Emily Dickinson
(About Emily Dickinson)
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 –
May 15, 1886) was an American poet. She was one of the most important figures
in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts into a
prominent family. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her
youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and returned to
her family's house in Amherst. Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation.
Her
father Edward Dickinson ruled his house like an absolute monarch, rearing his
children in a way as to make them perfect Christian citizens. Emily Dickinson
was mostly educated at home.
After
the death of her father, she devotedly nursed her bed-ridden mother for seven
years. Her elder brother Austin understood her better than any other member of
the family. Her younger sister, Lavinia, being aggressive and practical, protected
Emily’s privacy and fulfilled her social obligations. After Emily’s death in
1886, shocked Lavinia discovered the mass of hidden poems written by Emily. She
not only got them published but also saw them achieve popular success. During
her own life time Emily published just seven poems and even these appeared anonymously.
Her most important literary friendship was with T. W. Higginson, the editor of
‘Atlantic Monthly,’ to whom she sent a few of her poems asking his opinion. Higginson
advised her against publication. This and her own temperament made her decide
not to seek the publication of her poems.
Dickinson
was a recluse by temperament and habit. Her isolation was not due to any
disappointment in life but it does seem that she lacked intellectual
companionship. From 1861 to 1864 she wrote over 750 poems, which remained
unpublished during her life time. She had a deep resentment against publication,
which she called ‘the auction of the mind of man’. Emily Dickinson has come to
be recognized as one of the America’s major poets since 1920.
A
complete and authoritative edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems appeared in 1955
as ‘The Poems of Emily Dickinson’ in three volumes. These volumes contained all
the 1775 of her known poems, Their chronology and all their variants.
Characteristic Features of Dickinson’s Poetry
The
Theme of Love
Dickinson’s
aim was to achieve a true fusion of thought and feeling. There are nearly three
hundred poems, in which there are remarkably precise analyses of intense
pleasure and intense pain. Dickinson considered the subject of love from a
philosophical view point. She almost equated love with God. Love triumphs over
both life and death to achieve an almost divine status. She realized in her
maturity that love created the only harmony in the universe and that divine
love surpassed Nature’s beauty and human affection.
The
majority of Dickinson’s love poems reflect the effects of passion upon a human
soul. These poems reveal three principal motifs:
-
the anticipation of the lover’s future visit
and possible marriage;
-
the climacteric meeting of the lovers and
their resulting separation; and finally,
-
the sublimation of the human passion in a
celestial marriage as she becomes the bride of Christ.
Most
of Emily’s love poems deal with the actual meeting of the lovers. These poems have
a sense of anguish because of the possibility of separation and a realization
of the termination of love. These poems present spiritual aspect of love rather
than its human importance. According to Emily, the lovers’ earthly renunciation
will bring them heavenly bless. She insists that their temporary ecstasy and long
separation will lead to a greater spiritual happiness. The loss is accepted
because it must bring an eternal and perfect union.
Dickinson’s
love poems deal with brides and marriages also. In her poems, the human lover
remains shadowy and her vision of the lovers’ heavenly marriage changes to an actual
celestial union with God. She merges the sacred and profane aspects of human passion
and transforms her desire for human marriage into a Bride-of Christ vision. In
these poems the bride is viewed, first, as an actual woman being married, then
as the bride of death, which allows her to enter the third stage as married to
God in paradise. Thus, we see, that she imbues physical passion with religious
feeling.
The
Theme of Death
Dickinson
wrote nearly five hundred poems on the subject of death. For her, death is a free
agent, greater than Nature and second only to God. Death results not only in
despair and terror but also in rest and peace. It comes as a cunning courtier
stealthily wooing; it commands a king, stings, like an insect, maneuvers like a
snake, visits like an old friend, kills ruthlessly like a hired assassin. ‘Because
I could not Stop for Death’ is the finest of her poems concerning death.
Dickinson closely examines the sensation of dying, the response of the out
lookers, the terrible struggle of the body for life, the adjustments in a house
after death, arranging the body for the funeral, the church services, and even
the thoughts of the dead person.
Emily
has analysed death with variety and intensity. She never feared from death’s
harsh reality. Her poems do not fall into the simplified form of “beginning in
delight and ending in wisdom.” She gives us only as much of life as she
experiences, without any attempt at falsification through the contracts of
custom, or beaten tracks of tradition.
The
Theme of Immortality
Death
and life after death, constitute a dominant theme in Dickinson’s poetry.
Immortality as a subject largely occupied her mind and overwhelmed her with its
intensity. Although she was skeptic about the belief in immortality yet she
knew that one of the strongest incentives to belief was the desperate desire of
the heart not to be robbed by the grave. This need was the firmest proof for
man to believe that the grave was a gateway to immortality. The tension between
faith and doubt remained constant in her from an early age up to the time of
her death.
The
majority of Emily’s poems accept God as a true personality, whom she could
love, hate, joke with and be irritated by. In her religious poems, she felt
that even God himself was dependent on human love for complete happiness. In
her poems on immortality, Dickinson reveals not only her religious depth and
perceptive insight into spiritual reality but also her artistic ability in
employing both scepticism and faith as a strategy to increase the dramatic
tension of her poems.
Dickinson
as a Mystic Poet
In
the nineteenth century, poets, with acute spiritual perceptions, were many:
Vaughan, Herbert, Blake, Wordswoth, Keats, Shelley, Hopkins etc. The list can
be extended into the twentieth century to include W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. In
the works of these poets, the progress of the mystic towards illumination, and
of the poet towards the full depth and richness of his insight are much alike.
Both work from the world of reality, towards the realm of essence; from the
microcosm to the macrocosm. Both possess an intense and accurate sense of their
surroundings. We cannot find anything vague or floating in their perception of reality.
They are filled with love for the beauty, they perceive in “this remarkable
world”, as Emily Dickinson called it.
As
for Death, both the mystic and the poet are neither fearful not morbid, because
they feel immortality behind it. They document life’s fearful limitations from
which they suffer, but they do not mix self-pity with account of their
suffering. They see the world in a grain of sand and Heaven in the wild flower.
In the work of Emily Dickinson, such moments of still and halted perception are
many. The slant of life on a winter day, the still brilliance of the summer
noon, the sound of the wind before the rain- she speaks of these and such other
phenomena of nature, attracting us to share the shock of insight, the slight
dislocation of serial events, the sudden shift from the manifold into the one.
In all of her poetic perceptions, Dickinson comes close to the experience of
the mystic. In her poems there is the purity of perception, the transcendence
of the mundane, the child-like simplicity and innocence, and the freshness of
response to life.
Making
comparisons between the life and circumstances of poets can often prove an
unrewarding effort. But in certain cases, it can yield result highly useful for
better understanding of both. In the case of Emily Dickinson, it seems
interesting to make certain comparisons: between the lives, temperaments and
works of Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, and between William Blake and Emily
Dickinson. Blake, as a lyric poet, seems
to have been a model for Dickinson, as both took over the simplest forms of the
song and the hymn and turned this simplicity to their own uses and advantages. Both
the poets had to struggle against severe odds of life: Blake against poverty
and misunderstanding, and Dickinson against a lack of true response in the
traditionally stiffened society in which she was born and brought up.
The
power to utter the unutterable is the power of Emily Dickinson. She was
equipped with the ironic intelligence and great courage of spirit. The stuff of
her imagination is of this world, and there is very little of the labored or artificial
about her means. She presents the creatures of this earth, not as symbols of
this or that, but as themselves, as they are. And her lyrical notation is perfect,
fine, and moves closely in union with her mind. She was a visionary and like
her Puritan forerunners, she was severe, downright, uncompromising, factual, and
sardonic. Since, she shared with the mystic the mystical experience of feeling
the infinite in the finite, the unknowable in the known, she can be called a
mystic poet.
Dickinson’s
Poetic Technique
Dickinson
approached language as an explorer of new lands. She used words with a creator’s
license, coining with a free hand, springing the rhythm and slanting the rhyme.
For her, using words does not mean killing them but endowing them with life. In
one of her letters, she says:
A word is dead, when
it is said
Some say I say it just
begins to live
That
day.
It
is generally agreed that it was around 1860 that Emily Dickinson made the
discovery of herself as a poet and began to develop a professional interest in
poetic techniques.
Dickinson’s
poems are lyrics, generally defined as short poems with a single speaker, who
expresses thought and feeling. In most
lyric poetry, the speaker in Dickinson’s poems is often identified in the first
person, “I.” Dickinson reminded a reader that the “I” in her poetry does not
necessarily speak for the poet herself: “When I state myself, as the
Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person”.
Emily
Dickinson titled fewer than 10 of her almost 1800 poems. Her poems are now
generally known by their first lines or by the numbers assigned to them by
posthumous editors. For some of Dickinson’s poems, more than one manuscript
version exists. “I’ll tell you how the
Sun rose” exists in two manuscripts. In one, the poem is broken into four
stanzas of four lines each; in the other, there are no stanza breaks. One of
Dickinson’s special gifts as a poet is her ability to describe abstract
concepts with concrete images. In many Dickinson poems, abstract ideas and
material things are used to explain each other, but the relation between them
remains complex and unpredictable.
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