Emily Dickinson

## Biography

A radical individualist, Emily Dickinson was born and spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, a small Calvinist village. She never married, and she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside.

Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time for writing (for stretches of time she wrote about one poem a day). Her day also included homemaking for her attorney father, a prominent figure in Amherst who became a member of Congress.

Dickinson was not widely read, but knew the Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, and works of classical mythology in great depth. These were her true teachers, for Dickinson was certainly the most solitary literary figure of her time. That this shy, withdrawn village woman, almost unpublished and unknown, created some of the greatest American poetry of the 19th century has fascinated the public since the 1950s, when her poetry was rediscovered.

It is known that she read Emerson and heard him lecture and that he had some effect on her. There is no egotistical sublime here, no dramatic self on show and no transcendentalist outreach. Rather there is an inreach, a guiding concept of privacy and seflhood which creates a metaphysical distillation from its own being. By only looking at some of her famous opening lines ―"The Soul selects her own Society," "I dwell in possibility," "Renunciation―is a piercing Virtue"― it is possible to feel the pained self-anatomizing, the willed self-enclosure, which is the field of her verse.

Her poetry articulates a life carefully hidden, even from the Puritanism and Evangelicalism of her Amherst neighbors and of her own family. With few forays out, the sum of her life was conducted in her father's house. Even here she kept her distance. As she said of her family in a letter to her one literary mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: "They are religious―except me― and addres an Eclipe every morning―whom they call their 'Father.'"

Even this remark is oblique. Dickinson is religious, but her world of faith seems homemade. She knew very well the painful erosion of belief that was taking place among the othodox who surrounded her, the troubles that marked the transition from Calvinism to Unitarianism, and she felt this in her own conscience and consciousness.

The years of the Civil War saw her most concentrated poetic work, but the war itself did not impinge directly on her poems―though it may be speculated that it had something to do with the doubt and horror they so often express.

The Dickinson family hosted many important visitors, including the famed essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emily Dickinson had numerous correspondents and attended both Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She sent numerous letters and poems to her intimate friend and sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and she, with her sister, Lavinia, nursed her ailing mother throughout her lengthy illness and until her death, just four years before the poet’s own.

Since her poems were first published posthumously in 1890, critical responses to Emily Dickinson’s work have been both abundant and unceasing, steadily gathering force with every new version of her collected poems and each poem newly discovered in her letters and manuscripts. Continuous publication of Dickinson’s poems and manuscripts has been spurred by vigorous scholarly inquiry and by public interest in her poetry and her life.

One of the most often quoted facts of Emily Dickinson’s life is that she published only a few poems during her lifetime. Although she wrote to the writer and editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to ask his opinion of her poetry, she did not openly seek publication, and most of the poems published during her lifetime were submitted by Dickinson’s friends, not by the poet herself. In 1858, she began to record poems in folded pages hand-bound with string, often called fascicles. In this way, she collected and organized, and some say self-published, her poetry. Although Dickinson asked her sister, Lavinia, to destroy the poems upon her death, Lavinia sought instead to organize, or reorganize, them for publication.

She died in Amherst in 1886 at age 55.

## Historical & Cultural Context

### The Great Awakening

* Religious and social movement that rwnewed religious fervor among the people of New England.
* Increasing church membership. Dickinson's family joined the church while she did not.
	+ Dickinson struggled to reconcile her religiou beliefs with the newly emerging scientific concepts
* Influence of religious hymns in her poetry
	+ Usually written in common metre, just as most of her poems

### Romanticism

The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some 20 years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had revolutionized English poetry by publishing Lyrical Ballads.

Her poetry reflects traits of both Transcendentalism and Dark Romanticism. ***She wrote in a Romantic vein or with a Romantic influence, but DO NOT SAY that she was a Romantic writer.***

## Bibliography

Seven of her poems appeared, anonymously, during her lifetime, but the remaining works, close to eighteen hundred of them, did not come to light until after her death. They were published in 1890, but it was not until the 1920s that they were fully acclaimed, and not until 1958, when Thomas H. Johnson edited them, that a satisfactory edition and full impression was possible. Only then was it fully clear that these enigmatic short lyrics were the work of America's greatest poet.

Although she did now and again try to publish, for Dickinson the writing seemed a satisfying secret, sufficient to itself.

### Literary Style

Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the turn of the century. Dickinson’s terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman’s. She never uses two words when one will do, and combines concrete things with abstract ideas in an almost proverbial, compressed style. Her best poems have no fat; many mock current sentimentality, and some are even heretical. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential awareness.

Like Poe, she explores the dark and hidden part of the mind, dramatizing death and the grave. Yet she also celebrated simple objects — a flower, a bee. Her poetry exhibits great intelligence and often evokes the agonizing paradox of the limits of the human consciousness trapped in time. She had an excellent sense of humor, and her range of subjects and treatment is amazingly wide. Her poems are generally known by the numbers assigned them in Thomas H. Johnson’s standard edition of 1955. They bristle with odd capitalizations and dashes. A nonconformist, like Thoreau she often reversed meanings of words and phrases and used paradox to great effect.

Her poetry was a metaphysical and moral secret which might never have been fathomed. She writes with condensation, with tight formal control and hymnlike construction, but there is also fragmentation.

Dickinson's verse rejects conventional punctuation and completed phrasing, employs dashes for pacing, and thereby creates ambiguity and multiplicity. Where Whitman used lists, she scattered alternative words about her manuscripts―synonyms, close pairings or rival locutions that keep the poems incomplete so that final print seems to imprison them. This is doubtless deliberate, part of the method of "circuit" which she celebrates.

The Emerson of "Experience," "Politics" and "Fate" had explored the falws of his own special optimism and felt the anguished strain of acknowledging death as inescapably part of his affirmation of life. But it is Dickinson who fully distilled the darker Janus-vision of her age against the grain of a culture that called its popular poetry increasingly toward sentimentality. It is this vision that made her seem so contemporary to the modernist poets of the next century. Here the accents of the modern world are heard, a world of doubt, of Kurtz's "the horror" that Emerson, Thoreau or even Whitman could not or would not imagine.

The modernists responded as well to her insistence on the discipline and formality of art, the craft by which the words are placed rightly on the page. In consequence her reputation grows daily as one of the best of America's writers, a writer in whom the legacy of nineteenth-century Romanticism turns toward the complexities of twentieth-century Modernism.

Dickinson’s stark style, her ambiguous punctuation and capitalization, her variant word choices and multiple versions of poems, and her practice of expunging clearly historical references from her poetry, all contribute to creating poems that are extraordinarily open to varying, sometimes even contradictory, interpretations that perplex, startle, and amaze readers. At times, her poems seem to embody multiple voices that perform various personae. Many of the contributors to this volume suggest that such contradiction lies at the very center of Dickinson’s poems and her conception of herself as poet.

* **Subjects:**
	+ nature
	+ religion
	+ human morality
	+ what lies beyond death
	+ the difficulty and necessity of faith
	+ dark and hidden part of the mind

* **Themes:**
	+ The wonders of nature
	+ The identity of the self
	+ Death and immortality
	+ Love

* **Form and Style:**
	+ Short poems with a single speaker in the first person
	+ No titles
	+ The use of concrete images to describe abstract concepts

* **Meter and Rhyme:**
	+ A variety of metrical and stanzaic forms
	+ Common meter
	+ Experimental employment of rhyme

* **Punctuation and Syntax:**
	+ Dashes and capitalization of interior words
	+ Simple diction

#### Common Meter

Four-line stanzas that alternate between iambic tetrameter (four iambs) and iambic trimeter (three iambs).

This meter is usually featured in religious hymns that may have influenced Dickinson's style.

## Poems

### A Narrow Fellow in the Grass (986)

**Summary**: An unexpected encounter between the speaker and one of nature's creatures.

**Tone**: Mysterious, joyful, fearful

**Form**: common meter

**Themes**: Amazement for nature, two sides of nature, fear of the unknown, appearance vs. reality

1. A narrow Fellow in the Grass

2. Occasionally rides -

3. You may have met Him - did you not

4. His notice sudden is -

5. The Grass divides as with a Comb -

6. A **s**potted shaft is **s**een -

7. And then it closes at your feet

8. And opens further on -

9. He likes a Boggy Acre

10. A Floor too **c**ool for **C**orn -

11. Yet when a **B**oy, and **B**arefoot -

12. I more than once at Noon

13. Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash

14. Unbraiding in the Sun

15. When **s**tooping to **s**ecure it

16. It wrinkled, and was gone -

17. Several of Nature’s People

18. I know, and they know me -

19. I **f**eel **f**or them a transport

20. Of cordiality -

21. But never met this Fellow

22. **A**ttended, or **a**lone

23. Without a tighter breathing

24. And Zero at the Bone -

**Literary Devices**:

* Alliteration and assonance: (marked in bold in the poem)
* Metaphor: A narrow fellow in the Grass (1) - a snake
* Simile: The Grass divides as with a Comb (5)

### Because I Could not Stop for Death (712)

A lyric poem, also considered narrative. It is written in the first person and expresses intense personal feelings and emotions.

**Summary**: A female speaker describes how she was visited by death in the form of a gentleman suitor, who stopped to pick her up and take her in a ride in a horse-drawn carriage.

**Tone**: calm, passive, peaceful acceptance of death

**Form**: Use of capitalization and dashes

**Themes**: Death, mortality and immortality, the cyclical nature of life and death

1. Because I could not stop for Death –

2. He kindly stopped for me –

3. The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

4. And Immortality.

5. We slowly drove – He knew no haste

6. And I had put away

7. My **l**abor and my **l**eisure too,

8. For His Civility –

9. We passed the **S**chool, where Children **s**trove

10. At **R**ecess – in the **R**ing –

11. We passed the Fields of **G**azing **G**rain –

12. We passed the **S**etting **S**un –

13. Or rather – He passed Us –

14. The **D**ews **d**rew quivering and Chill –

15. For only **G**ossamer, my **G**own –

16. My **T**ippet – only **T**ulle –

17. We paused before a House that seemed

18. A Swelling of the Ground –

19. The Roof was scarcely visible –

20. The Cornice – in the Ground –

21. Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

22. Feels shorter than the Day

23. I first surmised the **H**orses' **H**eads

24. Were toward Eternity –

**Literary Devices**:

* Personification: Death (1), He kindly stopped for me (2), For His Civility (8)
* Alliteration: (marked in bold in the poem)
* Simile: a House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground (17-18)
* Symbols:
	+ The carriage: the journey from life to death
	+ The children: childhood
	+ The gazing fields: adulthood
	+ The setting sun: end of life
	+ The house: grave/resting place (a swelling on the ground)

### I'm Nobody! Who Are You? (288)

A lyric poem on the folly of seeking fame.
**Summary**: In the poem, the speaker introduces themselves as "Nobody" before excitedly realizing that the addressee is "Nobody" too. Paradoxically, this hints at a community of "Nobodies" out there. These people just don't make as much noise as all the "Somebodies" who crave attention and admiration.

**Tone**: joyful, exciting

**Form**: Use of capitalization and dashes, internal rhyme, common meter

**Themes**: Anonymity and solitude, self identity, community and solidarity

1. I'm Nobody! Who are you?

2. Are you – Nobody – too?

3. **Th**en **th**ere's a pair of us!

4. Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

5. How dreary – to be – Somebody!

6. How public – like a Frog –

7. **T**o **t**ell one's name – the livelong June –

8. To and admiring Bog!

**Literary Devices**:

* Alliteration: (marked in bold in the poem)
* Internal rhyme: (underlined within each line)
* Simile: like a Frog (6)
* Symbols:
	+ Frog: loud, public (the "sombodies")

## Intro Paragraph

Reaching the middle of the nineteenth century, America was witnessing the rise of tensions between northern and southern states over politic and economic issues rooted in the fight for the abolition of slavery. The more industrialized north engaged into a heated discussion with a slavery-reliant south that led, along with the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, to the outbreak of the American Civil war. While this events were taking place, American arts were receiving the influence of Romanticism, a Europe-born intellectual and artistic movement that focused on the individual and focused on the beauty of human emotions. Romantics took inspiration in nature and childhood, often creating pieces full of mysticism and ornaments to appeal to the audience’s feelings. Many writers, although not specifically adherent to the movement, were influenced by the tenets of Romanticism, as it was the case of one of the lead figures of the history of American poetry: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Often written in common meter due to religious influences, Dickinson’s poetry ranges from the exploration of more spiritual topics such as the beauty of nature to a frank analysis of grief and death. Her poems tend to be short but powerful, characterized by an unconventional use of capitalization and dashes that add on to the mysticism of her pieces. Some of the most Romantic characteristics of Dickinson’s poetry can be found in the veneration of nature seen in “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass”, and the journey through deep emotions characteristic of “Because I couldn’t Stop for Death”.

Body 1: content, themes, symbols (influences of Romanticism)
Body 2: form, capitalization, dashes, common meter

### MLA citation

Dickinson, Emily. “986”. *The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson*, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Little Brown & Company, 1955, pp. 459-460.

Dickinson, Emily. “712”. *The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson*, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Little Brown & Company, 1955, pp. 350.

Dickinson, Emily. “288”. *The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson*, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Little Brown & Company, 1955, pp. 133.

## Sources

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2  VanSpanckeren, Kathryn. *Outline of American Literature*. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Information Agency, 1994. Print.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2  Ruland, Richard and Malcolm Bradbury. *From Puritanism to Postmodernism*. Viking, 1991.
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1  Martin, Wendy. *The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson*. Cambridge University Press, 2002.