Moran is an educator specializing in American and British literature. In this essay, he examines the ways in whichDickinson faces the difficulty of conveying complex mental processes in concrete language.

William Wordsworth's famous preface to his Lyrical Ballads (1798) contains his much-quoted definition of good poetry:

Since Dickinson cannot truly replicate insanity, she instead chooses to portray it as a physical sensation; imagine trying to convey the sense of a terrible headache to one who has never had one, and then the logic behindDickinson's choice of metaphor becomes clearer.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does actually exist in the mind.

In other words, the poet's...