EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)
WORKS
LIFE
born in Amherst, Massachussets, into a middle-class Puritan family
she studied at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary but returned home after refusing to declare her faith in public as required by Puritans
life of seclusion: never left his father's house, talked just with her family and some friends, wore only white clothes
letter-writing became her only form of contact with the world
she began writing for communication rather than for publication, and she allowed only 7 out of 2000 poems to be printed
after her death, the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson made a selection of her works and published
Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890)
changes to meet the traditional taste
1955
new edition by Thomas Johnson
re-established the original form, including the original and eccentric punctuation
1958
publication of a collection of her vibrant LETTERS
THEMES
issues of life
time, fear, sorrow, despair
God
love and desire
nature
death and loss
man's relation to the universe
obsessed with DEATH
her own death
regarded as a liberation from anxiety
from the point of view of the person dying and of a witness
the place where the human beings tend
LOVE
ecstatic, sensual, eternal
NATURE
objectively described
leading to a philosophical speculation
a source of imagery
the bee symbolises the poet, while the 'I' can be a spider, a flower, ...
STYLE
short poems, generally in quatrains, without any title
monosyllabic words, common words in unusual contexts
syntax and punctuation to leave the poems ambigous
frequent use of rhetorical devices
use of the dash to break lines apart
free use of rhyme anticipating modern experimentation
forerunner of the 1980s minimalist writers
POEMS
Hope is the thing with feathers
Because I could not stop for Death
MEMORIAL
At Amherst in 1995 Michael J. Virzì dedicated a tribute to Emily Dickinson and the poet Robert Frost (professor at Amherst University) called A poetic dialogue