In one of Dickinson’s oft-quoted poems, “Hope” is defined as “the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.” A “thing with feathers” is, of course, a bird. But saying it that way, as if it is unfamiliar, and needs to be described again, causes us to rethink those qualities of a bird that resemble hope, and in turn to rethink hope. Just imagine how, if the poem just said “‘Hope’ is a bird / That perches in the soul,” we would be immediately in the land of Hallmark cards. Describing a bird as if she didn’t know the name for it, and assigning its qualities to the abstract concept of “hope,” is the defamiliarizing technique of the poem. It has an almost clinical unsentimentality, an objectivity of insight that feels trustworthy, won from hard thinking.