THE SEMANTIC FUNCTION OF THE DASH AND MINIMALIST STYLE IN EMILY DICKINSON’S POETRY

Abstract

The paper analyses the semantic function of the dash and the minimalist poetic style in the work of one of the central figures of nineteenth-century American poetry, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). Particular attention is paid to the fact that no more than ten of her nearly 1,800 poems appeared in print during her lifetime, and the full corpus was published only posthumously. Through close reading of selected poems (“Because I could not stop for Death”, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”), the dash is shown to function not as a conventional punctuation mark but as a poetic equivalent of silence, hesitation, and dawning comprehension. The paper also briefly considers Dickinson’s impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry (W. C. Williams, Louise Glück).