From literary scholars and professionals to undergraduate college students to the high school student in an English class, Emily Dickinson is a renowned and beloved poet to analyze and study. Many people have studied the biography of her life in Amherst Massachusetts. Many have looked at her verse in comparison to other poets at the time like Walt Whitman. Still, through letters and one thousand seven hundred seventy-five poems, her work is still looked at in a vacuum. In this age of New Criticism where work is looked at from close readings and explications, readers tend to move past a cultural and historical perspective that can shed light on racial, social and political issues of the time. In particular, the Civil War (1861-1865) were critical years for poet Emily Dickinson that has been until recently looked over by scholars. Perhaps what should be done is to look at New Criticism through the lens …show more content…
Though no exact location is given, this poem may discuss according The Companion to Emily Dickinson that this was the Battle of Antietam which took place in September of 1862. It is described as “renowned and one of the bloodiest of the war, in which 6,000 men died and 170,000 were wounded (Smith 167).” It is also speculated that the son in this poem may referencing Frazar Sterns, the one Emily wrote the letter about to her cousin. He was the son of Amherst College’s president and a beloved friend of her brother Austin Dickinson. The Companion notes that some details in the poem do not match Stearns ' life story, his mother died during his childhood, a detail that suggests Dickinson may have had him partly in mind writing this poem (Smith 115).” Though, of course, that cannot be factually
Emily Dickinson’s response to the Civil War was once discounted as nonexistent, but in the last few decades her works have been added to the Civil War canon. The previous belief that Dickinson’s poetry was not influenced by the Civil War is preposterous given that her most successful years as a poet coincided with the Civil War. Like any American during the war, she too experienced loss when a person from her childhood had been killed in a battle, and she kept her correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson throughout the war. No American was left unscathed; the war had influenced the country in many different ways – political, personal, and literary. This is why it would be the most logical to assume Dickinson had written about the Civil
“Although Emily Dickinson is known as one of America’s best and most beloved poets, her extraordinary talent was not recognized until after her death” (Kort 1). Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she spent most of her life with her younger sister, older brother, semi-invalid mother, and domineering father in the house that her prominent family owned. As a child, she was curious and was considered a bright student and a voracious reader. She graduated from Amherst Academy in 1847, and attended a female seminary for a year, which she quitted as she considered that “’I [she] am [was] standing alone in rebellion [against becoming an ‘established Christian’].’” (Kort 1) and was homesick. Afterwards, she excluded herself from having a social life, as she took most of the house’s domestic responsibilities, and began writing; she only left Massachusetts once. During the rest of her life, she wrote prolifically by retreating to her room as soon as she could. Her works were influenced ...
Emily Dickinson was born December 10th, 1830 in her family home on main street in Amherst, Massachusetts to her two parents Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson. The homestead in which she was born was a family home owned by her grandparents who, soon after her sister’s birth in 1833, sold it out of the family. The Dickinson’s held residence in the home as tenants for the next seven years. Once her father’s political career took off, around the age she was nine, they moved to, and bought a new house in the same town. Dickinson was very close to her siblings, her older brother Austin and younger sister Lavinia. She had a strong attachment to her home and spent a lot of her time doing domestic duties such as baking and gardening. Dickinson also had good schooling experiences of a girl in the early nineteenth century. She started out her education in an Amherst district school, then from there she attended Amherst Academy with her sister for about seven years. At this school it is said that she was an extraordinary student with very unique writing talent. From there she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a year in 1847. this year was the longest she had spent away from home. In her youth, Dickinson displayed a social s...
Emily Dickinson was a polarizing author whose love live has intrigued readers for many years. Her catalog consists of many poems and stories but the one thing included in the majority of them is love. It is documented that she was never married but yet love is a major theme in a vast amount of her poetry. Was there a person that she truly loved but never had the chance to pursue? To better understand Emily Dickinson, one must look at her personal life, her poems, and her diction.
Recognized for experimenting with poetry, Emily Dickinson is said to be one of the greatest American poets. Her work was an amazing success even after being published four years after her death in 1890. Eleven editions of Dickinson’s work were published in less than two years. Emily Dickenson’s personal life, literary influences and romantic sufferings were the main inspirations for her poetry.
In conclusion, it can be stated the examples of Emily Dickinson's work discussed in this essay show the poetess to be highly skilled in the use of humor and irony. The use of these two tools in her poems is to stress a point or idea the poetess is trying to express, rather than being an end in themselves. These two tools allow her to present serious critiques of her society and the place she feels she has been allocated into by masking her concerns in a light-hearted, irreverent tone.
Emily Dickinson is one of the great visionary poets of nineteenth century America. In her lifetime, she composed more poems than most modern Americans will even read in their lifetimes. Dickinson is still praised today, and she continues to be taught in schools, read for pleasure, and studied for research and criticism. Since she stayed inside her house for most of her life, and many of her poems were not discovered until after her death, Dickinson was uninvolved in the publication process of her poetry. This means that every Dickinson poem in print today is just a guess—an assumption of what the author wanted on the page. As a result, Dickinson maintains an aura of mystery as a writer. However, this mystery is often overshadowed by a more prevalent notion of Dickinson as an eccentric recluse or a madwoman. Of course, it is difficult to give one label to Dickinson and expect that label to summarize her entire life. Certainly she was a complex woman who could not accurately be described with one sentence or phrase. Her poems are unique and quite interestingly composed—just looking at them on the page is pleasurable—and it may very well prove useful to examine the author when reading her poems. Understanding Dickinson may lead to a better interpretation of the poems, a better appreciation of her life’s work. What is not useful, however, is reading her poems while looking back at the one sentence summary of Dickinson’s life.
Hughes Gertrude Reif. (Spring 1986). Subverting the Cult of Domesticity: Emily Dickinson’s Critique of Woman’s Work. Legacy. Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 17-2
Emily Dickinson lived in an era of Naturalism and Realism (1855-1910). She lived in a period of The Civil War and the Frontier. She was affected by her life and the era she lived in. She also had many deaths in her family and that’s part of the reason that she was very morbid and wrote about death.
Breaking news revealing the truth about Emily Dickinson’s life has recently been uncovered. For the past hundred-plus years literary historians believed Dickinson to be a plain and quiet type of person who did not communicate with the public for most of her life. Her romanticism poetry drew attention from fellow literary legends. After corresponding with the well-known Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who showed interest in her work but advised her not to publish it, she became defiant to publish any of her work.
Porter, David T. The Art of Emily Dickinson’s Early Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966. Print.
Literary Analysis of Emily Dickinson's Poetry. Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous authors in American history, and a good amount of that can be attributed to her uniqueness in writing. In Emily Dickinson's poem 'Because I could not stop for Death,' she characterizes her overarching theme of Death differently than it is usually described through the poetic devices of irony, imagery, symbolism, and word choice. Emily Dickinson likes to use many different forms of poetic devices and Emily's use of irony in poems is one of the reasons they stand out in American poetry. In her poem 'Because I could not stop for Death,' she refers to 'Death' in a good way.
Kennedy, X. J.. "Two Critical Casebooks: Critics on Emily Dickinson." An introduction to poetry. 13 ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966. 343-344. Print.
Guthrie, James R. Emily Dickinson's Vision: Illness and Identity in Her Poetry. Gainesville: University of Florida, 1998. Print.
Psychological criticism is known as the type of criticism that analyses the writer’s work within the realms of Freud’s psychological theories. Such approach can be used when trying to reconstruct an author’s position throughout their literary writings, as well as understanding whom the author was and how their mind created such works. When considering the work of Emily Dickinson, psychoanalytic criticism comes into play with the role of explaining the many meanings behind her poetry, as to make the reader relate to such poetry on a deeper level or not to who she was as a human being.