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historical analys of emily dickinson
women and literature
women and literature
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Only a very few pieces of an American poet Emily Dickinson were published during her lifetime. The majority, more than seventeen hundred of them, became available to public after her death. Dickinson’s poems are short, unique, and lack a title. Common topics are death, immortality, and the role of a woman. Dickinson was not famous during her life, and she wanted her books to be burnt after she died. However, they were published, and she is now one of the most renowned American poets. The poem “Fame is a bee” (1763) expresses her view of fame, but it is not clear whether she really had no interest in being famous, or whether it was her desire, the path to immortality.
In the first line Dickinson uses a metaphor when she states that “Fame is a bee”, and she continues by explaining why it is true. Fame possesses everything that bee does – “song”, “sting”, and “wing”. “It has a song” (line 2) can be interpreted as that fame is very attractive. People wish to be famous because it opens a door to many desirable items and great experiences. Bee’s “song” is honey it produces. Honey is swe...
Along with the selected reading above, Dickinson’s work reflects a strong reverence for the natural world. This appreciation for nature is conveyed through a number of references and reoccurring images. In poem #627,
During the late nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) featured as one of the few female poets in the largely male-dominated sphere of American literature. Although she authored 1800 poems, only seven were published during her lifetime - why? Emily Dickinson has always provoked debate; over her life, her motivations for the words she wrote and the interpretations of those words. It can be argued that Emily Dickinson herself, was as ambiguous, as misunderstood and as elusive as her poetry. As a outlet for relentless examination of every aspect of her mind and faith her poems are both expository and puzzling. Her conclusions are often cryptically implicit and largely dependant on the readers ability to put together the pieces - to see the connections and implications. Amy Lowell said "She was the mistress of suggestion....and to a lesser degree, irony" The ruses and riddles in her poems came from her; and as such she too was a riddle.
Emily Dickinson was a different type of poet that has people thinking of things people would never think about in another author’s work. Dickinson was born and raised with the rich life with only two siblings. Her work was inspired by her much of her childhood and the people she interacted with. An example of Dickinson’s different type of style is, “ So I conclude that space and time are things of the body and have little or nothing to do with ourselves. My Country is Truth,”(Berry) Emily Dickinson did not share hardly any of her writing when she was alive. According to Berry,” With the exception of six poems that appeared in newspapers at various times, and another that appeared in a collection of stories and poems in 1878, Emily Dickinson never published her work,” (Berry) Even though Dickinson wrote differently, does not mean she had a different lifestyle compared to most people today. Dickinson was an outstanding American poet where her childhood, family and friends, religion, and education inspired most of her poetry.
Emily Dickinson is one of the most well known poets of her time. Though her life was outwardly uneventful, what went on inside her house behind closed doors is unbelievable. After her father died she met Reverend Charles Wadsworth. She soon came to regard him as one of her most trusted friends, and she created in his image the “lover'; whom she was never to know except in her imagination. It is also said that it was around 1812 when he was removed to San Fransico that she began her withdrawal from society. During this time she began to write many of her poems. She wrote mainly in private, guarding all of her poems from all but a few select friends. She did not write for fame, but instead as a way of expressing her feelings. In her lifetime only six of her poems were even printed; none of which had her consent. It was not until her death of Brights Disease in May of 1862, that many of her poems were even read (Chelsea House of Library Criticism 2837). Thus proving that the analysis on Emily Dickinson’s poetry is some of the most emotionally felt works of the nineteenth century.
Poetry is defined as literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm whether collectively or as a genre of literature. I chose to do all three poems by the one of our four great American poets, Emily Dickinson. The poems I have chosen to are, “Because I could not stop for death”, “Success is counted sweetest”, and “Triumph may be of several kinds”. The theme of each individual poem and its true interpreted meaning will be the focus of this paper.
Much has been said about Emily Dickinson’s mystifying poetry and private life, especially during the years 1860-63. Allegedly it was during these years that the poetess, at the most prolific phase of her career, withdrew from society, began to wear her “characteristic” white dress and suffered a series of psychotic episodes. Dickinson tended to “theatricalize” herself by speaking through a host of personae in her poems and by “fictionalizing” her inner life as a gothic romance (Gilbert 584). Believing that a poem is “the best words in the best order” (to quote S.T. Coleridge) and that all the poems stemming from a single consciousness bring to surface different aspects / manifestations of the same personal mythology, I will firstly disregard biographical details in my interpretation of Dickinson’s poems 378, 341 and 280 and secondly place them in a sort of “continuum” (starting with 378 and ending with 280) to show how they attempt to describe a “plunge” into the Unconscious and a lapse into madness (I refrain from using the term “journey,” for it implies a “telos,” a goal which, whether unattainable or not, is something non-existent in the poems in question). Faced with the problem of articulating and concretizing inner psychological states, Dickinson created a totally new poetic discourse which lacks a transcendental signified and thus can dramatize the three stages of a (narrated) mental collapse: existential despair, withdrawal from the world of the senses and “death” of consciousness.
The speaker in the poem realizes that she has the potential to be a queen, and she didn't want to give up on that dream. She wanted to get away from her drudge-like surroundings that had once killed her spirit. She would ‘rise above the fray’ and get away from “the engine that killed her- the mausoleum, the wax house.” The beehive had become more of a prison, and she wants to get away from it very badly.
Emily Dickinson, who achieved more fame after her death, is said to be one of the greatest American poets of all time. Dickinson communicated through letters and notes and according to Amy Paulson Herstek, author of “Emily Dickinson: Solitary and Celebrated Poet,” “Writing was the way she kept in touch with the world” (15). Dickinson’s style is unique and although unconventional, it led to extraordinary works of literature. Dickinson lived her life in solitude, but in her solitude she was free to read, write and think which led to her nonconformity and strong sense of individualism. Suzanne Juhasz, a biographer of Dickinson, sums up most critics’ idea of Dickinson ideally: “Emily Dickinson is at once the most intimate of poets, and the most guarded. The most self-sufficient, and the neediest. The proudest, and the most vulnerable. These contradictions, which we as her readers encounter repeatedly in her poems, are understandable, not paradoxical, for they result from the tension between the life to which she was born and the one to which she aspired” (1). Dickinson poured her heart and soul into over 1,700
Emily Dickinson was one of the greatest woman poets. She left us with numerous works that show us her secluded world. Like other major artists of nineteenth-century American introspection such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville, Dickinson makes poetic use of her vacillations between doubt and faith. The style of her first efforts was fairly conventional, but after years of practice she began to give room for experiments. Often written in the meter of hymns, her poems dealt not only with issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the power and limits of language.
Emily is still one of the most well respected and influential writers today. All the things that happened in her life affected how she wrote and what she wrote about. Emily suffered through a lot of death,but through this, death became one of her main themes in her poetry. Due to her love for nature Emily made it one of her prominent themes as well. Other things such as the civil war, time and eternity, and death are presented as common themes. Most of her life was spent in seclusion, but this seclusion led to her beautiful writings,which influenced other poets and the literature world in general. Emily Dickinson will forever be recognized as an astonishing writer.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 10th December, 1830, in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts. As a young child, she showed a bright intelligence, and was able to create many recognizable writings. Many close friends and relatives in Emily’s life were taken away from her by death. Living a life of simplicity and aloofness, she wrote poetry of great power: questioning the nature of immortality and death. Although her work was influenced by great poets of the time, she published many strong poems herself. Two of Emily Dickinson’s famous poems, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “I Heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died”, are both about life’s one few certainties, death, and that is where the similarities end.
“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 ...
Many of her poems were a reaction to the rejection of many publishers and other literary critics. This particular poem’s character comes from Dickinson’s reaction to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement that “poets are thus liberating gods.” Here she is challenging the established literati by questioning popular Emersonian views. In particular, this poem is a reaction to Emerson’s belief that “the poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.” Basically, it is a reaction to the idea that the poet is the creator of beautiful words, liberating the common people by giving them words they would not have access to.
Dickinson didn’t always wish to be an unpublished and unknown writer and at one point “began her career with a normal appetite for recognition.” (Wilbur) It is seen in her poem “Success is counted sweetest (112)” how she seems to praise an unknown success. Dickinson’s poems were numbers by when they were believed to have been written and as this was almost 150 poems before “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” it can be assumed it was during the time of her still wishing to be published. The third and fourth line in the poem state “To comprehend a nectar/ Requires sorest need” (3,4) in which the narrator is calling to attention that to truly enjoy the feeling of success you must truly want it to the point that you are suffering or feel like you would die without it. It contrasts greatly with her poem “260” where she believes it “dreary – to be- somebody” (5) and doesn’t wish to advertise herself at all or have success.
Throughout Emily Dickinson’s poetry there is a reoccurring theme of death and immortality. The theme of death is further separated into two major categories including the curiosity Dickinson held of the process of dying and the feelings accompanied with it and the reaction to the death of a loved one. Two of Dickinson’s many poems that contain a theme of death include: “Because I Could Not Stop For Death,” and “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”