¡The dashes in Emily Dickinson! Actually they are rivers of ink, a bunch of common places in the voice of critics. Perhaps, we must look for aesthetic reasons, given the fact that ethical, rational reasons are exhausted. It is also said that she used these dashes in the writing of her recipes. It is not a part of an equation, a sort of whim, but something normal for her. At first, she developed it as a tool, given the fact that words were incapable to achieve her objective. The way she lived and wrote was needing some particular slant at writing, to sublime herself, to add a particular visual effect.
Time went on, in the garden. The art of pressed flowers moved to the blank page. As she was looking for a certain enigma, as she could not touch it with her fingertips, she decided to illustrate it in the verse. As a result, they look much more than dashes. In every poem, she assembled, dash by dash, some veils. These veils can cover, and, at the same time, reveal. They can be compare, in a certain sense, with the sfumatto used by Leonardo in his paintings. That technique consists of adding delicate veils, layer by layer, pretending to dilute the edges, to blur the contours… The result is real and surreal, at the same time. It is not a joke to state that Dickinson is a master of ambiguity. These dashes are part of her personal, poetic recipe…
They are widely connotative. These dashes are primarily mistic. Then, they are lustful. They are fleshy. They are not supposed to mean, but to evoke. They don’t depend on the meaning of every verse. They are call to sublimate the page, in the very eyes of the reader, adding a new ending to the end. This is why I consider every dash is pictorial, in addition to musical. In this point, it is fair to say that Emily Dickinson is a painter, a draftswoman for poets, just as Leonardo is a poet for painters.
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