Introduction to Emily Dickinson #
Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) an American poet is demanding to comprehend and difficult to warm to. Her poetry is experimental; different, unusual, odd, unique, eccentric – challenging, but well worth the while persisting with.
Emily Dickinson, whose odd and inventive poems helped to initiate modern poetry, is an enigma, a mystery, a paradox. Paradoxically questioning, her individualistic directness shows a strong bold voice; self-assured and unyielding.
In many ways she is similar to John Donne, with bold shocking first lines, striking comparisons, elliptical ideas, disjunctive language, personal introspection and powerful assertions.
“Her poetry is of the quietest, most unobtrusive sort, but it clings like a five-finger (clinging vine).
All but 7 of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published posthumously, beginning in 1891.
Most of the poems we have were written in just six years, between 1858 and 1864. (28 - 34 years old) She bound them into small volumes she called fascicles, and forty of these were found in her room at her death.
There is plenty of evidence indicating that Emily felt she experienced an emotionally deprived parenting. She makes many references to a cold father and mother.
Emily’s father, like his father before him was educated for and worked in law, and in ethos of the Calvanistic church. At the age of 16 Emily had been sent to Holyoke Seminary for girls, but found, ultimately, that she could not accept its severe religion.
Mother My Mother does not care for thought. I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled. I always ran Home to Awe when a child, if anything befell me. He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none. ………………………… We were never intimate Mother and Children while she was our Mother — but Mines in the same Ground meet by tunneling and when she became our Child, the Affection came.” She spoke in the same tone to her Norcross cousins: “She was scarcely the aunt you knew. The great mission of pain had been ratified — cultivated to tenderness by persistent sorrow, so that a larger mother died than had she died before.
Dickinson writes about love and death:
“Love is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,/ initial to creation, and
The exponent of breath”.
There is longing in several poems, an unfulfilled neediness: Wild Nights - is probably about Susan Huntingdon, a close friend who married her brother for social and financial security.
Melancholic recollection also sustains eager anticipation in Dickinson’s letters to her sister-in-law, Susie Huntington Gilbert:
I shall grow more and more impatient until that dear day [of Susie’s return] comes, for till now, I have only mourned for you; now I begin to hope for you.
Dickinson imagines them in silence together:
We need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language.
Wild nights - Wild nights!(269) #
Wild nights - Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile - the winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden -
Ah - the Sea!
Might I but moor - tonight -
In thee!
Short elliptical poems say so much with so little, using compressed and pointed, nuanced and ambiguous language. Though some poems adopt a male persona, most poems dramatise the female voice.
Most of the poems we have, were written in just six years, between 1858 and 1864 when she confined herself to er house and garden and eventually to her room. She bound them into small volumes she called fascicles, and forty of these booklets, with more than 1700 poems, were found in her room at her death. She also shared poems with friends in letters.
From the few drafts of letters, that were not destroyed, at her instruction, when she died, it’s apparent that she worked on each letter as a piece of artwork in itself, often picking phrases that she’d used years before.
Katy Waldham, commenting on Alena Smith’s Subversive “Dickinson hears a voice that, “embraces paradox and defies authority.” indicating Emily to be more subversive than she was in life—to espouse, for instance, feminist and anti-racist beliefs. Dickinson’s poetry often seems to emanate from a prison cell in the soul, where strange forms of torture are about to resume. “I felt a funeral, in my Brain,” the poem that titles the episode goes, “And Mourners to and fro / Kept treading - treading - till it seemed / That Sense was breaking through.”
“Emily Dickinson’s Gothic,” a book by the scholar Daneen Wardrop, claims the genre, the gothic has been mostly reserved for fiction, not poetry, “The oppression of domesticity, the quality of being haunted, the suffusedness of the living with the dead,”
The season wasn’t just about sexism in the nineteenth century; it was a gothic study of inner life, a story about how, Smith told me, “women are always trapped in the wrong time.”
James Antoniou - Spectrum Oct 26, 2019 claims Emily is responsible for some of the fiercest, most cognitively-demanding and most deeply-felt poems ever written.
Her eccentricity is increasingly being recognised as strategic rather than whimsical: by adopting an “eccentric” (literally, non-central) approach to poetry, she was able to explore concerns far beyond the parameters of her society. She could, crucially, circumvent the pieties and restrictions that published women poets at the time were expected to accept.
The opening stanzas of Because I could not stop for Death, is a masterful poem about mental deterioration.
Dickinson was interested in psychological extremes and, like John Donne a few centuries before her, used unusual and disjunctive language in order to convey them. In another poem, Dickinson ponders her suffering:
I measure every grief I meet
With narrow, probing eyes,
I wonder if It weighs like Mine*
Or has an easier size.
Suffering feels so singular, as Auden says, it happens when life for others goes on unnoticed.
The goal of the true artist is to give people hope, to get them to love life in all its complexity. To deal with crises – rupture, upheaval – Things falling apart.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314) #
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
Great literature conceals its message and can intrigue you forever. Dickinson expressed her technique in a letter:
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant #
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant–
Success in Circuit lies.
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth’s superb surprise;
As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.”
Oscar Wilde observed that “as soon as you understand a great work of art, it dies for you”.
Her warm personal halting style is full of concise, candid and direct revelation inducing us to trust her intimate moods and feelings. Though she wrote more than 1700 poems, less than ten (seven) were published in her life time and she was not fully appreciated as one of America’s greatest poets until about the 1950’s.
A reclusive individual, (after her mid twenties, she seldom left her house, let alone room) Dickinson dwells on personal introspection, delving into private observations, reflections, aspirations, passions and fears. It is her solitude and asceticism (life of self-denial) that allow her to probe the inner depths of our existence.
Life is full of fanciful illusions #
“Life is full of fanciful illusions
conjured from thin air;
dreams that are hostile to reality,
but dwell in possibilities”
Though she was born to a prominent academic, authoritarian, distant and puritan family, she was headstrong and willful, forging an independent, individual identity, discarding many of their values. While spiritual, she rejected religious piety; though learned, she rejected academia; though personable, she rejected society.
Some of her poetry appears morbid due likely to the many losses in her life, including the mass deaths of many young men in the Civil War.
Though not a pantheist, she may have closely identified with the “druids”, thought to be translated to “wisdom of the trees”, an Earth-based spirituality connecting with the energy of the land, and with animals, plants and natural philosophy. Her greatest delight was the time she spent in their large garden.
There are many biographers of Emily Dickinson listed below: The first two are a must read.
Michael Myers: https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/roots/legacy/dickinson/edbio.html
Lyndall Gordon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/13/emily-dickinson-lyndall-gordon
C.D. Merriman http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/
Biographies online: http://www.biographyonline.net/poets/emily_dickinson.html
Brief: http://www.uta.edu/english/tim/poetry/ed/bio.html
Timeline: http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/timeline
For a brilliant spoof on Dickinson see:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/11/16/emily-dickinson-jerk-of-amherst