Abstract

This thesis documents one poet's coming to writing through the influence of Emily Dickinson. It is divided into three sections: the first is a correspondence between the poet and her muse---the character of Emily Dickinson; the second is a series of letters written by the female inmates of an asylum; the third is a series of poems that deal with Dickinson's ideas of circumference. The invocation involves the poet and the Emily-muse in a journey through New Brunswick's Bay du Vin, during which they witness a terrible storm that kills many of the town's fishermen. The storm introduces death into the world of art, the world created by the poet and her muse as a kind of placeless heaven. The second section is a series of letters written from the perspective of the fishermen's wives, now confined in an asylum. Titled "Much Madness is Divinest Sense/Letters from the Asylum," this section makes of its setting a significant symbol: a cage, a prison, the asylum figures finitude and limitation. In this milieu, distance, absence, death, pain and, indeed, madness become their opposites. The final section, "Circumference," deals with the Dickinsonian idea of limitation and expansion, the I and the not-I and how one negotiates the distance between self and other, self and God. The final poems of this section investigate the world of Bay du Vin as seen through the poet's eyes. There is a movement away from Emily and towards the poet's plotting of her own circumference