...your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

When Emerson divides the world into Soul and Nature, or `I' and "all which philosophy distinguishes as the Not Me, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body,"[1] he delineates the boundary which informs the transcendentalist movement's understanding of the American sublime The division informs transcendentalist thinking about the sublime by locating the sublime outside the Self, making sublime experience a union of Self and Not Self which is invasive and transformative. He positions himself as a "transparent eyeball" at the center of creation which filters and grasps at experience.

Both Whitman and Dickinson work to revise, resist, and traverse the division between the Self and Emerson's `Not Me'. The relationships both poets construct between the `I' and the physical emerge from their differing understandings of the individuals' stance in relation to the sublime. Whitman works to locate the sublime within the Self, and open sublime experience to a wider public. He authorizes the idiolect over the sociolect, or the `I' over the "en-masse" (SOM) and attempts to infuse the social context with individualist impression as a way of radicalizing a social understanding of the body. He democratizes the Self in this process. Dickinson, on the other hand, locates the sublime outside of herself. The invasiveness of union with the sublime and the anonymity of the democratized Self both pose a threat to the `I' of Dickinson's work. Dickinson also implies that the confidence with which Emerson and Whitman unite themselves with the sublime detracts from the mystery and authority of the sublime, as well as the autonomy of the individual. Dickinson' expression of the body is rigidly idiolectic. However, I hope to show that the nature of her resistance to the sublime and the democratic bears sociolectic readings.

TO READ MORE ABOUT FORM, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THE BODY FIGURED IN THE TEXT AND THE TEXT AS A BODY, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THE SUBLIME AS A SEXUAL UNION, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT DEMOCRATIC RESISTANCE AND ISOLATION IN DICKINSON'S WORK, CLICK HERE

Selected Bibliography

Finch, Annie. The Ghost of Meter. Ann Arbor: U. MichiganPress, 1993.

Diehl, Joanne Fiet. Women poets and the American Sublime. Indianapolis: Indiana U. Press, 1990.

Scarry, Elaine, ed. Literature and the Body: Essays on persons and Populations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1988.

Kiersthardt, Melanie. Flirting with patriarchy: Feminist Dialogics. in The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed., Mason, I. Lowrance, Jr., Westbrook, Ellen E., Prospo, RCD.

Bal, Mieke. The rape of Narrative and the Narrative of Rape: Speech Acts and Body Language in Judges. in Women poets and the American Sublime, ed., Scarry, Elaine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1988.

Dimock, Wai Chee. Whitman, Syntax, and Political Theory