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    Emily Dickinson 23-24

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    aliciia705
    This document provides biographical and literary context about American poet Emily Dickinson. It discusses her life, influences, style, and the themes and forms of her poetry. Key points covered include Dickinson's reclusive nature, experimentation with form and punctuation, exploration of themes like death and nature, and influence on later American poetry.

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    Emily Dickinson 23-24

    Uploaded by

    aliciia705
    11 views25 pages
    This document provides biographical and literary context about American poet Emily Dickinson. It discusses her life, influences, style, and the themes and forms of her poetry. Key points covered include Dickinson's reclusive nature, experimentation with form and punctuation, exploration of themes like death and nature, and influence on later American poetry.

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    EMILY DICKINSON 23-24

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    This document provides biographical and literary context about American poet Emily Dickinson. It discusses her life, influences, style, and the themes and forms of her poetry. Key points covered include Dickinson's reclusive nature, experimentation with form and punctuation, exploration of themes like death and nature, and influence on later American poetry.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    11 views25 pages

    Emily Dickinson 23-24

    Uploaded by

    aliciia705
    This document provides biographical and literary context about American poet Emily Dickinson. It discusses her life, influences, style, and the themes and forms of her poetry. Key points covered include Dickinson's reclusive nature, experimentation with form and punctuation, exploration of themes like death and nature, and influence on later American poetry.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 25

    EMILY DICKINSON

    Foundational myths of American


    Literature

    • American exceptionalism: the idea that the United States is inherently different from other nations.
    - American Dream.
    • The notion of reinvention (overarching literary theme).
    • The myth of the frontier Slotkins: “[America’s frontier] was the border between a world of
    possibilities and one of actualities, a world theoretically unlimited and one defined by its limitations”.
     Dickinson was deeply influenced by an ideology of self-reliance; Ralph Waldo Emerson, with
    whom this philosophy is often identified, was one of the writers she most admired (Pollack, 4).
     Dickinson represents the rebellious strain in American culture and the courage to be oneself.
     Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the poets who most demonstrably influenced her.
     Emerson (1803-1882) and Thoreau (1817-1862), are Romantic, self-consciously part of a
    literary/philosophical/theological movement known as "Transcendentalism".
    Walden (1854). Henry David Thoreau

    “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only


    the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I
    came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is
    so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to
    live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put
    to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a
    corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
    Emily Dickinson.

     Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts.


     1790: Religious Revivals and “Second Awakening”.
     Transcendentalism
     Interest in science: Herbarium (Houghton Library, Harvard University):
    https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:4184689$5i
     Little known in her lifetime.
     First publicized in almost mythic terms: as a reclusive, eccentric, death obsessed spinster
    who wrote in fits and starts. (Levine, 1246).
     Complex poems: explore a wide range of subjects: psychic pain and joy, the relationship of
    self to nature, the intensely spiritual, and the intensely ordinary (Ibid, 1246).
     Her many love poems seem to have emerged in part from close relationships with at least
    one woman and several men (Ibid, 1246).
     It is sometimes possible to extract autobiography from her poems, but she was not a
    confessional poet; she used personae -first person speakers- to dramatize the perspectives
    explored in her lyrics (Ibid, 1246).
     800 poems have survived (hundreds of them lost).
     Only ten of her poems were published before her death in 1886 (Pollack and Noble, 16).
     Economically, politically and intellectually prominent family.
     Lived in the family house, called the Homestead.
     Lived with her parents all her life.
     Emily’s close friend (Susan) marries her brother Austin.
     Deepest literary debts to the Bible, classic English authors [Shakespeare and Milton,
    Tennyson, Dickens]. Read Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Brontë sisters, George Eliot,
    Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Levine, 1247).
     “poetic freedom within the confines of the meter of the “fourteener” -seven-beat lines
    usually broken into stanzas alternating four and three beats […] This is the form of nursery
    rhymes, ballads, church hymns and some classic English poetry […]”. (Ibid, 1247).
     If Walt Whitman [following Emerson] turned to an open form – as though rules did not
    exist-Dickinson made use familiar forms only to break their rules.
     “She used dashes and syntactical fragments to convey her pursuit of a truth that could best
    be communicated indirectly” (Ibid, 1247).
    Poem 695
    As if the Sea should part
    And show a further Sea-
    And that – a further- and the Three
    But a presumption be-

    Of periods of Seas-
    Unvisited of Shores-
    Themselves the Verge of Seas to be-
    Eternity – is Those-
    288
    I’m Nobody! Who are you?
    Are you – Nobody – too?
    Then there’s a pair of us!
    Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
    How dreary – to be – Somebody!
    How public – like a Frog –
    To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
    To an admiring Bog!
     Use of enjambment: created ambiguities and demanded an attentive reader.
     Slant rhymes: contributed to the expressive power of her poetry (Levine, 1248). Poetic
    forms thought to be simple, predictable, and safe were altered irrevocably by Dickinson’s
    language experiments.
     Slant rhymes: quatrain that occurs in hymns, called common measure (Abrams, 295).
    (Dickinson most representative): “Poetic forms thought to be simple, predictable, and safe
    were altered irrevocably by Dickinson’s language experiments (Levine, 1248); it’s about
    breaking expectations!
     common meter (8-6-8-6 / abab o abcb), short meter (6-6-8-6 / abab o abcb), long meter (8-
    8-8-8 / abab o aabb), sevens and sixes (7-6-7-6 / abab o abcb) and common particular
    meter (8-8-6-8-8-6 / aabccb).
    Not any higher stands the Grave
    For Heroes than for Men –
    Not any nearer for the Child
    Than numb Three Score and Ten.
    This latest Leisure equal lulls
    The Beggar and his Queen
    Propitiate this Democrat
    A Summer’s Afternoon
     She wrote half of her extant poems during the Civil War.
     Her “nature” poems offer precise observations that are often as much about psychological
    and spiritual matters as about the specifics of nature [her gaze is her biography].
     The sight of a familiar bird- the robin- in the poem beginning “A Bird, came down the
    Walk” leads to a statement about nature’s strangeness rather than the expected statement
    about friendly animals.
    A Bird, came down the Walk - (359)
    A Bird, came down the Walk -
    He did not know I saw -
    He bit an Angle Worm in halves
    And ate the fellow, raw,
    And then, he drank a Dew
    From a convenient Grass -
    And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
    To let a Beetle pass –

    He glanced with rapid eyes,


    That hurried all abroad –
    They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
    He stirred his Velvet Head. -

    Like one in danger, Cautious,


    I offered him a Crumb,
    And he unrolled his feathers,

    And rowed him softer Home -


    Than Oars divide the Ocean,
    Too silver for a seam,
     Openly expressive of sexual and romantic longings, her personae reject conventional gender roles. In one of
    her most famous poems, for instance, she imagines herself as a “Loaded Gun” with “the power to kill”
    [unexpected metaphors; compare to renaissance].

    My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -


    In Corners - till a Day
    The Owner passed - identified -
    And carried Me away -

    Though I than He - may longer live


    He longer must - than I -
    For I have but the power to kill,
    Without - the power to die -
     Use of ellipsis, syntactical alterations:
     “To his simplicity/To die – was little Fate – /If Duty live – contented/But her Confederate”.
    (Dickinson’s elegy to her father).
     Use of dashes and capital letters (Dickinson’s hallmark).
     Marks of her style.
     Dashes: room for interpretation.
     “a Pen has so many inflections and a Voice but one” (Letter to Higginson, 1876).
     Dashes: enhance syntactic ambiguity.
     “The Frogs sing sweet – today – They have such pretty – lazy – times –” (406). (impose a rhythm,
    imitated frogs’ croak).
     Punctuation transcends the confines of formal expression.
     New unexpected metaphors: “My life had stood – a Loaded Gun” (Life=Gun).
     Oximoron: “an Honor Honorless” (713) or “fond ambush” (338).
     Dickinson’s private letters […] have convinced biographers that she fell in love a number
    of times [Benjamin Newton, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, her sister-in-law] (Levine, 1248).
     Only ten poems appeared during her lifetime.
     She sent four poems to Thomas Higginson [editor at the Atlantic Monthly], after he printed
    “Letter to a Young Contributor” in 1862. Her cover letter asked him “Are you too deeply
    occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”.
     He became one of the editors of her posthumously published poetry.
     Dickinson and Whitman are the nineteenth-century poets who exerted the greatest
    influence on American poetry to come.
    Envelope poems (1864-1885)

    In this short Life


    that only lasts an hour
    merely
    How much -how
    little – is
    within power
     Envelope poems.
     Found among the makeshift and improvised manuscripts of Dickinson’s later writings
    (messages and notes that have been compiled and published).
     The earliest envelope poem: 1864.
     Testing the relationship between message and medium.
     The complete collection in The Gorgeous Nothings: Werner and visual artist Jen Bervin
    (2013).
    Bibliography

     Abrams, M.H. & Geoffrey Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Heinle & Heinle,
    2008.
     Levine, R. ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 2 vols. Norton, 2017.
     Pollak, V. (ed.) A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson, Oxford University Press, 2004.

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