Disillusioned Imagination: An Analysis of Emily Brontë's Poetry

Maria Brontë did not know on July 30, 1818 that she had given birth to the girl who would one day make history for her poetry and prose. She looked down at the baby's face and could only see her fifth child, Emily. Emily Brontë matured as one of five girls in a family of eight, but her family soon narrowed to five with the untimely deaths of her mother and two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. She grew close to her remaining siblings while her father educated his children from home. Her close relationship with her father and sisters cultivated a love for home that the Brontë children carried on into their adult lives. After teaching at a school for just a year, Emily returned home, where she acted as a stay at home daughter. A few years later she once again attempted teaching, but returned home along with her sister Charlotte upon the death of their aunt. She maintained the bond with her sisters leftover from childhood, and went on to publish a book of poetry with Charlotte and Anne in 1846 under the surname of Ellis Bell. While the book only sold three copies, Brontë's poetry shines as unique because of its imaginative qualities and disjointness with emotion, setting it apart from typical Romantic works of the time.

Emily lived during the literary movement of Romanticism. The movement valued emotion and feeling above all, especially as a reaction to nature. Charlotte said of her sister “her native hills... were what she lived in, and by, as much as the wild birds, their tennants, or as the heather, their produce” (Wallace 148). She lived a distinctly Romantic life and it shows in her poetry. In her poem “Remembrance” she invokes three elements in the first two stanzas. In another poem “How Loud the Storm Sounds Round the Hal...

... middle of paper ...

...ly Jane Brontë : The Poetry Foundation." Poetry Foundation. Web. 23 Jan. 2012. .

Kenyon, Karen Smith. The Brontë Family: Passionate Literary Geniuses. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 2003. Print.

Lutz, Norma J. "Biography of the Bronte Sisters." The Bronte Sisters. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002. Print.

Marsh, Nicholas. "Chapter 7: Emily Bronte's Life and Works." Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights. New York: St. Martin's, 1999. Print.

Thaden, Barbara Z. Student Companion to Charlotte & Emily Brontë. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. Print.

Vine, Steven. Emily Brontë. Ed. Herbert Sussman. New York: Twayne, 1998. Print. Twayne's English Authors Ser.

Wallace, Robert K. Emily Brontë and Beethoven: Romantic Equilibrium in Fiction and Music. Athens and London: University of Georgia, 1986. Print.