Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of Reticence

Reticence is an essential component of most, if not all, poetry. Eve Grubin identifies four elements that are central to reticence in poetry: absence of emotional language; withheld narrative information; unstated messages; and unexpected breaks. Exploring a dynamic, phenomenological encounter between Self as ‘reader’ and the Other as ‘poem’, Eve presents an original reading of what she terms the ‘poetics of reticence’. Taking Emily Dickinson’s work as a test case, Eve argues that reticence resides at the core of the reader’s experience of Dickinson's poetry.