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Analysis of emily dickinson
Introduction of Emily Dickinson
Introduction of Emily Dickinson
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Unlike most American authors, Emily Dickinson was a quiet, reclusive woman of the 1800’s. She wasn’t known as a poet until several years after her death, however she is considered to be one of the great American poets (“Emily Dickinson-Biography.”). Emily Dickinson wrote about her own life experiences; love, death, education, and her desire to remain young or immortal. Her work, discovered after her death, grew in popularity and continues to sell today. Born into a well off family on December 10, 1830, Emily Dickinson and her family had no grasp on how she would live her life, or the lasting impact she would have (“Emily Dickinson-Biography.”). Growing up in the center of Amherst society, her ability to surpass the patriarchy of the time seemed unattainable (Crumbley). Her father, Edward Dickinson, prided himself as a model citizen and often ran for political positions. He was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature and to the Massachusetts State Senate (“Emily Dickinson.”). All of the men in the Dickinson men had political ambitions and were attorneys (Crumbley). Dickinson’s mother, however, appears to be a passive wife of a domineering husband (“Emily Dickinson.”). For a young, impressionable teenager, living in a household were men held the power and women weren’t allowed the same rights, led Dickinson to try to protect her differing opinions by adhering to standards of her family and keeping to herself (Eberwein). As a child, Dickinson’s life revolved around her growing education and religious activities. Typical of this time period, she was expected to quietly abide by the strict puritan ways. Emily Dickinson was blessed with an education at Amherst Academy then at Mount Holyoke (Crumbley). During her yearlong study at Mount... ... middle of paper ... ...um Encyclopedia of American Literature, pp 269-272, Literary Reference Center, EBSCO host, 22 January 2014. “Major Characteristics of Dickinson’s Poetry.” Emily Dickinson Museum. Trustees of Amherst College, 2009. Web. 23 January 2014. “Emily Dickinson.” Poetry Foundation. 2014. Web. 24 January 2014. “Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.” American Studies at the University of Virginia. 2009. Web. 20 January 2014. “Emily Dickinson: An Overview.” Brooklyn College. 2009. Web. 31 January 2014. “Emily Dickinson-Biography.” The European Graduate School. 2012. Web. 28 January 2014. Crumbley, Paul. “Emily Dickinson’s Life.” Modern American Poetry. National Biography Online. 2000. Web. 31 January 2014. Eberwein, Jane Donahue. “Emily Dickinson.” Modern American Poetry. National Biography Online, 2000. Web. 31 January 2014. http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/ed/node/118
Phillips, Elizabeth. " The Histrionic Imagination." Emily Dickinson: Personae and Performance. University Park and London: Penn State, 1919.
*Reprinted by permission of the publisher and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and fellows of Harvard College.
Dickinson’s Christian education affected her profoundly, and her desire for a human intuitive faith motivates and enlivens her poetry. Yet what she has faith in tends to be left undefined because she assumes that it is unknowable. There are many unknown subjects in her poetry among them: Death and the afterlife, God, nature, artistic and poetic inspiration, one’s own mind, and other human beings.
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...
Homans, Margaret. “’Oh, Vision of Language’: Dickinson’s Poems of Love and Death.” Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson. Ed. Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983. 114-33.
Emily Dickinson, the self-secluded poet from Amherst, is now considered one of the greatest American Poets. She, in breaking conventional grammar rules, created a new form of poetry, her own, to attain this title. Through the use of unconventional grammar styles Dickinson was able to create a poem, when read in the mind appears to be incomprehensible, but when read aloud is made clear to the reader. Dickinson also made use of common objects and emotions in her poems, which captivated the reader and allowed the reader to escape into a world created by her. Dickinson's use of common objects and emotions was due to her un-social and hostile background, which created a twisted soul inside of Dickinson that was represented in much of her poetry. The methods of Dickinson created a new form of poetry, raw and undiscovered, which made her poetry more significant and realistic than an average poem.
Growing up in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson did not have the “typical” life of a young woman growing up in the nineteenth century. Born into one of Amherst’s most prominent families, Dickinson had only the best possessions in her life, ...
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.
Emily Dickinson was a creative,private poet, unlike Robert Lee Frost. She chose to publish less than a dozen of her almost eighteen hundred poems written during her lifetime. The work that was published during her life was usually altered by the publishers to meet the strict poetic rules of the period. Emily Dickinson’s
Ickstadt, Heinz. “Emily Dickinson’s Place in Literary History; or, the Public Function of a Private Poet.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 10.1 (2001): 55-68.
Emily Dickinson was ahead of her time in the way she wrote her poems. The poems she wrote had much more intelligence and background that the common person could comprehend and understand. People of all ages and critics loved her writings and their meanings, but disliked her original, bold style. Many critics restyled her poetry to their liking and are often so popular are put in books alongside Dickinson’s original poetry (Tate 1). She mainly wrote on nature. She also wrote about domestic activity, industry and warfare, economy and law. “Her scenes sometime create natural or social scenes but are more likely to create psychological landscapes, generalized scenes, or allegorical scenes.” She uses real places and actions to convey a certain idea or emotion in her poem. She blends allegory and symbolism, which is the reason for the complication in her poems because allegory and symbolism contradict each other (Diehl 18, 19). Dickinson did not name most of her poems. She named twenty-four of her poems, of which twenty-one of the poems were sent to friends. She set off other people’s poetry titles with quotation marks, but only capitalized the first word in her titles. Many critics believe she did not title most of her poetry because she was not planning on publishing her work. As Socrates said, “the knowledge of things is not devised from names… no man would like to put himself or the education of his mind in the power of names”(Watts 130). Dickinson said that the speaker in all...
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960.
Collins, Billy. “Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes.” The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer: St. Martin’s, 2012. 627-628. Print.
The poetry of Emily Dickinson is shrouded in an air of mystery, and rightly so. The fact that not much is known about Dickinson’s personal life makes it somewhat difficult to grasp her strikingly complex subject matter and unusual writing style. Her rebellion of the traditional poetic form seems to have made it rather difficult to publish any of her work—Norton tells us that she did, in fact, try to have some of her poetry published, but that she was unhappy with how the editors tried to make the format of her work appear more conventional (“Emily Dickinson” 1661). When her poems finally were published following her death in 1886, it was through the tedious efforts of some of her closest friends. Initially, Dickinson’s poetry was disliked by critics who thought that her verse “violated the laws of meter” (“Emily Dickinson” 1662), but they began to gain popularity in the mid-1900s when Dickinson’s niece resumed publication of the poems. Without such efforts, Dickinson’s work may not have made it to the eyes and ears of audiences today. While her poems still cause some confusion among her readers, she is nonetheless revered as one of America’s greatest poets.
(A detailed analysis of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and how it related to human understanding and, Dickinson’s view of the individual)