A Poet Was Born　：　"Agony"　and "Circumference" in Emily Dickinson

Out of her 1775 poems Emily Dickinson published only seven in her lifetime. Besides, these few had suffered the editors corrections in punctuation and rhymes. It was only in 1955 that her complete works came to be appreciated in her own style. It may not be an extraordinary phenomenon that an artist he valued posthumously. What intersts us in her ease, however, is how she maintained her identification as a poet knowing she was unable to share her art with anybody, even with her “Master” T. W. Higginson, then a professional man of letters. It is notable that in her late twenties and early thirties, during the time when she was finding herself as a poet, “agony” or “pain” is a conspicuous theme in her works. Looking into these works, we can see the process through which she was born a poet by her power of intelligence to deny any sort of slackness or flaccidity, and her self-discipline to control her ejaculation of being renounced. She did not write any formal theory of Poetics. Yet we still find her rudimentary attitude in some of her works and letters. ”Circumference” was the word she often used to express her theory of poetics. The word is first of all an mathematical term and far from invoking poetical sentiment, and this fact seems to touch upon her concept of creating poems. She loved words. When she was successful, she succeeded in giving her own meanings to seemingly abstract and theoretical words such as death, immortality, love and circumference itself. In this paper we are going to pick up the word “agony” and “circumference” to see how the poet was born and what she meant when she said, “My Business is Circumference.