More info Learn more about us Blog Future writers Explore further. Emily Dickinson. Early life and poetry beginnings Emily Dickinson was a well-known American poet who continues to be influential and prominent in the literary world today, more than two centuries after her death. Emily Dickinson's popular poetry As stated previously, Emily Dickinson was the author of nearly eighteen hundred poems over her lifetime.
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Thanks for filling that out. Check your inbox for an email about the scholarship and how to apply. OK, close this. Emily Dickinson also had a powerful curiosity and highly developed intelligence.
This gave her a passion for life that was euphoric. She was able to appreciate intellectual and worldly creations at a higher level than most people. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Ben Davis January 22, What makes Emily Dickinson unique?
What made Emily Dickinson different from other poets? How public is like a frog? Tabernacle or tomb, Or dome of worm, Or porch of gnome, Or some elf's catacomb. If all her poems were of this sort there would be nothing more to say; but such poems are exceptions.
Because we happen to possess full records of her varying poetic moods, published, not with the purpose of selecting her most artistic work, but with the intention of revealing very significant human documents, we are not justified in singling out a few bizarre poems and subjecting these to skeptical scrutiny.
The poems taken in their entirety are a surprising and impressive revelation of poetic attitude and of poetic method in registering spiritual experiences. To the general reader many of the poems seem uninspired, imperfect, crude, while to the student of the psychology of literary art they offer most stimulating material for examination, because they enable one to penetrate into poetic origins, into radical, creative energy.
However, it is not with the body of her collected poems but with the selected, representative work that the general reader is concerned. Assuredly we do not judge an artist by his worst, but by his best, productions; we endeavor to find the highest level of his power and thus to discover the typical significance of his work. To gratify the aesthetic sense was never Emily Dickinson's desire; she despised the poppy and mandragora of felicitous phrases which lull the spirit to apathy and emphasize art for art's sake.
Poetry to her was the expression of vital meanings, the transfer of passionate feeling and of deep conviction. Her work is essentially lyric; it lacks the slow, retreating harmonies of epic measures, it does not seek to present leisurely details of any sort; its purpose is to objectify the swiftly-passing moments and to give them poignant expression.
Lyric melody finds many forms in her work. Her repressed and austere verses, inexpansive as they are, have persistent appeal. Slow, serene movement gives enduring beauty to these elegiac stanzas:—. Let down the bars, O Death! The tired flocks come in Whose bleating ceases to repeat, Whose wandering is done. Thine is the stillest night, Thine the securest fold; Too near thou art for seeking thee, Too tender to be told. The opposite trait of buoyant alertness is illustrated in the cadences of the often-quoted lines on the hummingbird:—.
A route of evanescence With a revolving wheel; A resonance of emerald, A rush of cochineal. Between these two margins come many wistful, pleading, or triumphant notes. The essential qualities of her music are simplicity and quivering responsiveness to emotional moods.
Idea and expression are so indissolubly fused in her work that no analysis of her style and manner can be attempted without realizing that every one of her phrases, her changing rhythms, is a direct reflection of her personality.
The objective medium is entirely conformable to the inner life, a life of peculiarly dynamic force which agitates, arouses, spurs the reader. The secret of Emily Dickinson's wayward power seems to lie in three special characteristics, the first of which is her intensity of spiritual experience. Hers is the record of a soul endowed with unceasing activity in a world not material, but one where concrete facts are the cherished revelation of divine significances.
Inquisitive always, alert to the inner truths of life, impatient of the brief destinies of convention, she isolated herself from the petty demands of social amenity. A sort of tireless, probing energy of mental action absorbed her, yet there is little speculation of a purely philosophical sort in her poetry. Her stubborn beliefs, learned in childhood, persisted to the end—her conviction that life is beauty, that love explains grief, and that immortality endures.
The quality of her writing is profoundly stirring, because it betrays, not the intellectual pioneer, but the acutely observant woman, whose capacity for feeling was profound. It has been argued that Dickinson refused publication exactly because it was synonymous with print, whose standardizing tendencies she knew would miscarry her precision effects. To write this paragraph, I looked hard at an envelope: what a mercurial object it is, more like origami than like a sheet of paper.
She wrote within, and occasionally across, the folds and creases of this complex surface. To read the lines, you have to turn the image counterclockwise. The vertical column of the first panel then becomes a broad horizon, which, when the poet runs out of space, picks up on the third blank panel.
The pleasures and the challenges of this kind of reading are impossible to ignore; next to a clear facsimile of these manuscripts, a print version seems, at best, a kind of crude trot. Handwritten letters express a far greater variety of sounds than printed ones. And, if the letters are sounds, so, too, are the spaces between the letters, the margins and gaps, the shape and other material aspects of the paper she chose.
Her idiosyncratic punctuation sometimes feels like triage for the emergency conditions of her muse. Her dashes stand for all the nonessential and time-taking aspects of syntax: she is a process poet even in her finished drafts, preserving the urgency of composition.
Time, on these little scraps, is a function of space: both run out at the same instant. It defeats categorization.
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