Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10,1830, to a prominent family of academics, lawyers, and statesmen. Following her education at Amherst Academy and Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson embarked on her impassioned journey as a poet. Composing first in a fairly conventional style, the poetess soon began to experiment with her writing; her frequent use of dashes, sporadic capitalization of nouns, broken meter, and idiosyncratic metaphors made her work unparalleled for its time. ...
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Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10,1830, to a prominent family of academics, lawyers, and statesmen. Following her education at Amherst Academy and Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson embarked on her impassioned journey as a poet. Composing first in a fairly conventional style, the poetess soon began to experiment with her writing; her frequent use of dashes, sporadic capitalization of nouns, broken meter, and idiosyncratic metaphors made her work unparalleled for its time. Dickinson's poetry dealt not only with issues of death, faith, and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the power of language to transfer emotions into written text. An obsessively private writer, only ten of her some 1,700 poems were published during her lifetime. Dickinson withdrew from social contact at the age of 23 and devoted herself to writing in secret. It wasn't until her death in 1866 that the scope of Dickinson's work was realized, when her sister Lavinia found her prolific collection in a dresser drawer. Since this time, Emily Dickinson's writing has had significant influences on modern American poetry; her complex use of language and form has contributed to her reputation as one of the most innovative poets of the 19th century. This collection of some of her finest works illustrates not only Dickinson's talent as a writer but her profound love of language, nature, and life. In the series Classic Thoughts and Thinkers, explore some of the most influential texts of our time along with the inner workings of its greatest thinkers. With works from great American figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Emily Dickinson and seminal documents including the Constitution of the Unites States, this series focuses on the most reflective and thought-provoking writings of the last two centuries. These beautiful hardcovers are the perfect historical perspective for meeting the challenges of the modern world. Other titles in this series include: As a Man Thinketh, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Collected Poems of Robert Frost, Common Sense, Constitution of the United States with the Declaration of Independence, Helen Keller, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and Theodore Roosevelt's Words of Wit and Wisdom.
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While Emily Dickinson led an outwardly quiet, uneventful life in her father Edward's house in Amherst, her mind was fixed upon verities and eternalities. She wrote almost two thousand poems, only a dozen of which were published in her lifetime, and is commonly regarded with Walt Whitman as one of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century. In fact, in its tremendous concision, Dickinson's work is the opposite of Whitman's long breath-line in Leaves of Grass. For me, her example strongly insists on the claims of the work itself rather than the life. Her themes are the eternal ones: love, death, immortality, faith, and pain. She herself recognized poetry by feeling as if "the top of my head were taken off."
Formally, her work can present difficulties because of its unconventionality: her odd punctuation (the frequent use of the dash), capitalization, and free meters, though the poems are often three quatrains (that is, four-line stanzas), so regular in their structure.
Here is the opening couplet of one poem: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes-- / The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--." Whether physical, emotional or psychic pain, the effect is of remoteness or distance, and a sort of funereal deadness, a neural numbness. There is a sense of the mechanistic or the duty-bound: "The Feet, mechanical, go round-- / Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--." The "stiff Heart," ".A Wooden Way," and "the Hour of Lead" suggest not only the rigidity that follows pain, but also a kind of spiritlessness. And if one "outlived" this deathly period, there is "First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--." That is to say, one experiences cold, torpor, then a surrender, perhaps, to feeling.
This seems to me as exact an "imaging" of the thing it describes as anything I have ever read. Certainly, the "Hour of Lead" wasn't the exclusive province of the poet; anguish and suffering are part of the human condition. In fact Dickinson takes the reader far into our common journey in poems such as "I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--" or "Because I could not stop for Death," rethinks the conventional wisdom in "Much Madness is divinest Sense," discloses her perspective in "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--," and writes her own poetic credo in "I dwell in Possibility." Read the poems of Emily Dickinson for those rare epiphanies of possibility.
