Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - Janet W.Buell (essay date 1989)

Janet W.Buell (essay date 1989)

“‘A Slow Solace’: Emily Dickinson and Consolation,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. LXII, No. 3, September, 1989, pp. 323-45.

[In the following essay, Buell traces Dickinson's attitude toward death and aging through her poetry, suggesting that Dickinson came to accept death in her later life and found consolation in nature.]

“That Bareheaded life—under the grass—worries one like a Wasp.”1 In her letter to Samuel Bowles, written during her most productive period, Emily Dickinson expressed a lifelong preoccupation and state of mind. A hovering concern with death harassed, threatened, and sometimes stung her painfully. In 1883, soon after the shattering death of her young nephew Gilbert, she wrote to Mrs. Holland, “is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me it’s name!” (L 873).

Emily Dickinson undertook an abiding quest for that name. Beginning with the...

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