Notes on Emily Dickinson

Her Poems:

• She had over 1000 brief lyrics

• They are her "letter to the world"

• They are records of life about her

• They are records of tiny ecstasies

• They are records of candid insights into her own states of consciousness

• They are records on the timeless mysteries of love and death

Her Subject Matter:

• God

• Prayer

• Salvation

• Immortality

• Damnation

• Heaven

• Hell

• Nature

• Love

• Beauty

• Fear / Anguish

• Renunciation / Loss

• Sickness / Starvation

• Pain / Death

Her Themes:

• A sense of loss.

• The idea of Nature as both a threat and a source of joy and comfort.

• The ecstasy and dangers of love.

• The tension between faith and doubt.

• A fascination with death.  (Death is typically personified as a monarch, a lord, or a kindly but irresistible lover.)

Important Elements in Her Poetry:

• Her diction (choice of words)

• The balance of abstract (Latinate) and concrete (Anglo-Saxon) words

• The use of paradox

• The use of irony

• The use of personification

• The unusual metaphors

• The unusual conceits

• Her "moods" vary greatly -- melancholy to exuberance, grief to joy, leaden despair to spiritual intoxication.

Her Meters:

• Common to Protestant Hymn Books

• Hymn stanzas follow a common meter and form (e.g. four-line stanzas)

• Hymn stanzas follow a traditional rhyme scheme (e.g. xaxa or aabccb)

• Some say she "invented" a "free" form of England's most common poem, the hymn.

Her Rhymes:

• About 40% of her rhymes are exact (true) rhymes -- sod/God, store/more (poem 49)

• Near (slant, imperfect) rhyme with similar vowels -- run/come (poem 214), prose/doors (poem 657)

• Consonantal rhyme -- tell/still (poem 165), peer/pare (poem 585)

• Identical rhyme -- long/along (poem 324)

• Visual rhyme -- one/stone (poem 303)

• Suspended rhyme, having only similar final sounds -- house/place (poem 670), most/least (poem 670), away/civility (poem 712), chill/tulle (poem 712)

Her "Romanticism":

• Her coyness

• Her sentimentality

• Some of her views of Nature -- harmonious relationships with Nature

• Her tendency to look inwardly

• Her tendency to look beyond the actual

Her "Violations" of Poetic Conventions (her realism):

• Her rough, irregular rhythms

• Her imperfect rhymes (off-rhyme, near-rhyme, slant-rhyme)

• Faulty grammar

• Faulty spelling

• Faulty punctuation

Some readers of Dickinson's poetry have found it morbid and oppressive because of her emphasis on:

• Fear and anguish

• Renunciation and loss

• Sickness and starvation

• Pain and death

• (Think about her use of such subjects to portray mankind's spiritual and emotional needs and to portray mankind's predicament in a world of anguish and mortality.)

Some Quotes:

"Her mind was charged with paradox, as though her vision, like the eyes of birds, was focused in opposite directions on the two worlds of material and immaterial values."

"Like Emerson, her preference for the intrinsic and the essential led her often to a gnomic concision of phrase."  (Gnomic means "wise and pithy, full of aphorisms."  An aphorism is a "short, pointed sentence expressing a wise or clever observation or a general truth.")

"[Her] artistry [was in the] modulation of simple meters."

"[She had a] delicate management of imperfect rhymes."

"[Her] images [were] kinesthetic" (meaning  highly concentrated and intensely charged with feeling).

"The sense of limitation is her greatest spiritual strength."

Contrasting and Comparing Whitman and Dickinson:

Some Questions:

1.)  Which of the two poets seems to speak more to the 20th-21st centuries?

2.)  Does she exhibit, like Whitman, a desire to create new poetic vocabularies, new modes of literary expression?