How Did Emily Dickinson Influence Her Poetry

Elizabeth D’Angelo

5/19/15

7th Grade English

Mr. Leonard

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was one of the most influential writers in American History. Emily was a renowned 19th century poet, who voiced her feelings and shed light on various aspects of her life. Although her poetry was mostly private, her works are very public today. The themes of Emily Dickinson’s poetry was influenced greatly by what she experienced throughout her life, beginning at an early age.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in the family homestead, on December 10, 1830. Emily Dickinson was the middle child of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson. Her grandfather, father, and brother were lawyers. Her father wanted his children well-educated, and he followed their progress even while away on business. Emily Dickinson's grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was one of the founders of Amherst College. When Emily was seven, her father wrote home, reminding his children to “keep school, and learn, so as to tell me, when I come home, how many new things you have learned.” (The Emily Dickinson Museum) On September 7, 1840, Emily and her sister Lavinia started school at Amherst Academy, a former boys' school that was open to females just two years earlier. She graduated from

Amherst Academy in 1847. The next year she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary at South Hadley, but because of health problems, she did not return.
As a youth, Emily exhibited a social flare, having lots of female friends and even evidence of a marriage proposal from George H. Gould, a graduate from Amherst College. In her formative years, she experienced deaths of friends and relatives, which prompted questions about death and immortality. Emily and her family encountered financial hardships, and they were forced to live as tenants on their homestead. As Emily grew older, she retreated to a solitary life coming in contact with only her sister, brother, and his wife. Emily's only contact with the outside world was through letters.
Emily had an exceptional education for a girl in the 19th century, although it was common for girls in Amherst. In Emily’s adult life she lived a life of almost complete isolation, but kept much correspondents and read a lot. She appreciated the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as well as John Keats. She did not like the poetry of her contemporary, Walt Whitman, but ironically, they both are hailed as founders of the unique poetic voice. She was not publically recognized during her lifetime. She sent five early poems to friends in letters or as valentines, and one of them was published anonymously without her permission in the Springfield Republican. After, in 1858 she apparently convinced herself she had a “talent” for writing, she sent her works into a publisher. After Dickinson begged her friend Samuel Bowles, editor of the Republican, to submit poems and letters into the paper for 4 years, he published two poems, both anonymously: "I taste a liquor never brewed" and "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers." In 1862, Dickinson turned to the literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson for critiques on her poems. She had known him only through his essays in the Atlantic Monthly, but in time he became her friend. Between 1858 and 1866 Dickinson wrote more than 1,100 poems full of aphorisms, paradoxes, off rhymes, and eccentric grammar. Few are more than 16 lines long, composed in meters based on English hymnology. The major subjects of her poems were love and separation, death, nature, and God—but most of them were about love. Her conciseness, brevity, and wit are tightly packed in her poetry. In one of her poems, she describes her strategies this way; “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant//Success in Circuit Lies.” This might well stand as a working definition for Emily’s beauty.
Emily’s poetry is classified as coming from the Realistic Era and at the end of the Romantic Period. Her poetry on themes of nature cause her to be identified with Romanticism. Emily often included nature in her poetry. This is interpreted as her rebelling against the Puritan ideals. Puritans believed nature to be the realm of the devil. Emily had a disdain for this type of thinking. Dickinson’s writings of the harsh realities of life earned her the title of a poet of the realistic era.
In Poem 216, Emily writes in metaphoric language of the Puritan ways. She discloses that Puritans keep their distance from people to the extent that hinders them from living a full existence. She goes as far as describing them as “walking dead”. Emily even makes fun of the Puritans’ thrifty ways as they are reluctant to spend money but will do so on their tombstones. She scoffs at not being permitted to enjoy the riches in this life. Many of her poems deal with death or dying, but this is simply a metaphor to express how bleak life has come to be in the present. Dickinson appeals that unless change occurs, people will continue to live a dead, dreary life, lacking in passion and failing to embrace life and to revel in its joys. Emily’s writing is a wake-up call for social change. It is for this very reason that she is cataloged as a poet of the the realistic era.
In the last 2 decades of her life Emily wrote less than 50 poems a year because of eye trouble and increase of responsibility to her household. Emily’s father died in 1874, and a year later her mother suffered a stroke that left her an paralyzed until her death. There was little time for poetry. Her mother died in 1882. Emily's health declined terribly after a stroke in 1884, and on May 15, 1886, she died of nephritis, which is a kidney disorder. “I’m a nobody” is a poem that she wrote before she died.
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d banish us – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
This poem opens with Emily saying that she is a “nobody.” Then, she gives us a chance to open up about who we are and if we are a “nobody.” She assumes that the answer is yes and goes on to say that we are a pair of nobodies.

She uses an exclamation point to show just how excited she is that there is someone that is just like her. Dickinson then shows how sad a crowd of somebodies can be, while encouraging the reader to keep this a secret (“Don’t tell!”) because otherwise, the speaker and her readers would lose their ability to stand apart from the crowd. Then she shows that it is good to be a nobody because “somebodies” are dreary. She goes on to say that somebodies are pitiful and compares them to a

bog.

Ironically, although Emily Elizabeth Dickinson lived a very private life choosing whom and how much of her life she disclosed to the outside world. She now lives in a very public realm through her books, letters, and poems, speaking of nature and many realistic themes that are relevant today. Emily Dickinson will forever be considered one of American history’s influential poets.

Work Cited

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Dickinson, Emily. Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson. New York: Modern Library, 1924. Print.
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