The seductions of Emily Dickinson

What makes Emily Dickinson such a fascinating poet? Although she left no personal poetics, she did define her own response to poetry as an immediate sensual reaction: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever 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" (L. 342a). Presumably, her own poetry is most significant not in what it communicates to a reader but in what it does to a reader. Is the continued popular success of that poetry not conclusive evidence of its capacity to elicit a similarly spontaneous, visceral response from its readers? And is Dickinson's critical reception not the visible proof of the perpetuation of a powerful (and uncanny) reading seduction? Relocating Dickinson within her own culture reveals the genesis of her rhetoric of seduction. But the consequences of the rhetorical "seduction" of antebellum readers still impact readers today. Why do critical studies of the poet so often identify her as the classic analysand, the female hysteric? Because transference is frequently the engine of analysis, misshaping the reader's relationship with the text by introducing a past scene of seduction into a present interpretive context. Recent critical interpretations of Dickinson's poetry exhibit a distinct homology between the interpreters' own prevailing fascinations and the apparent thematic concerns of the poetic text they analyze. These interpretations suggest that to analyze this poet is to put oneself under analysis: to attempt her seduction is to be oneself seduced.