In 'Much Madness is divinest Sense' (435), a definition poem, Emily Dickinson criticizes society's inability to accept rebellion, arguing that the majority is the side that should in fact be considered 'mad.' The perception of madness and insanity are a common theme among Dickinson's poetry, as she fought against society's tainted view of herself as crazy. She focuses on how judgmental society is on non conformist views when she describes the majority as 'discerning' (line 2). As similar to most of her poetry, she writes in iambic meter and uses slant rhyme, as lines one, three, and seven end with 'Sense', 'Madness', 'dangerous', and lines six and eight, in 'sane' and 'Chain' in seemingly rhyme scheme. Dickinson credits the majority with prevailing, however, anyone who disagrees is considered a threat to society and sentenced to punishment.
MacDonald agues that 'Much Madness in divinest Sense,' (435) features one of Dickinson?s more disturbing themes, using ?dark imagery of confinement and fear? (1) to draw the reader into the subject of madness. A division between society?s view of acceptable and appropriate is made between that which is considered against the norm, or mad. Tying into a current issue at the time MacDonald suggests among contemporary writers of the time, Dickinson?s poetry is in response to the Civil War, as it questions ?the purity of the nation,? (1) challenging readers to understand the sanity of the war itself. However, this critique does not limit Dickinson?s poem in response to the Civil War, as ?madness? can suggest more than simply the immorality of slavery in the late 1880s. This ?madness? is also compared with the normalcy during the 1800s that ?women should marry and lead lives for the benef...
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...fined only by authority. Dickinson does not conform to society?s norm with her slanted rhyme scheme, random capitalization, and peculiar use of punctuation, fitting herself into the society?s view of ?mad?. She illustrates to the reader that individually, we have the choice whether or not to choose the desires set for ourselves or conform to the desires others have for us. Through her writing Dickinson also proves the awareness she had of the perception society held of her.
Works Cited:
Kattleman, Beth. Poetry for Students, Vol. 16, Gale 2002. Critical Essay
Source Database: Literature Resource Center
MacDonald, Deneka Candace. Poetry for Students, Vol. 16, Gale 2002. Critical Essay
Source Database: Literature Resource Center
Oates, Joyce Carol. Soul at the White Heat: The Romance of Emily Dickinson?s Poetry.
Vol. 13, No. 4. 1987. pp. 806-824.
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
The dash in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, initially edited away as a sign of incompletion, has since come to be seen as crucial to the impact of her poems. Critics have examined the dash from a myriad of angles, viewing it as a rhetorical notation for oral performance, a technique for recreating the rhythm of a telegraph, or a subtraction sign in an underlying mathematical system.1 However, attempting to define Dickinson’s intentions with the dash is clearly speculative given her varied dash-usage; in fact, one scholar illustrated the fallibility of one dash-interpretation by applying it to one of Dickinson’s handwritten cake recipes (Franklin 120). Instead, I begin with the assumption that “text” as an entity involving both the reading and writing of the material implies a reader’s attempt to recreate the act of writing as well as the writer’s attempt to guide the act of reading. I will focus on the former, given the difficulties surrounding the notion of authorial intention a.k.a. the Death of the Author. Using three familiar Dickinson poems—“The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” “The Soul selects her own Society,” and “This was a Poet—It is that,”—I contend that readers can penetrate the double mystery of Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life and lyrically dense poetry by enjoying a sense of intimacy not dependent upon the content of her poems. The source of this intimacy lies in her remarkable punctuation. Dickinson’s unconventionally-positioned dashes form disjunctures and connections in the reader’s understanding that create the impression of following Dickinson through the creative process towards intimacy with the poet herself.
objects that may not fit into the every day norm. In Emily Dickinson's "Much Madness is
Approaching Emily Dickinson’s poetry as one large body of work can be an intimidating and overwhelming task. There are obvious themes and images that recur throughout, but with such variation that seeking out any sense of intention or order can feel impossible. When the poems are viewed in the groupings Dickinson gave many of them, however, possible structures are easier to find. In Fascicle 17, for instance, Dickinson embarks upon a journey toward confidence in her own little world. She begins the fascicle writing about her fear of the natural universe, but invokes the unknowable and religious as a means of overcoming that fear throughout her life and ends with a contextualization of herself within both nature and eternity.
Emily Dickinson develops the central idea of madness throughout her poem by using capitalization of keywords that develop the central idea as well as using repetition of words that help to show how the narrator is insane and getting more and more so throughout the poem. She starts using repetition in the first
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.
Reading a poem by Emily Dickinson can often lead the reader to a rather introspective state. Dickinson writes at length about the drastically transformative effect a book may have upon its’ reader. Alternating between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, Dickinson masterfully uses the ballad meter to tell a story about the ecstasy brought by reading. In poem number 1587, she writes about the changes wrought upon the reader by a book and the liberty literature brings.
One of Emily Dickinson’s greatest skills is taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. In this sense, she reshapes how her readers view her subjects and the meaning that they have in the world. She also has the ability to assign a word to abstractness, making her poems seemingly vague and unclear on the surface. Her poems are so carefully crafted that each word can be dissected and the reader is able to uncover intense meanings and images. Often focusing on more gothic themes, Dickinson shows an appreciation for the natural world in a handful of poems. Although Dickinson’s poem #1489 seems disoriented, it produces a parallelism of experience between the speaker and the audience that encompasses the abstractness and unexpectedness of an event.
Vendler, Helen. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2010. 118-20. Google Books. Google. Web. 5 April. 2014. .
Dickinson, on the other hand, was a free-style writer. She was carefree of how her writings do not include any type of meter or structure. She did not use standard punctuation. Instead, she referred to the use of dashes, unsystematic capitalization, and broken meter. It is not clear as to why she chose such a unique style of writing, but it worked for her. She was not concerned with correctness but with structure that would include considerate features. In “Defrauded I a Butterfly,” Dickinson left little room for meter or style used from European models in her time being it only consisted on two lines. Also, in “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” the reader may recognize that the she did not use a traditional rhyme scheme that would usually be able to identify in poetry. She used AABC instead of the more noticeable and most often used ABAB or a more rare scheme ABCB.
The average reader cannot help but be affected by Dickinson’s style. The capitalized words draw the reader’s attention. They highlight important key words of the poem. The dashes set apart specific words and phrases, forcing the reader to slow down while reading. The dashes compel the reader to contemplate and ponder over the lines. Thus, whether or not Dickinson had a conscious purpose in her unconventional capitalization and punctuation, they have an undeniable effect on the rhythm of the poem and the perception of the reader.
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.
Emily Dickinson, a radical feminist is often expressing her viewpoints on issues of gender inequality in society. Her poems often highlight these viewpoints. Such as with the case of her poem, They shut me up in Prose. Which she place herself into the poem itself, and address the outlining issues of such a dividend society. She is often noted for using dashes that seem to be disruptive in the text itself. Dickinson uses these disruption in her text to signify her viewpoints on conflictual issues that reside in society. From the inequality that women face, to religion, to what foreseeable future she would like to happen. All of her values and morales are upheld by the dashes that Dickinson introduces into her poems.
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.
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.