We could say that Emily Dickinson, who seldom left her father's home in Amherst, Massachusetts, except for one trip to Boston, represented values and habits that were antithetical to the Age of Expansion, or Manifest Destiny.
However, Dickinson's insular habits—writing poetry and letters and gardening—were her ways of engaging with the world. Her poetry, which contemplates subjects such as botany and the role of science, reflect thorough engagement, though her approach to the world is subtler and humbler than that of, say, Walt Whitman.
The Age of Expansion in the United States began with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and continued with the annexation of Texas in 1836 and its statehood in 1845, the Gold Rush of 1849, and then the annexation of Oregon Territory in 1846, after an agreement with Britain about where to draw the Canadian border.
The concept of Manifest Destiny, which asserted the presumed right...
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of white Americans to move westward, was a claim of self-importance that would have irked Dickinson—if we are to use her poetry as any indication of her character, which is tricky. At the very least, we can use it as an indication of what she saw in the world. For example, her poem "I am Nobody! Who are you?" is a rejection of self-importance while advocating the importance of companionship. To be "Somebody" was a "dreary" and "public" thing, "like a Frog"—grotesque and noisy. The United States, as a result of Manifest Destiny, was displacing Great Britain as a big "Somebody" on the international stage.
On the other hand, her poem "To make a prairie" could be read as an advocacy of homesteading, unless one is inclined to read her nature poems more literally:
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery [sic].
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
The "clover" could be interpreted as a small patch of land, while the "bee" might be the settler who expands it. When all that exists are that one settler (pioneer) and his or her small farm, sometimes the dream of a future community is all there is.
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