Precisely Knowing Not: Emily Dickinson and Generative Negation

Abstract: Even recent Emily Dickinson scholarship has tended to receive Dickinson's poems according to a mid-twentieth-century intellectual milieu, whereby affirmations of absurdity and meaninglessness are judged to be the most authentic posture. This essay argues that such readings present an anachronistic projection onto Dickinson's work. Aided by an alternative philosophical and theological archive grounded in her time, we should read the poetic features of Dickinsonian unknowing—distance, darkness, and inscrutability—not in terms of divine absence but as counterintuitive modes of divine presencing.