Emily Dickinson Analysis

Emily Dickinson lived a life constrained in many respects. What liberating experiences of her life—including self-created ones—contributed materially to her poetry?

How have editors of Dickinson’s poetry both obscured and clarified what she actually wrote?

Examine three or four Dickinson poems with a theme of love. What particular effects of imagery and tone distinguish these poems?

Repeat the above process with respect to poems on the theme of death.

What factors account for the inclusion of weakly sentimental poems in her canon? Would the publication history of her poems be one of these factors?

Dickinson’s favorite stanza is basically that of many familiar hymns of her time. What differences in rhythm and phrasing do you note between the hymns and her poems?

Compare the different versions of “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers.” Is it possible to determine the direction her revisions took or in fact which versions are revisions?

In addition to her poetry, Emily Dickinson left behind voluminous correspondence. Because she was so rarely out of Amherst—and in her later life so rarely left her house—much of her contact with others took place through letters, many of which include poems. Like her poetry, the letters are witty, epigrammatic, and often enigmatic. They are available in The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958, 3 volumes; Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, editors).

Reclusive throughout her life, Emily Dickinson garnered little recognition for her poetry during her lifetime, but her legacy to American literature in general and poetic form in particular is an achievement few have surmounted. As surely as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, different as they were, brought American fiction into the twentieth century, so Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson brought about a revolution in American poetry. By the mid-nineteenth century, American lyric poetry had matured to an evenly polished state. Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville were creating poetry of both power and precision, but American poetry was still hampered by certain limiting assumptions about the nature of literary language, about the value of regular rhythm, meter, and rhyme, and about imagery as ornamental rather than organic. For the medium not to become sterile and conventionalized, poets had to expand the possibilities of the form.

Into this situation came Dickinson and Whitman, poets who—except in their commitment to writing a personalized poetry unlike anything the nineteenth century had thus far read—differ as widely as do Faulkner and Hemingway. Whitman rid himself of the limitations of regular meter entirely. Identifying with the common man, Whitman attempted to make him into a hero who could encompass the universe. He was a poet of the open road; Whitman journeyed along, accumulating experience and attempting to unite himself with the world around him. For him, life was dynamic and progressive. Dickinson, however, was the poet of exclusion, of the shut door. She accepted the limitations of rhyme and meter, and worked endless variations on one basic pattern, exploring the nuances that the framework would allow. No democrat, she constructed for herself a set of aristocratic images. No traveler, she stayed at home to examine small fragments of the world she knew. For Dickinson life was kinesthetic; she recorded the impressions of experience on her nerves and on her soul. Rather than being linear and progressive, it was circular: “My business is circumference,” she wrote, and she often described the arcs and circles of experience. As carefully as Whitman defined himself by inclusion, Dickinson defined herself and her experience by exclusion, by what she was not. Whitman was a poet of explanation; Dickinson, having rejected expansion, exploited suggestion.

Different as they were, however, they are America’s greatest lyric poets. Although Dickinson was barely understood or appreciated in her own lifetime, she now seems a central figure—at once firmly in a tradition and, at the same time, a breaker of tradition, a revolutionary who freed American poetry for modern thought and technique.

In Emily Dickinson: Her Letter to the World, Polly Longsworth has created a portrait of the enigmatic nineteenth century writer with the sincerity and attention to detail that a loving neighbor might use in recounting a special and private anecdote to a friend. Beginning with the Amherst College commencement in August of 1845, Longsworth takes the reader down the streets of Amherst, Massachusetts, and into the Dickinson homestead. Considered a mansion by Noah Webster’s definition, this residence housed the creative genius that the world later came to know as Emily Dickinson.

From Dickinson’s early morning rising to her habit of writing after all others were asleep, the young reader is transported to the homestead in the mid-1800’s, with its privileges and its restrictions. Longsworth takes the liberty of surmising Dickinson’s thoughts regarding household chores, family relationships, social responsibilities, and the dozens of other situations that may make life either mundane or lively, depending on one’s choices.

Longsworth, as might be expected from the title, does borrow frequently from Dickinson’s letters. Therefore, in many cases, the reader knows precisely what she was thinking—or at least what she chose to express on paper. Yet the sense of won-der that pervades Dickinson’s mind, heart, and soul is felt in the mystery that was the essence of the woman herself. Many questions remain unanswered and serve as a foundation for the research of other biographers. Some may ask why she never married or why, for the last decade and more of her life, she dressed only in white and refused to venture from her house. Others may wonder why she seemed disinterested in publishing her poetry when writing seemed as breath itself to her, who the man was who broke her heart, and what exactly she believed about God. All these questions are introduced gently in this book, as a friend might select flowers from a private garden to form a bouquet.

Although Dickinson chose the life of a recluse in her middle years, she certainly was not alone. Longsworth breathes life into both her siblings, Lavinia and Austin, as well as into their dominating father and shadowy mother. Her sister-in-law, Sue, and her children were willing recipients of Dickinson’s homemade bread, cookies, notes, and poetry. Throughout her life there seemed to be a stream (and later a trickle) of writers, publishers, preachers, and educators passing through the Dickinson homestead, as well as brother Austin’s home next door. Although Dickinson shared special bits of poetry with selected individuals, she did not actively pursue the publication of her verses. Those few that she or others submitted were tampered with, so that they better suited the rules of convention. Because such editing greatly angered Dickinson, her writing remained private until her death. Longsworth utilizes the discovery of the verses to bring her book to a dramatic conclusion, as she declares that Dickinson’s private poetry became her “letter to the world.”