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영어

Emily Dickinson is a poetic genius who left as many as 1775 poems, all of which show the poet’s idiosyncrasies, particularly in the originality and succinctness in their forms. But the genius of the poet is expressed the most effectively in the vast scope of her imagination as well as the profundity of her concepts and speculations. Among the various themes of hers, Dickinson’s main concerns are the ontological questions of life, death, and immortality, and through the speculations of these fundamental questions, she literally “assimilates two millennia of western experience” in her poems. The purpose of this paper is to study Dickinson’s poetic imagination in relation to the ascending images in the themes of volcanos and escapes. The movement of Dickinson’s imagination has been approached from Plato’s Idealism. Also for an effective tool of reading Dickinson’s poetry, this one owes greatly to Bachelard’s poetics such as Fire and Air images, especially his theory of “the four elements as the hormones of the imagination.” It deals with Dickinson’s ascending imagination, a means of transcendence, where the symbolic meanings of various ascending images are examined in detail. Particularly, it is shown that the poet’s desire to escape from the gravity of earth into the freedom of endless sky is substantiated by the images of volcanos and escapes. Finally Dickinson’s will to transcend reality is symbolized through the image of ascending symbols.