illustrated portrait of English poet Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

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Which characteristics of Emily Dickinson's poems align with the realism genre?

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Emily Dickinson's poetry, with its distinctively plain and unadorned style, is a form of realism.

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Realism is a term more often employed to describe fiction or drama than to describe poetry. Critics and commentators tend to regard novels of the period beginning in the late nineteenth century as having especially "realistic" qualities, because they generally focused on middle- and working-class people in everyday situations, avoiding the extravagant and presumably far-fetched characters and plots that had been typical of previous fiction.

In my view, it's more difficult to draw distinctions among poets from different periods based on these factors. Emily Dickinson is, in fact, a realistic poet because nearly all readers recognize that she honestly and directly conveys her personal feelings in her verse. But the Romantic poets (Worsdworth, Shelley, Byron, and others) essentially did the same thing. Dickinson's poetry, however, has a plainer and more unadorned quality that does distinguish her from her predecessors. Much of it, with its abrupt, truncated sentences and its unusual...

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punctuation, often using dashes instead of commas or semicolons, has an almost stream-of-consciousness element that anticipates literature written decades later. Of all the prominent nineteenth-century poets, she is the one least likely to use "poeticdiction"—special phrases in an "elevated" style differing from that of speech or prose. Even her rhymes, which much of the time are deliberately inexact, are evidence of this spontaneous, natural quality. She writes the way people talk. These factors, therefore, do add up to a form of "realism," though, as stated, the term is not as often applied to poetry as it is to other literary genres.

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