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1."Measuring the Sun": Perception, Punishment, and the Rivalrous Imagination --2.Compound Vision: The Poet as Astronomer --3.The "Scientist of Faith": Overcoming the Obstacles to Perception --4.Poetry as Place: Heaven, Ill/locality, and Continents of Light --5.The "Consent of Language": Symbolism in Nature, Mathematics, and the Sacrament --6."A Tumultuous Privacy of Storm": Snow, Publication, and the Problem of Romantic Egotism --7.A Charter for Heaven on Earth: Law, Property, and Provincialism in Dickinson's Poems and Letters to Judge Otis Phillips Lord. Dickinson's illness compelled her to remain indoors with her eyes heavily bandaged for months at a time, especially during the summer. Guthrie maintains that these extended periods of sensory deprivation caused her to seek solace in writing and to convert her poems into replacements for her injured eyes. Many poems discuss her physical pain; many mention such topics as optics, astronomy, light, or the sun; some suggest that she blamed God for what had happened to her Guthrie argues that reading the poems in an overtly biographical context deepens their complexity and profundity. Dickinson emerges from this study as an accomplished artist and an eminently sane and stable woman whose patience and optimism were sorely tested by severe, chronic illness In this original contribution to Dickinson biography and criticism, James Guthrie demonstrates how the poet's optical disease - strabismus, a deviation of the cornea - directly affected her subject matter, her poetic method, and indeed her sense of her own identity These poems permitted her, Guthrie says, to use her personal experience as a springboard for discussing philosophical and religious matters and led her, finally, to conceive a system of metapoetics in which she served as translator or mediator between God's will and human experience
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