Emily Dickinson
(1830-1866)
from: "Fields of Vision” by D.Delaney
Life
Family background Emily Dickinson
was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. Her father was a
successful lawyer and a prominent member of the community who raised his
children according to austere Puritan principles. During her early years Emily
was witty and sociable, but from her mid-twenties she began to withdraw from
the outside world.
Retreat into reclusion By the
age of thirty she had become a total recluse, living her life in total
isolation: "You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog
large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because
they know, but do not tell” (from: Letter to Mr. Higginson,
received April 26, 1862). For over twenty years she
never left her father’s house, wore only white clothes and received very few
guests. The townspeople of Amherst
referred to her as "The Myth”.
Poetry and letter-writing Dickinson
was an avid reader and letter writer and exchanged letters with a large number
of people, some of whom she never met personally. She submitted some of the
2,000 poems she wrote for publication, but only seven were published in her
lifetime. Her contemporaries found her work bewildering.
Love and the outside world There is much speculation about her emotional life and it has been
suggested that there was a disappointed love affair. Her interest in the
outside world was so minimal that even events such as the Civil War that
ravaged the country in the years 1861-1865 had little or no impact on her.
Published posthumously
After her death in 1886 her sister found her poems, all bound up in handmade
booklets. The first volumes of her poetry to be published appeared in 1890 and
1891.
Works
Traditional themes/original style During her reclusive life Emily Dickinson wrote almost 2,000 poems,
mostly short lyrics in simple quatrains and almost all untitled and undated. In
her poetry she scrutinized the material world that surrounded her and the inner
world of her emotions. The subjects of her poems are traditional – love,
nature, religion and mortality. However, her treatment of these subjects is
highly original. Early publishers corrected her eccentric punctuation, which
included the frequent use of dashes, seemingly random capitalization of nouns,
ungrammatical sentences and broken meter.
Metaphysical influence The
influence of the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets can be seen in the
intensity of the emotions she expressed and her use of startling metaphors.
Inner struggle and nature Her poetry often reveals a painful inner struggle that may have been
caused by religious doubts. Although she could not accept the doctrines of
orthodox religion, she seemed to long for the comforts of unquestioned faith.
Hers is the poetry of funerals, volcanoes, storms, and shipwrecks, but it is
also the poetry of butterflies, birds and sunrays. Her ability to capture in
words the smallest detail of nature was one of her greatest talents.
Reputation
Initially Emily Dickinson was consider to be an eccentric minor poet. Today she
is regarded as one of the outstanding poets of the nineteenth century and a
major influence on the poets of the twentieth century.
External Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson
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