This is my letter to the world - Emily Dickinson #

Together with A Word dropped carelessly on a page, this poem is an example of Metapoetry – poetry that is aware of itself as a poem; how it is constructed and why it is being composed. The Thought - Fox by Ted Hughes is another good example.

People write for a variety of reasons, but poetry tends to be an expression of intense personal and intimate urges. Dickinson’s prodigious outpouring of more than 1700 poems over a period of about 25 years demonstrates a need to express her private observations, reflections, aspirations, passions and fears. It is her solitude and asceticism (life of self-denial) that allows or perhaps dictates her need to probe the inner depths of life. Dickinson declares her “one purpose” in life, is to become a great writer".

Kamran Javadizadeh writing in the August 21, 2024, edition of the New Yorker claims Dickinson wrote more than thirteen hundred letters to close friends offering a way of making a life out of her fantasies. Many are written to her close friend Susan Gilbert, a woman with whom she seemed to be in love. Susan eventually married Emily’s brother Austin and lived next door. They later separated.

In 1869, when Dickinson was thirty-eight years old, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man who (through the mail) had become her poetic mentor, asked her if they could meet:

“if I could once see you & know that you are real, I might fare better.”

Dickinson’s response suggested that she preferred a state of slight unreality:

“A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.”

Dickinson did eventually consent to see Higginson in person. After their second (and final) meeting, he wrote to his sister,

“I saw my eccentric poetess Miss Emily Dickinson who never goes outside her father’s grounds & sees only me & a few others. She says, ‘there is always one thing to be grateful for—that one is one’s self & not somebody else.’

Never going outside your father’s grounds may be a way to insure that you do not become somebody else. Dickinson’s writing, in this way of thinking, created a simulated world that took the place of the real one.

Writing letters could therefore be for Dickinson not only a withdrawal from the world but also a way of extending herself into many worlds, all at once. From, When Emily Dickinson Mailed It In, Kamran Javadizadeh, August 21, 2024 The New Yorker.

Emily Dickinson made a wilful, deliberate and determined resolution to retreat from society and commune with nature, yet she yearns for acknowledgement and recognition. It was from personal choice; “Some keep the Sabbath going to church - I keep it , staying home.”

Some critics contend that she wrote, as consolation, out of sheer egotism - a desire to be recognised, remembered after death.

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,–

The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty. Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;

For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

As Sylvia Plath later would use her writing as therapy; by a frank and full admission of her pain she is hoping for some release of tension and an exorcism of the demons that haunt her, some of Dickinson’s poems, intensely emotional, yet never dissolving into sentimentality, reveal a troubled soul searching for understanding and acceptance. Dickinson admits that writing is soothing for her.

Another writer who used writing as an attempt to address inner turmoil is Zelda, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, commenting on the disintegration of their marriage:

“To right myself, I write myself.”

Writing is an escape into the depths of my imagination."

Her initial declamation is followed by a peevish sulk or an understandable natural feeling of indignant hurt - slight, revealing her need for acknowledgement if not acceptance:

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,–

Even though she voluntarily withdraws from society, she feels indignant that it seems to function without noticing her. Her petulant accusatory claim that no one ever communicates with her indicates that she begrudges or resents her invisibility. But then it was she who cut off society.

Later the tone modulates from a pained pout, petulant, resentful or an aggrieved one to a conciliatory, reasoning one and ends with a plea or supplication for understanding.

The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;

Nature – like God, is an intangible force. The juxtaposition of contradictory adjectives, tender and majesty suggests her affinity for it.

For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

You can view a reading of the poem @:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP_b82juGXI

Dickinson provides a contrast between human society; complicated, complex and judgmental; and Nature, which is more simplified, “tender” yet majestic. To Dickinson, nature can be a benevolent force.

Dickinson evokes a neediness through blunt, direct self-expression – she enjoys her solitude but was a suffocated feeler. Inside there was churning — a desire for acknowledgement if not acceptance.

Dickinson did consciously reject the limelight as can be seen in these two short poems:

I’m Nobody! Who are you? #

Are you – Nobody – Too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! They’d banish us – you know!
How dreary to be Somebody!
How public – like a frog –
To tell your name – the livelong June- To an admiring Bog!

…..

Another Poem

Fame is a bee.
It has a song –
It has a sting –
Ah, too, it has a wing.

W.B. Yeats once wrote;

“When we quarrel with others, we make rhetoric; When we quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry”.

Other writers providing their reasons include:

Franz Kafta’s - Writing should be an axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Poetry is the expression of deeply felt emotions or feelings characterised by an intensity of thought and consciousness of thought patterns.

Poetry is Personal — an attempt to capture the experience of significant moments of life.

Poetry is central to each person’s core existence—of unique value to the fully realised life.

Poetry celebrates the joys and mysteries of existence.

Poetry demonstrates the ineffability of the human condition; language’s inability to bridge the chasm between our individual existences, revealing the inescapable fact of our aloneness.

Wordsworth “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.