[Erik Olson]

I remember when I first read Emily's famous definition of poetry—"if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry"—and scratching my head.
Though I recalled being physically altered in one respect or other on reading sublime poetry, I experienced a whole range of sensations and nothing so definitive. But as you said, Michael, this is Emily Dickinson's singular rhetoric. Would not exuberance, awe, tenderness, excitement, wit, the noble, the splendid and the terrifying sublime manifest with some variation in one's physical response? Dickinson's definition makes more sense to me when once taken as rather more rhetorical and hyperbolical than literal and absolute.