Dickinson, Emily. (1830 - 1886).

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

- considered 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 century geniuses to resist the influence of the British genteel forms: Whitman invented the American free verse unrhymed and unmeasured, Dickinson invented the free form of England’s most common poem = the hymn

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

C o n t e n t :

- poetry of dazzling originality: reflected her reading of English poets and R. W. Emerson x but: remained the least imitative of American poets

- untouched by her political environment, no social poet

- expressed the paradoxes and dilemmas of the self in their philosophical 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 religion

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

- avoided a Christian point of view x but: employed Christian symbols: especially damnation, salvation, crucifixion, and heaven

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

(b) Nature Observer:

- memorialised and appreciated the New England 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 adjectives after nouns, omits auxiliaries, and challenges grammatical categories – ‘We Talk in Careless’ (adjective in the function of a noun), ‘I lingered with Before’ (preposition 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