Emily Dickinson and The Dash–– Ambiguous, Elegant, Oxymoronic and Paradoxical

The “it” poet of the 19th century, her enigmatic brilliance and originality that drops

from the page who challenged the real definition of poetry with the dashes and her abstract

poems where the meaning is not always confined, she wanted to free herself for conventional

constraints. Demonstrating that the dash served more purpose to both the artist and the reader,

it provided elegant ambiguity and privacy to the writer but possibilities and breathes to the

reader. Emily Dickinson’s dash is a double entendre, an ambiguity of meaning arising for

language and diacriticals that lends itself to more than one interpretation hence why it

provides an experience that exceeds linguistic expression.

Emily Dickinson disrupted literature, her handwritten dashes did not translate to page,

her sudden strokes between lines that invoked this unwavering feeling to the reader allowed

her to position as an oxymoronic writer, her themes and dashes did not always went hand by

hand thus creating a question of their meaning, questions that till this day are present and

brilliantly allow Dickinson to find some semblance of peace and secrecy in the reality of her

poems. Even though, she was a poet, someone who wanted to share her art, we do know by

many accounts she was reserved and spend most of her days hidden in her house, often

known as the lady in white–– shutting away from the world, where the only pieces of her are

known by the breaths on her poetry.

In her poem “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind '' the gesture of her dashes interrupt

language with odd pauses where the dashes work as if you were sewing with thread and

needle, it splits sensations that materialize in the verses. Revealing the idea of her lifelong

fascination with exploring moments intensely in our minds, we can interpret that this poem is

about experiencing joy but also understanding the agony of surviving, through this she

explores–– Seam by seam– where this sewing never captures the thoughts or the experience

of the self, reinforcing the impossibility of capturing an exact process and describing the
narrative just as the writer wanted it. By writing with indescribable dashes, where you feel

the splits, stumbles and pauses of her marks, makes the reader question how those diactricals

translate into breathes and how secrecy of the reality of her self can be discovered, causing a

unique experience where there is an infinitude of possible of thoughts and associations.

Emily Dickinson explores writing and life as something that will never be pieced

together in a process itself, her inspiration and how her dashes look resist the idea of just one

meaning conveyed, a seam by seam, this weaving but simultaneously unweaving of

experience that create an sophisticated ocurrance where this process is creating itself

repeatedly, is an imperfect meaning where her dashes and words instigate the reader to go to

the depths of breath thus making every visual and semantic interpretation possible.