Success Is Counted Sweetest

'“A woman - white - to be”: Politics of subjectivity and gender in Emily Dickinson’s poetry' by Edina Szalay (2008).

In this essay, Szalay analyzes Dickinson’s poetry and its intersection with “the ongoing social debate on subjectivity and gender in nineteenth-century America.” Szalay specifically focuses on the poem “A Charm invests a face,” placing Dickinson’s poetry within the context of gender expectations popular at the time at which Dickinson was writing. Szalay depicts the assumptions surrounding the behavior and values of white middle-class women in nineteenth-century America and shows how Dickinson “critiques the image of the True Woman through the rhetorical means of her unique language and how she ultimately reveals the vulnerability and illusory nature of the privileges enjoyed by this class of women.”

“The ecstasy of Mere Living: “Time’s Possibility” in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson” by Alexander Creighton (2018).

In this article, Creighton assesses how Dickinson’s poems conceptualize time. He approaches this subject by looking at Dickinson’s use of figurative language, syntax, and meter. Creighton analyzes the ways in which Dickinson challenges typical notions of time and “complicates its usual depiction in criticism as a trap to be escaped or a lesser state to be surpassed by immortality.” By complicating the concept of time, Dickinson opens up possibilities for the “human experience.”

'“To Pile like Thunder”: The Advantages of Reading Emily Dickinson’s Poetry from a Cognitive Perspective' by Margaret Freeman & Nigel McLoughlin (2021).

In this analysis of Dickinson’s work “To Pile like Thunder,” Freeman and McLoughlin assess how sound and form help to create meaning in the poem. Freeman and McLoughlin “apply the principles of conceptual integration network theory, informally known as ‘blending,’ to show how the blending model opens up the dynamic cognitive processes that underpin the poem’s metaphors.”