The point of these comparisons can perhaps be put more succinctly by saying that for
Dickinson poetics is always at the service of rhetoric rather than the other way round.
Her style may loudly call attention to itself, but it does not usually do so as a
construction to be admired in its own right or as evidence of authorial genius. Like all
the other isolable devices contributing to the double writing of "Tell all the
truth," Dickinson’s conspicuously deviant style is part of a larger rhetoric of
stimulus. It is meant to cherish a power that extends considerably beyond the author’s
direct control.
from The Dickinson Sublime. Copyright ? 1990 by the Board of Regents of the
University of Wisconsin System.