College Admissions Essay - I Grew Up with Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was a part of my household ever since I can recall. She was introduced to me quite dramatically. My mother, with her omnipresent distant look, would suddenly begin to recite the famous poetry as though taking inspiration from some preternatural cue. I understood that a transmigration was occurring, although it was hard to pinpoint the direction. At times, it seemed Emily was contacting my mother, giving her a phantom tap on the shoulder, indicating she would like to hear one of her poems recited in earth time. Sometimes it seemed that my mother reached out to Emily. Nodding as though in acknowledgement of a cosmic contract, my mother would begin to utter the poet’s odd but mesmerizing verse. It appeared to me that when she recited from memory, my mother left the confines of the dinner table and withdrew to the nineteenth century to have contact with the poet from Amherst. It was through this penchant of my mother’s that I developed a bit of a sense of poetry but, perhaps even more, a sense of history. Although my usual sense of the passing of time was marked by the typical events in the life of a young boy (first day of school, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and so on), when my mother spontaneously broke into verse, the effect was like that of being transported in a time machine. Years later, a professor of mine claimed the most radical form of distance learning was the book for it could transport one across time, not merely space.
But experiencing my mother’s sojourns was much more conspicuous than quietly reading century-old poetry to oneself. Through the spoken word, I felt the past entering the present. The effect was mesmerizing, as though there was ...
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...owing me a book she had won for receiving the English prize in her high school. It was The Collected Plays of James Barrie. I asked her who he was, and she told me that he had written Peter Pan. At the time, I was a bit disappointed to find that out. I had thought the flying boy had just always been there. But no. He was the creation of the flight of an author’s imagination. After my initial disappointment, though, I became aware that plays and books and poems didn’t come from nowhere, but from people who had the ability to tap into their creativity and give it shape. Through dozens of dinner table encounters, my mother helped me realize something about human nature and inventiveness. A setting that respects the roles of both imagination and reality makes the world a more rewarding and interesting place. Such a setting bears an eerie resemblance to Never Never Land.
There were many differences between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. At the end of the American Revolution the free states needed some sort of control that would generate to a unified country. Issues arose such as: How should power be divided between local and national governments? How should laws be made, and by whom? Who should be authorized to govern those laws? How could the government be designed to protect the unalienable individual rights? Their first attempt at solving this issue was the Articles of Confederation, which was a failure for the most part, but not completely. After the failure of the articles, the state delegates tried to revise the articles, but instead, constructed the Constitution. There were so many changes made and very little remained the same.
The Articles of Confederation were approved by Congress on November 15, 1777 and ratified by the states on March 1, 1781. It was a modest attempt by a new country to unite itself and form a national government. The Articles set up a Confederation that gave most of the power to the states. Many problems arose and so a new Constitution was written in 1787 in Independence Hall. The new Constitution called for a much more unified government with a lot more power. Let us now examine the changes that were undertaken.
After the Revolutionary War, the newly formed United States still had a major task ahead of them. They had to form a new government that would satisfy the demands of the people and ensure the success of their nation. The Articles of Confederation was the first system of government that was proposed and put into effect. This attempt at creating a system that protected the people form a strong central government ultimately failed but was an important step in the development of the current government system. The weaknesses presented by the Articles of Confederation helped lead to reforms that made the Constitution successful. Both the Articles and the Constitution demonstrate the struggles that the colonists went through with the British and their desire to establish a new tyranny free government.
The poems facilitate the investigation of human experience through illustrating life’s transience and the longevity of memory.
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.
The Articles of Confederation was essentially the first document after America gained its independence from Britain that established how the country would run. The Articles of Confederation were written in 1777 but were not ratified by all thirteen states until 1781. Later these documents would become what we know today as the Constitution in 1787 (Comparing the Articles and the Constitution).
“The Constitution devotes the national domain to union, to justice, to defense, to welfare and to liberty” (Maier 154). This quote, stated by William Henry Seward, displays the strength and stability that the Constitution had over the nation, and the liberty and justice it supplied for all of its citizens. Although the Constitution and the Articles of Confederation have similarities, they have many differences, which proved that the Articles of Confederation were a weaker document in comparison. It can be said that the Articles were the “rough draft” to the final living document, which significantly influenced and “ruled” our government, as it still does today.
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.
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.
As Vincent Van Gogh once said, “If one is a master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.” Grippingly, this seems to be the case with a famous poet known as Emily Dickinson, since her passion for poetry led to her gaining insight into many topics. Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson went on to drop out of school and live the rest of her days at home with her family. There, she wrote countless amounts of poetic pieces and letters in her notebooks, which went on to be published after her death, on May 15, 1886, in Amherst. She is now considered an important stepping stone to the textual art that is literature. Because she is able to use a unique poetic style, Emily Dickinson provides her in-depth insights on life, death, and the laws of nature in her works.
The film Ongka’s Big Moka is about a Big Man named Ongka of the Kawelka tribe in Papua New Guinea. Being the Big Man of the tribe Ongka reasures his status by arranging a Moka ceremony. In this film we see the process of a Moka that takes up to 5 years of preparation. We follow Ongka’s struggles and successes of accumulating the number of pigs in preparation for the ceremony. The film allows us to understand the motives and functions of a Moka, provides topics that have been discussed in class, and relate this culture to a similar institution within the United States.
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.
Poems are often designed to express deep feelings and thoughts about a particular theme. In Theodore Roethke’s poem, My Papa’s Waltz, and Ruth Whitman’s poem, Listening to grownups quarreling, the theme of childhood is conveyed through their details, although we can neither see a face nor hear a voice. These poems are very much alike in their ideas of how their memories pertain to the attitudes of their childhood; however, the wording and tones of the two poems are distinct in how they present their memories. The two poems can be compared and contrasted through the author’s use of tone, imagery, and recollection of events; which illustrate each author’s memories of childhood.
Instructor’s comment: This student’s essay performs the admirable trick of being both intensely personal and intelligently literary. While using children’s literature to reflect on what she lost in growing up, she shows in the grace of her language that she has gained something as well: an intelligent understanding of what in childhood is worth reclaiming. We all should make the effort to find our inner child
Crumbley, Paul. “Emily Dickinson’s Life.” Modern American Poetry. National Biography Online. 2000. Web. 31 January 2014.