“How ruthless are the gentle –”

Abstract In this essay, Dill writes as an artist immersed for decades in Dickinson’s words as inspiration for her art. She reflects on how those words unlocked an extensive career of marrying poetic text with image. Dill highlights how the breadth of her material—wood, paper, bronze, fabric, music, and even the human body—externalize and animate the equally wide-ranging profundities of Dickinson’s language—hunger, truth, danger, dualism, luminance. While living in India from 1991 to 1992, Dill discovered a natural connection between Dickinson’s words and the indecipherable, musical, and transcendental worlds of India. She discloses how her art evolved to show that words not only hold meaning in the mind but are an experience of the ears, eyes, and breath. Consequently, a single phrase can be reincarnated in a diversity of art-making processes. Dickinson’s words are, to Dill, particularly regenerative, appearing in ever-new iterations over time. From cerebral resonance to the simple beauty of a glyph, Dill proves the atmosphere of Dickinson’s poetry—and language as a whole—to be a powerful and intoxicating medium.