Measuring a Bird: The Dictionary and the Mode of Defining

Abstract

In this essay, I describe some of the basic tools that non-dictionary genres use to define objects and words. To show how description of the natural world relates to definition-making, I closely examine passages from the journals of Meriwether Lewis and a letter by John Clare, and point out the procedures that they share with the dictionary for creating an identifiable description of an object. To show how writers have implemented the dictionary’s form into poetry, I closely examine poems by Dan Beachy-Quick, Emily Dickinson, and A. Van Jordan, each poet providing a different method of integrating elements of the dictionary into verse. I also briefly discuss why the imagination influences how we talk about the dictionary.