(38) Emily Dickinson: Innovation of her Poetry and its Influence upon the Next Century.

E m i l y  D i c k i n s o n  ( 1 8 3 0 – 8 6 )

L i f e :

- led one of the most prosaic lives of any great poet: except for a few brief trips spent her entire life in her father’s house, eventually seeing no visitors

- consid. eccentric: her constant wearing of white, withdrawal from social interchange, abandonment of attendance at the Congregational Church, etc. x but: reserved her energies for her genius

W o r k :

- together with W. Whitman the only 19^th c. geniuses to resist the infl. of the Br. genteel forms: W. invented the Am. free verse unrhymed and unmeasured, D. invented the free form of En.’s most common poem = the hymn

- publ. only a dozen poems in her lifetime, her almost 2,000 poems discovered after her death and publ. completely only in 1955

C o n t e n t :

- poetry of dazzling orig.: reflected her reading of E poets and R. W. Emerson x but: remained the least imitative of Am. poets

- untouched by her political environment, no social poet

- expressed the paradoxes and dilemmas of the self in their philos. and tragic dimension, the tension of human consciousness in the terrible slipperiness of reality

- often began with assertion and affirmation x but: ended in qualification and question, if not outright denial

- wrote on the theme of inwardness and inner life in the context of the milieu of her own mind

- produced a thematically heft and verbally dense poetry structure

(a) Metaphysical Poet:

- brought up in conventional Protestantism x but: unable to believe in institutional relig.

- conc. with the metaphysical questions of mortality, renunciation, perfection, and existential meaning

- avoided a Christian POV x but: employed Christian symbols: esp. damnation, salvation, crucifixion, and heaven

- frequently used blasphemy: God, the torturer, ‘scalps your naked Soul’

(b) Nature Observer:

- memorialised and appreciated the New En. seasons in all their variety: ‘I see — New Englandly —’

- observed a bird eating a worm raw, a snake thrilling her, etc.

(c) Psychological Analyst:

- herself a subject to extremes of anxiety and depression

- when ‘the Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —’ she watches, then reports

(d) Love poet, social satirist, observer of people, poet of aesthetic reflection, etc.

- her early poetry, when weak, displays hysteria, self-absorption, and a coy whimsicality

=> her mature poetry: disciplines hysteria by an intellectual analysis, self-absorption by a meditation on the human lot, and whimsicality by a relaxed self-irony and irony on the universe

F o r m :

- poetry of startling poetic and grammatical inventiveness

- aphoristic style: compact, compresses the meaning in a very few words, and omits titles

- forceful language: shifts adj. after nouns, omits aux., and challenges grammatical categories – ‘We Talk in Careless’ (adj. in the function of a noun), ‘I lingered with Before’ (prep. in the function of a noun), etc.

- iambic meters; imprecise, slant rhymes

- typically irregular and often idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalisation, abundance of long disruptive dashes

- composition by phrase: each marked off by a dash with a space before and after, puts emphasis on each impress of the mind for a rhetorical emphasis or musical pointing

Also wrote following poems of distinction:

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes”, “Because I could not stop for Death”, “A bird came down the walk”, “Hope is the thing with feathers”, “I died for Beauty — but was scarce”, “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died”, “My life closed twice before its close”, “There’s a certain Slant of light”, “This is my letter to the World”, “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee”