Because

Circumference delineates that region where the imagination comes into play, [it] is thus the source of poetry itself.

Eniko Bollobas emphasizes the rhetorical character of Dickinson’s Circumference, defining it as a “catachresis,” a literary trope that does not point outside of language. Instead of using “metaphorical analogies,” catachresis relies on “the positional power inherent in language” to invent and express intellectual concepts usually thought to be unrepresentable or incomprehensible. We see this in Dickinson’s tendency to use images that then point to other images, not to an unknowable referent, extending across the gaps and inadequacies of language. Bollabas goes so far as to say that Circumference itself functions as a catachresis, in the sense that Dickinson extends its dictionary meaning to encompass particular states of consciousness at the borders of language or experience that were previously unthought or unexpressed, so that Circumference

becomes … a catachresis of a catachresis.

One final, though not exhaustive, reading of Circumference. Rather than using frameworks of Transcendentalism, the sacred, mystical, or rhetorical, Paul Giles argues we might “more subtly” think of circumference in “terrestrial and geographical terms” based on a definition of circumference as circumnavigation. In his view, Dickinson refuses the Emersonian move through which the human spirit contains the world, and “probes instead its points of conjunction or intersection, where the mind is dispersed into diurnal and seasonal cycles” and mapped “in relation to a wider macro-sphere.” Giles resists the tendency of readers and critics “to reduce [Dickinson’s] fractious explorations of the possibilities and limitations of circumference” to largely a “domestic concern.” Rather, Giles seeks to preserve circumference as

something that tracks private consciousness out through the geographical “Hemisphere” into barely legible realms of the solar system.

Here are all the poems by Dickinson that mention Circumference:

  • J313, Fr283: “would have shamed / This new Circumference – have blamed –”
  • J354, Fr610: “to go / In purposeless Circumference – / As ’twere a Tropic Show”
  • J378, Fr633:  “a Ball – / Went out upon Circumference – / Beyond the Dip of Bell”
  • J515, Fr653: “– does – / Circumference be full –”
  • J533, Fr571: “a Farm / And then espied Circumference / Then overtook –”
  • J552, Fr669: “Territory – Color – / Circumference – Decay –”
  • J633, Fr601: “Cogs – stop – that’s Circumference – / The Ultimate – of”
  • J798, Fr853 of Men: “– / And now, among Circumference – / Her steady Boat be seen”
  • J802, Fr858: “Eternity – / I fear me this Circumference / Engross my Finity –”
  • J883, Fr930: “Lens / Disseminating their / Circumference”
  • J889, Fr1067: “/ Or a Circle hesitate / In Circumference / It – may jolt the Hand”
  • J943, Fr890: “Bestows a single Friend – / Circumference without Relief –”
  • J967, Fr833: “coil within / The minute Circumference / Of a single Brain –”
  • J1084, Fr1099: “was where the Presence was / Circumference”
  • J1343, Fr1297: “below / The Billows of Circumference / Were sweeping him”
  • J1620, Fr1636: “Circumference thou Bride of Awe”
  • J1663, Fr1730: “with a start / He carries a circumference / In which I have no part”

Read This Week’s Poems and Letter:

Dickinson to Higginson July 1862 (L268)

July 1862

Could you believe me-without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur- and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves- Would this do just as well?

It often alarms Father-He says Death might occur, and he has Molds of all the rest- but has no Mold of me, but I noticed the Quick wore off those things, in a few days, and forestall the dishonor-You will think no caprice of me-

You said “Dark.” I know the Butterfly-and the Lizard-and the Orchis -
Are not those your Countrymen?

I am happy to be your scholar, and will deserve the kindness, I cannot repay.

If you truly consent, I recite, now-
Will you tell me my fault, frankly as to yourself, for I had rather wince, than die. Men do not call the surgeon, to commend – the Bone, but to set it, Sir, and fracture within, is more critical. And for this, Preceptor, I shall bring you-Obedience-the Blossom from my Garden, and every gratitude I know. Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that-My Business is Circumference-An ignorance, not of Customs, but if caught with the Dawn – or the Sunset see me – Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty, Sir, if you please, it afflicts me, and I thought that instruction would take it away.
Because you have much business, beside the growth of me-you will appoint, yourself, how often I shall come-without your inconvenience. And if at any time-you regret you received me, or I prove a different fabric to that you supposed – you must banish me -

When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse-it does not mean-me-but a supposed person. You are true, about the “perfection.”

Today, makes Yesterday mean.

You spoke of Pippa Passes – I never heard anybody speak of Pippa Passes – before.
You see my posture is benighted.

To thank you, baffles me. Are you perfectly powerful? Had I a pleasure you had not, I could delight to bring it.

Your Scholar

DEA transcript: Originally in Boston Public Library (Higg 54), dated by Higginson: July 1862. Ink. Envelope addressed T. W. Higginson/Princeton/Massachusetts. Postmarked: Jul [?] I862. Courtesy of Boston Public Library. First published in Atlantic Monthly LXVIII (Oct. 1891) 447-448.

As mentioned in This Week in Biography, in this fourth letter to Higginson, the correspondents seem to have made their verbal contract in the language of “Preceptor” and “scholar,” a discourse that belies the powerful confidence of Dickinson’s momentous announcement, “My Business is Circumference –.” Scholars have taken the memorable phrase in the sentence that follows this declaration, “Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty,” to refer to Dickinson’s awareness of her differences from the norm or her lack of physical beauty, a train of thought perhaps set off by the description of herself she offers Higginson at the beginning of the letter in lieu of a portrait. But Paul Giles argues that through this allusion, Dickinson “implicitly associates this idea of circumference with a passage to the other side of the world, one epitomized by this iconic Australian animal.” This bolsters his reading of Circumference explained above, a “transnational perspective” that Dickinson uses

not as a means of expansion but as a means of compression, a way of highlighting the inherently prismatic slant presented to any given observer …

Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Robert Browning (1812-1889)

The other allusion in the letter we haven’t noted yet is to Robert Browning’s “Pippa’s Passes,” a verse drama published in 1841 and again in 1848 to more critical attention. Apparently, Higginson mentioned this piece in his previous letter and Dickinson indirectly confirms that she has read and esteems it. It is a dramatic piece in which a young, innocent silk-winding girl wanders through Asolo, Italy, attributing kindness and virtue to everyone she passes, while her song influences them to do good. In its time, it was criticized for its frank portrayals of disreputable characters and sexuality but contained this famous description of natural innocence:

The year’s at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his heaven—
All's right with the world!

The passage’s placement in the text, however, renders it ironic.

The poems Dickinson enclosed in this letter are: “Of Tribulation these are they” (F328B, J 325), which we discussed in the post on White; “Your Riches taught me poverty” (F418B, J299), which we discussed in the post on Sue; “Success is counted Sweetest” (F211D, J67), which we discussed in the first post on the Civil War; and “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” (F236C, J324), which is discussed in the post on Religion.

Sources
Giles, Paul. “‘The Earth reversed her Hemispheres’: Dickinson's Global Antipodality.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 20. 1, 2011: 1-21 11, 14.

I should have been too glad, I see (F283C, J313)

I should have been too glad,
I see –
Too lifted – for the scant
degree
Of Life's penurious Round –
My little Circuit would have
shamed
This new Circumference -
have blamed –
The homelier time behind –

I should have been too saved -
I see –
Too rescued – Fear too dim
to me
That I could spell the Prayer
I knew so perfect – yesterday –
That scalding one – Sabacthini –
Recited fluent – here –

Earth would have been too
much – I see –
And Heaven – not enough
for me –
I should have had the Joy
Without the Fear – to justify –
The Palm – without the Calvary –
So Savior – Crucify –

Defeat whets Victory – they
say –
The Reefs in Old Gethsemane
Endear the shore beyond –
'Tis Beggars – Banquets
best define –
'Tis Thirsting – vitalizes Wine –
Faith +bleats to understand –

    +faints

EDA manuscript: Originally in Poems: Packet IX, Fascicle 33-12, Houghton Library – (43a). Includes 16 poems, written in ink, dated ca. 1862. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. First published in Poems (1891), 46-47, from the fascicle copy (C), with the alternative for line 24 adopted.

Dickinson first sent this poem to her Norcross cousins around 1862, but that manuscript is lost. About a year later, she copied the poem into Fascicle 33 in the twelfth position with alternatives for two lines. It is the first poem to include the term Circumference, as far as we can tell, given the uncertainty of dating  Dickinson’s works.

Scholars have read it as a poem of bitter complaint about a great loss or disappointment with a biting tone. Each of the first three stanzas rehearses something the speaker has been forced to give up: gladness, salvation, earthly joy. Circumference appears in the first stanza on gladness and implies an elevation (“lifted”) or ennobling (“degree”) or enriching (“Penurious”) of the speaker’s “little circuit,” which from the perspective of “This new Circumference” seems “homelier” and even shameful. The poem poses circuit and Circumference as almost concentric circles in vastly different realms: circuit is the homely (poor and drab) and Circumference the electrified.

Stanza two plays on the language of religious salvation to intensify the stakes of the speaker’s “rescue” from suffering. The allusions are to Jesus’s words on the cross, “Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani? My God, my God, Why hast Thou forsaken me?” from Matthew 27:46. It a “scalding” prayer that expresses the bitterness of abandonment and prepares us for the crucifixion imagery in the next stanza.

The third stanza locates the speaker’s experience of Circumference in the earthly realm of joy without fear. The “Palm” may refer to the palm branches the crowds scattered before Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem on his way to his arrest and crucifixion on the hill at Calvary. It is unclear who or what the speaker addresses until this stanza, when she calls on her “Savior” to “Crucify.” Jesus, who is usually addressed as the savior of humankind, was himself crucified and felt abandoned by his God. Is the speaker willing to make a similar sacrifice, and if so, for whom?

The last stanza offers a Dickinsonian acceptance of, even preference for, renunciation in terms that continue to allude to Jesus’s sacrifice, the banquet/communion/seder of the Last Supper, the sacramental wine, and the Passover/paschal lamb bleating its failure to comprehend a universal order that would condemn people to such agony.

The respondent for this week, Ewa Chrusciel, adds another approach to this poem:

I wonder if the poem is a bitter complaint? It might start on a bitter note but it progresses to embracing the fact that there is no intensity of joy without intensity of suffering. That act of acceptance (with a note of renunciation—death to itself—in Biblical terms) starts with the last line of the penultimate stanza. It is in an imperative voice: “So, Saviour, crucify.” I don’t think she mourns his failure to “save” her from present misery. She addresses Under Malum, the mystery of suffering. “Faith faints to understand” because there is no explanation/justification/consolation for suffering. In other words, Christ did not come to the Earth to take the suffering away. He did not come to alleviate people from it either. He offered people companionship and friendship, instead. I do think this poem is a profound reflection on faith and in the end faith fails to understand the Mystery. This line from Andrei Trakovsky’s film, Andrei Rublev expresses it:

You know it well: you can’t manage a thing; you’re tired; you can’t go on. And all at once you meet the gaze of someone in the crowd – a human gaze – and it’s as if you had drawn near to a hidden god. And everything suddenly becomes simpler.

Could it be that when the speaker addresses Christ: “So, Saviour, crucify,” s/he accepts that companionship? Or, s/he offers her/his companionship to Christ?

Perhaps, just like the final line of the poem, “Faith faints to understand,” my words fail to express what I intuit/what my gut tells me. Because these things are not to be understood, just like nobody understands why we can’t have perpetual joy in life without Calvary.

And re: the final note of the poem. I intuit a positive, victorious tone here.
Perhaps music can be of service. Listen to Dvorak “Stabat Mater” and to David Lang’s “Little Match Girl – Passion” (after H.C. Andersen, H.P. Paull, Picander and Saint Matthew).

Both pieces are about Passion—Calvary—Pain. Dvorak’s piece focuses on but does not end on the note of death only, however. Lang’s piece ends with the notes, “Rest Soft” (even though in Andersen’s story, the girl does not die … it is suggested she reunites with her grandmother—the only person who loved her).

Like Dvorak’s piece, Dickinson ends somewhere else than she has begun—not on a bitter or mournful note.

When Bells stop ringing (F601A, J633)

When Bells stop ringing -
Church – begins –
The Positive – of Bells –
When Cogs – stop – that's
Circumference –
The Ultimate – of Wheels –

EDA manuscript: Originally in Amherst Manuscript Fascicle 26-13 (a84-7/8), summer 1863. Courtesy of Amherst College, Amherst, MA. First published in Bolts of Melody (1945), 279, with the alternative not adopted.

Dickinson copied this single quatrain of common meter into Fascicle 26 in the 13th position around summer 1863, though Johnson dates it to 1862.

The poem offers an analogy: bells stopping their ringing to announce the beginning of church service compared to “cogs,” defined in Dickinson’s Webster’s as “The tooth of a wheel, by which it drives another wheel or body,” stopping to allow Circumference to begin. Thus, “Circumference” for Dickinson is analogous to “Church” for believers, like those in her family, who, she told Higginson in her second letter to him, “address an Eclipse, every morning – whom they call their ‘Father’” (L261). For belief, Dickinson, then, does not address an “Eclipse,” or something that obscures the light, but something she describes as “The Ultimate of Wheels.”

The wheel is an ancient symbol that appears in many cultures and gives us insight into Dickinson’s beliefs. According to Federico Gonzalez:

it is the symbolic expression of expansion and concentration—of centrifugal energy, which moves from the center to the periphery, and of centripetal energy, which returns to it center, axis, or font and source, to extend itself once more, following a universal law obeyed by the tides of the sea (ebb and flow) and the earth (condensation, expansion)—like the diastole and systole, the inhaling and exhaling, of the human being or the universe, that is, of the microcosmic as of the macrocosmic.

A wheel is round, like Circumference, a circle with spokes. It encompasses opposites: the turning of wheels implies endless repetition, but also travel and transit—wheels on wagons and carriages take you places. Emerson invokes wheels in the sentence after his definition of “the life of man” as “a self-evolving circle,” quoted in the Introduction to the poems:

The extent to which this generation of circles, wheels without wheels, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.

The Buddhist Wheel of Life
The Buddhist Wheel of Life

In Buddhist thought and art, the wheel is an important symbol, representing the teaching of Buddha about spiritual change:

The eight spokes of the wheel symbolize the Noble Eightfold Path set out by the Buddha in his teachings. The wheel also represents the endless cycle of samsara, or rebirth, which can only be escaped by means of the Buddha’s teachings. And some Buddhists regard the wheel’s three basic parts as symbols of the “three trainings” in Buddhist practice: The hub symbolizes moral discipline, which stabilizes the mind. The spokes (usually there are eight) represent wisdom which is applied to defeat ignorance. The rim represents training in concentration, which holds everything else together.

Dickinson uses the word “cogs” in one other poem that sheds light on its meaning as an image of the impoverished and repetitive passage of time, opposed to the “deep joy” of Circumference, that is a necessary part of “that revolving reason” whose “belt” or boundary keeps us sane. The poem is undated. Its manuscript was lost, transcribed by Mabel Todd:

Did life's penurious length
Italicize its sweetness,
The men that daily live
Would stand so deep in joy
That it would clog the cogs
Of that revolving reason
Whose esoteric belt
Protects our sanity. (F1751A, J1717)

Sources

Hallen, Cynthia, ed. Emily Dickinson Lexicon. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 2007.

One Light Many Windows. 2010.

Gonzalez, Federico. The Wheel: Symbolic Image of the Cosmos. La Rueda: Una Imagen Simbólica del Cosmos (Barcelona: Symbolos, 1986). Translator: Dr. Robert R. Barr. Ch. 2.

From Cocoon forth a butterfly (F610, J354)

From Cocoon forth a Butterfly
As Lady from her Door
Emerged – a Summer Afternoon –
Repairing Everywhere –

Without Design – that
I could trace
Except to stray abroad
On miscellaneous Enterprise
The Clovers – understood –

Her pretty Parasol be seen
Contracting in a Field
Where Men made Hay –
Then struggling hard
With an opposing Cloud –

Where Parties – Phantom as Herself –
To Nowhere – seemed to go
In purposeless Circumference –
As 'twere a Tropic Show –

And notwithstanding Bee -
that worked –
And Flower – that zealous blew –
This Audience of Idleness
Disdained them, from the
Sky –

Till Sundown crept – a steady
Tide –
And Men that made the
Hay –
And Afternoon – and Butterfly –
Extinguished – in the Sea –

EDA manuscript: Originally in Poems: Packet XXVIII, Fascicle 29-1, Houghton Library – (149a). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Includes 20 poems, written in ink, dated ca. 1862. First published in Poems (1891), 118-19, with the third stanza as a quatrain.

Dickinson led off Fascicle 29, around the second half of 1863, with this poem. It gives us another set of associations with Circumference. At first, it seems like a charming account of the aimless freedom of a butterfly, which has just emerged from its cocoon on a summer afternoon. The simile in the first stanza, “As Lady from her Door,” suggests the analogy of butterfly and Lady. This is augmented by the comparison of the butterfly’s wings to a “pretty Parasol,” and of “struggling hard/ With an opposing Cloud” to “Parties,” “idleness,” and “disdain.” To further the analogy between the natural and human realms, Dickinson contrasts the butterfly as aristocratic Lady to the hard working bees and the flowers who supply them and the really hard working “Men” making hay while the sun shines.

As charming as these fanciful comparisons are, they all collapse into the oblivion of the last stanza. There, sundown is compared to the tides of the ocean where all are “Extinguished – in the Sea –” as if the world has been wiped clean. It is a startling finale.

Perhaps we can read this poem as illustrating an autonomous, unfathomable natural world, not dependent on or open to human understanding. The “Enterprise” of the butterfly has a “Design” the speaker confesses she cannot “trace.” Only the “The Clovers – understood –.” Thus, this poem may allude to the bleaker existential landscape of “Four Trees – opon a solitary Acre”(F778A, J742), written in the same year, which describes a scenario whose “Design / Or Order, or Apparent Action” are invisible to and independent of the perceiving speaker.

This connection may help us better grasp the reference to Circumference in the fourth stanza. The “parties,” members of the butterfly’s gala, “To Nowhere – seemed to go / in purposeless Circumference.” We might understand this random action as “repetition,” but the next line suggests a widening of the location: “As ‘twere a Tropic Show –.” Dickinson’s Webster’s defines “tropic” in astronomical and geographical terms, as “a circle of the sphere drawn through a solstitial point, parallel to the equator,” of Cancer and Capricorn. Dickinson uses the word to mean “exotic, sultry; colorful; exuberant,” also

belonging to the Tropics; pertaining to areas of warm climate on either side of the equator; [fig.] emotive; capable of feeling.

Thus, the “purposeless Circumference” of the butterfly contains hints of the other, warmer hemispheres and deeper, mysterious feelings and passions, but ones that are short-lived from the limited human perspective.

Sources
Hallen, Cynthia, ed. Emily Dickinson Lexicon. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 2007.

I saw no way (F633A, J378)

I saw no Way – The
Heavens were stitched –
I felt the Columns close –
The Earth reversed her
Hemispheres –
I touched the Universe –

And back it slid -
and I alone –
A speck opon a Ball –
Went out opon Circum – (
ference –
Beyond the Dip of Bell –

EDA manuscript: Originally in Poems: Packet XVII, Mixed Fasciles, Houghton Library – (90d). Includes 25 poems, written in ink, ca. 1862. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. First published in Unpublished Poems (1935), 23.

Dickinson included this poem in Fascicle 31 in the 4th place around the second half of 1863. It is one of the most harrowing of her Circumference poems and takes us to the very edge of comprehension. Helen Vendler compares the opening phrase, “I saw no Way,” to the statement of Jesus, “I am the way” (John 14:6). The echo suggests that the Calvinist God is not available to the speaker nor is traditional Heaven, whose closed columns bar her entrance. Vendler then reads the next two lines as referring to an unstable Earth “transvaluing all values.” The only option is “the Universe,” which slides from her grasp, leaving the speaker out, alone, tiny on the very edge of Circumference.

It is a terrifying experience, to be “beyond” the recall of the Church bell, an image that echoes “When Bells stop ringing” (F601A, J633), discussed above. But Vendler speculates, it is

a revelation … the realization of her existential status—that of a solitary self with no parents and no home, whether in the Heavens, the Earth, or the Universe …

The only light in the bleakness Vendler senses is that

she is the agent of her own enlightenment. … [she] can see Circumference and live—at the cost of remaining alone, unreachable by others.

Vendler also wonders why Dickinson chose such dissonant metaphors and suggests:

When Dickinson is following the convulsions of consciousness very closely, her metaphors tend to create this sort of nearly unintelligible cascade, which, once understood, makes the reader a participant in the sort of vertigo transcribed in the poem.

By contrast, Laura Gribbin reads this poem as a qualified triumph, turning exclusion into “a powerful critique of Romanticism.” The speaker rejects Emerson’s unbounded circle with the poet at the center. “Circumference,” Gribbin argues,

is not simply a defense mechanism designed to protect the self. It is also an offensive strategy that blocks the acquisitive, appropriative, and omnipotent urge of the Romantic “I.”

By the end of the poem, in this reading, the speaker has found a “foothold,” a way to move laterally “around and along the perimeter” and explore the very edges and limits of consciousness and language.

 Joanne Feit Diehl takes this line of interpretation further when she declares:

it is here, at the brink of poetic indecipherability, where the risks of language are greatest, that Dickinson achieves her full power.

Sources
Vendler, Helen. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2010, 275-77.

Joan Feit Diehl, “Ransom in a Voice: Language as Defense in Dickinson's Poetry.” Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Ed. Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983, 173.

Gribbin, Laura. “Emily Dickinson's Circumference: Figuring a Blind Spot in
the Romantic Tradition.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 2. 1 (Spring 1993): 1-21; 3-4.

Sources

Bollobas, Eniko.“Troping the Unthought: Catachresis in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.” The Emily Dickinson Journal XXI, 1 (2012): 25-56, 26-27, 30.

Gelpi, Albert. The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975, 275.

Giles, Paul. “‘The Earth reversed her Hemispheres’: Dickinson’s Global
Antipodality.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 20. 1, 2011: 1-21 11, 14.

Gribbin, Laura. “Emily Dickinson’s Circumference: Figuring a Blind Spot in the Romantic Tradition.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 2. 1 (Spring 1993): 1-21; 1, 2, 6, 14-15.