Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson

Ethos is an argumentative technique that appeals to the audience by establishing authorial credibility and trustworthiness. Rich employs ethos by emphasizing the connection between herself and Dickinson, drawing upon their shared geography, gender, and vocation. For example, Rich recalls her own college years living in the same region where Dickinson spent her entire life and discusses the effect that Dickinson’s poetry and the legends that surround the poet had on Rich from a young age.

Hypophora is a kind of a question that furthers the speaker’s argument rather than truly seeking an answer. It is similar to a rhetorical question, but where the answer to a rhetorical question is left implied, the speaker goes on to themselves provide the answer in instances of hypophora. For example, when refuting claims that Dickinson’s religious poetry is truly about religion, Rich asks, “What, in fact, did she allow to ‘put the Belt around her Life’—what did wholly occupy her mature years and possess her? For ‘Whom’ did she decline the invitation of other lives? The writing of poetry” (188). Rich’s use of hypophora engages the reader in her argument with the aim of making her interpretations of Dickinson’s poetry all the more persuasive.

Rich also poses various rhetorical questions:

What was it like to be writing poetry you knew […] was of a class by itself—to be fueled by the energy it took first to confront, then to condense the image of psychic experience into that language; then to copy out the poems and lay them in a trunk, or send a few here and there to friends and relatives as occasional verse or as gestures of confidence? (188).

The question invites the reader to join Rich’s effort to inhabit Dickinson’s mental space, which she suggests is at the heart of Dickinson’s poetry itself.

Imagery refers to descriptive language that engages the senses. Rich includes many visual descriptions and sensory details when describing Dickinson’s environment and her daily life to allow readers to better envision Dickinson herself. Arriving in Dickinson’s room, Rich writes, “Here in this white-curtained, high-ceilinged room, a red-haired woman with hazel eyes and a contralto voice wrote poems about volcanoes, deserts, eternity, suicide, physical passion” (180); elsewhere, she describes Dickinson as “a figure of powerful will, not at all frail or breathless, someone whose personal dimensions would be felt in a household” (180). Rich highlights these details to contrast with the mythological caricatures of Dickinson and to persuade the reader of Rich’s alternative conception of Dickinson.