Almost unknown as a poet in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson is now recognized as one of our greatest

poets and, in the view of some, one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. The past fifty years or so have
seen an outpouring of books and essays attempting to explain her poetry and her life. Some critics have
used her life to try to explain her poetry, and others have tried to explain her life by referring to her
poems, which they assume are autobiographical. Psychologically-oriented readers have subjected her to
psychoanalytical diagnoses and labels, such as "a helpless agoraphobic trapped in her father's house"; her
poetry has been interpreted as the last gasp of New England Puritanism; feminist critics see her as a
victim of patriarchy in general or her father in particular; gender critics find homosexuality in her life and
writings. These are just a few examples of the theorizing which Emily Dickinson and her poetry have
inspired.

The large number of poems she wrote (over 1700 of them) makes it easy for critics to find support for
their theories. And the fact that her life, her poems, and her letters are often difficult, if not impossible to
understand invites speculation.

Dickinson's Life

Emily Dickinson can be seen as eccentric (my view) or as psychologically unbalanced or even crazy (less
tolerant views). For example, from her late teens through her twenties she adopted the more childish
spelling of her name, "Emilie"; her letters repeatedly express the wish to remain a child. She didn't learn
to tell time until her mid-teens, because, she claimed, as a child she hadn't understood her father's
explanation and didn't want him to know. She wore only white for almost her entire adult life. Of course
there is a great deal of conjecture about her love life and her never marrying: are the references in her
poems and letters to actual men whom she was in love with, or are the men and love imaginary? She
became increasingly reclusive in her thirties until finally she almost never left the house. Her behavior at
social gatherings in the Dickinson home, while she still attended them, was distinct. She asked whether a
guest would rather have a glass of wine or a rose. One guest described her manner of appearing at such
occasions: "a moment when conversation lagged a little, she would sweep in, clad in immaculate white,
pass through the rooms, silently curtseying and saluting right and left, and sweep out again."

As a recluse, she occasionally stayed in her room rather than meet even close friends and rushed away
when strangers visited; sometimes she talked with friends while hidden behind a partially open door. She
stayed in her room and listened to her father's funeral service, which was held on the lawn of her home.
She stayed in the next room to listen to a young woman play her piano and then sent her notes of
appreciation. Even when ill, including when she was dying, she kept aloof; her doctor had to diagnose her
as she walked by an open door. This does not mean that she cut herself off entirely from people; she had
an extensive and active correspondence and saw an occasional, special visitor; she loved her brother's
children and lowered baskets of baked goods via a pulley outside her window for neighborhood children.

And throughout her seclusion, Dickinson wrote poetry in her room. Some critics believe that her
withdrawal enabled her to write her poetry; it gave her both the space to write (her room) and the time to
write by freeing her from woman's duties. Not even her sister Lavinia, on whom she depended, knew the
extent of her writing, not until she came across over 1700 poems after Emily's death.

Dickinson's Poems

Only a few of Dickinson's poems were published during her lifetime. For an editor preparing her poems
for publication, determining the text of many poems presents problems.

 Some poems are unfinished; a few even seem to be rough drafts.

  More than one version exists of a number of poems. Because she did not publish these poems, she
did not have to make a final decision about which word, line, or stanza she preferred. Also, she
included poems in her letters, changing them to fit her correspondent or the subject of the letter.
 In her letters, she sometimes writes poems as prose and prose as poetry, so that it is hard to
distinguish them.

Her occasionally idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and word choice can be distracting to readers, so that
editors have to decide whether to change her text to conform to modern usage.

General Comments

Like John Keats, Emily Dickinson is a passionate poet. Though she lived in seclusion, she lived a
passionate life. Within the confines of the family home, the garden, and her circle of family and friends,
she felt with her whole heart, thought with intensity, and imagined with ardor, and she shared herself in
her poetry and in her letters. She wrote of her life, "I find ecstasy in living, the mere sense of living is joy
enough" (letter, 1870). Her intensity is reflected in the dramatic quality of both her poetry and her life.

Like Keats, Dickinson saw writing poetry as an exalted calling (or profession) and dedicated her life to
poetry. She was willing to give the name of poetry only to verse that moved the reader profoundly:

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I
feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I
know it. Is there any other way?

Writing poetry may have served Dickinson as a way of releasing or escaping from pain--from the deaths
of loved ones, from her inability to resolve her doubts about God, from the terrors, however faint, she saw
within herself and others and in the world outside yet nearby. To say that she may have sublimated her
pain into poetry does not invalidate her view of the power of poetry; both may be true and exist at the
same time. Perhaps the sublimation of pain, as well as other powerful emotions, into poetry is one source
of the power that it has to move readers profoundly. If this theory is valid, shouldn't it also apply to other
literary forms--novels, plays, movie scripts, and television dramas?

Like Keats, Dickinson was concerned with the transitory and the permanent, with mortality and
immortality, though her views and her poetry differ from his.

Dickinson was concerned with the essence of living. She distilled or eliminated the inessential from
experience until what was left was pure, what was left was the quality or qualities that made the thing or
experience itself, that distinguished it from all other things or experiences. This was one way she achieved
the absolute. Henry W. Wells explains another result of her concern with essence, "Life is simplified,
explained, and reduced to its essence by interpreting the vast whole in relation to the minute particle."

In her poems, Dickinson adopts a variety of personas, including a little girl, a queen, a bride, a
bridegroom, a wife, a dying woman, a nun, a boy, and a bee. Though nearly 150 of her poems begin with
"I," the speaker is probably fictional, and the poem should not automatically be read as autobiography.
Dickinson insisted on the distinction between her poetry and her life: "When I state myself, as the
Representative of the Verse, it does not mean--me--but a supposed person."

Finally, I would like to point out that Dickinson's sense of whimsy and sense of humor, at their best,
manifest themselves in charmingly playful poems which have a childlike quality. At their worst they are
childish and cloying.
 Dickinson's Style

Her seeking the crux of experience affected her style. As part of her seeking essence or the heart of
things, she distilled or eliminated inessential language and punctuation from her poems. She leaves out
helping verbs and connecting words; she drops endings from verbs and nouns. It is not always clear what
her pronouns refer to; sometimes a pronoun refers to a word which does not appear in the poem. At her
best, she achieves breathtaking effects by compressing language. Her disregard for the rules of grammar
and sentence structure is one reason twentieth century critics found her so appealing; her use of language
anticipates the way modern poets used language. The downside of her language is that the compression
may be so drastic that the poem is incomprehensible; it becomes a riddle or intellectual puzzle. Dickinson
said in a letter, "All men say 'what' to me"; readers are still saying "What?" in response to some of her
poems.

Her seclusion may have contributed to the obscurity of her poetry. One danger of living alone, in one's
own consciousness, is that the individual will begin to create private meanings for words and private
symbols, which others do not have the key to. So language, instead of communicating, baffles the reader.
Dickinson does fall into this trap occasionally.

Dickinson was enamored of language; she enjoyed words for their own sake, as words. One of her
amusements was to read Webster's Dictionary (1844) and savor words and their definitions. This interest
gives a number of her poems their form--they are really definitions of words, for example "Pain has an
element of blank," "Renunciation is a piercing virtue," or "Hope is the thing with feathers." Sometimes
consulting the 1844 dictionary clarifies a line, for a meaning appearing in her dictionary may no longer be
used.

Her linguistic mastery and sense of the dramatic combine in the often striking first lines of her poems,
such as "Just lost when I was saved!," "I like a look of Agony," and "I can wade grief." Look at the first
lines of the poems in your textbook for other examples.

Dickinson consistently uses the meters of English hymns. This is undoubtedly one reason why modern
composers like Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland have set her poems to music and why the dancer
Martha Graham choreographed them as a ballet.

Knowing other stylistic characteristics may help you read her poetry: She uses the dash to emphasize, to
indicate a missing word or words, or to replace a comma or period. She changes the function or part of
speech of a word; adjectives and verbs may be used as nouns; for example, in "We talk in careless--and in
loss," careless is an adjective used as a noun. She frequently uses be instead of is or are. She tends to
capitalize nouns, for no apparent reason other than that they are nouns.

To casual readers of poetry, it may seem that Dickinson uses rhyme infrequently. They are thinking of
exact rhyme (see, tree). She does use rhyme, but she uses forms of rhyme that were not generally
accepted till late in the nineteenth century and are used by modern poets. Dickinson experimented with
rhyme, and her poetry shows what subtle effects can be achieved with these rhymes. Dickinson uses
identical rhyme (sane, insane) sparingly. She also uses eye rhyme (though, through), vowel rhymes (see,
buy), imperfect rhymes (time, thin), and suspended rhyme (thing, along).

A reassurance: I don't expect you to memorize these categories or to write about them; I would just like
you to be aware of the variety of rhymes and of Dickinson's poetic practices.

Themes
Though Dickinson's insights are profound, they are limited in topic. Northrup Frye points out, "It would
be hard to name another poet in the history of the English language with so little interest in social or
political events." She lived through the Civil War, yet her poems contain no clear references to that
national horror. Richard Howard comments wryly, "... there was only one event, herself."

The idea of identity or, alternately, the failure of identity runs through her poetry. One form it takes is the
achievement of status or the lack of status; repeatedly she uses terms like "queen," "royal," "imperial,"
and "lowly." Status can be achieved through crucial experiences, like love, marriage, death, poetic
expression. She insisted on the need and the right of the individual to maintain integrity; one way of
doing this was to exercise inflexible principle in selecting.

In identifying themes, I briefly discuss one theme at a time and list poems which illustrate that theme.
This approach may give the false impression that these themes are separate. In fact, two or more of these
themes may occur in the same poem, and several themes are clearly connected, like pain and death.

The Inner World

In exploring our inner world or psychological states, Dickinson presents a drama of individual
consciousness. Dickinson saw the potential danger and loneliness of that world, "the depths in every
consciousness from which we cannot rescue ourselves--to which none can go with us" (letter, 1878). For
the poet and critic Adrienne Rich, "Dickinson is the American poet whose work consisted in exploring
states of psychic extremity"; Rich further asserts, "More than any other poet, Emily Dickinson seemed to
tell me that the intense inner event, the personal and psychological, was inseparable from the universal."

"I felt a funeral in my brain"

"There's a certain slant of light"
"It was not death, for I stood up"
"I felt a cleaving in my mind"

Death

Death, the ultimate experience, is for Dickinson the supreme touchstone. It reveals ultimate truth or
reality; it makes clear the true nature of God and the state of the soul. She held the common Puritan belief
that the way a person died indicted the state of his/her soul, a peaceful death being a sign of grace and
harmony with God. When a much-admired friend died, she wrote to his minister to inquire about his state
of mind while dying: "Please Sir, to tell me if he was willing to die, and if you think him at Home, I
should love so much to know certainly that he was today in heaven."

Death is personified in many guises in her poems, ranging from a suitor to a tyrant. Her attitude is
ambivalent; death is a terror to be feared and avoided, a trick played on humanity by God, a welcome
relief, and a blessed way to heaven. Immortality is often related to death.

"I heard a fly buzz when I died

"Because I could not stop for Death"
"Safe in their alabaster chambers"
"I died for beauty, but was scarce"
"The bustle in a house"

Pain, Separation, and Ecstasy

Pain plays a necessary role in human life. The amount of pain we experience generally exceeds the joy or
other positive value contrasted with pain. Pain earns us purer moments of ecstasy and makes joy more
vital. The pain of loss or of lacking enhances our appreciation of victory, success, etc.; the pain of
separation indicates the degree of our desire for union, whether with another human being or God. Food
imagery is associated with this theme; hunger and thirst are the prerequisites for comprehending the value
of food and drink.

"Pain has an element of blank"

"Success is counted sweetest" (not in your text)
"After great pain a formal feeling comes" (not in your text)
"I measure every grief I meet"
"I had been hungry all the years"
"My life closed twice before its close"

Love

George Whicher, a biographer of Emily Dickinson, claims, "Emily Dickinson was the only American
poet of her century who treated the great lyric theme of love with entire candor and sincerity." Her poems
run the gamut from renunciation to professions of love to sexual passion; they are generally intense.

"If you were coming in the fall"

"I cannot live with you"
"I early took my dog" (not in your text)
"Wild nights! Wild nights!"

God and Religion

Man's relationship to God and the nature of God concerned Dickinson throughout her life. From her
schooldays on, her friends and family members experienced God's grace, conversion, and the sense of
being saved. Though she came close to being converted once, she never felt God's call, a lack which
caused her considerable disquiet and pain: "Tis a dangerous moment for any one when the meaning goes
out of things and Life stands straight--and punctual--and yet no signal [from God] comes." Her attitude
toward God in her poems ranges from friendliness to anger and bitterness, and He is at times indifferent,
at times cruel.

"He fumbles at your spirit"

"Heaven is what I cannot reach!"
"The heart asks pleasure first"

Nature

Nature is a source of joy and beauty, which can without warning and without obvious cause become
threatening, dangerous. Nature is at times (1) connected with death or with annihilation, (2) perceived as a
regenerative--or renewing--force, or (3) characterized as indifferent to humanity.

"A narrow fellow in the grass"

"I'll tell you how the sun rose"
"A bird came down the walk"
"A light exists in spring"
"I like to see it lap the miles"

The Poet of Dread

Emily Dickinson has been called the poet of dread, a phrase which can be read in various ways. As you
read her poetry, think about whether this is an accurate description and in what way(s) she might be a
"poet of dread." Is she writing about life as something to be feared and dreaded? or are only some aspects
of life to be feared and dreaded? Is it that she arouses the fears and dread of her readers? Or does the
phrase mean some combination of these possibilities?

Dickinson finds fear or dread desirable, as those who have experienced danger know. It acts as a "spur
upon the soul," causing us to seek experiences that we otherwise might avoid because of despair.

I lived on dread; to those who know

The stimulus there is
In danger, other impetus
Is numb and vital-less.
As 't were a spur upon the soul,
A fear will urge it where
To go without the spectre's aid
Were challenging despair. (p. 37)

Analysis
Emily Dickinson is such a unique poet that it is very difficult to place
her in any single tradition--she seems to come from everywhere and
nowhere at once. Her poetic form, with her customary four-line
stanzas, ABCB rhyme schemes, and alternations in iambic meter
between tetrameter and trimeter, is derived from Psalms and
Protestant hymns, but Dickinson so thoroughly appropriates the
forms--interposing her own long, rhythmic dashes designed to
interrupt the meter and indicate short pauses--that the resemblance
seems quite faint. Her subjects are often parts of the topography of her
own psyche; she explores her own feelings with painstaking and often
painful honesty but never loses sight of their universal poetic
application; one of her greatest techniques is to write about the
particulars of her own emotions in a kind of universal homiletic or
adage-like tone ("After great pain, a formal feeling comes") that seems
to describe the reader's mind as well as it does the poet's. Dickinson is
not a "philosophical poet"; unlike Wordsworth or Yeats, she makes no
effort to organize her thoughts and feelings into a coherent, unified
worldview. Rather, her poems simply record thoughts and feelings
experienced naturally over the course of a lifetime devoted to
reflection and creativity: the powerful mind represented in these
records is by turns astonishing, compelling, moving, and thought-
provoking, and emerges much more vividly than if Dickinson had
orchestrated her work according to a preconceived philosophical
system.
Of course, Dickinson's greatest achievement as a poet of inwardness is
her brilliant, diamond-hard language. Dickinson often writes
aphoristically, meaning that she compresses a great deal of meaning
into a very small number of words. This can make her poems hard to
understand on a first reading, but when their meaning does unveil
itself, it often explodes in the mind all at once, and lines that seemed
baffling can become intensely and unforgettably clear. Other poems--
many of her most famous, in fact--are much less difficult to understand,
and they exhibit her extraordinary powers of observation and
description. Dickinson's imagination can lead her into very peculiar
territory--some of her most famous poems are bizarre death-fantasies
and astonishing metaphorical conceits--but she is equally deft in her
navigation of the domestic, writing beautiful nature-lyrics alongside
her wild flights of imagination and often combining the two with great
facility.

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/dickinson/
analysis.html
"The Soul selects her own Society--"
Summary
The speaker says that "the Soul selects her own Society--" and then
"shuts the Door," refusing to admit anyone else--even if "an Emperor
be kneeling / Upon her mat--." Indeed, the soul often chooses no more
than a single person from "an ample nation" and then closes "the
Valves of her attention" to the rest of the world.

Form
The meter of "The Soul selects her own Society" is much more
irregular and halting than the typical Dickinson poem, although it still
roughly fits her usual structure: iambic trimeter with the occasional
line in tetrameter. It is also uncharacteristic in that its rhyme scheme--
if we count half-rhymes such as "Gate" and "Mat"--is ABAB, rather than
ABCB; the first and third lines rhyme, as well as the second and fourth.
However, by using long dashes rhythmically to interrupt the flow of the
meter and effect brief pauses, the poem's form remains recognizably
Dickinsonian, despite its atypical aspects.
Commentary
Whereas "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" takes a playful tone to the idea
of reclusiveness and privacy, the tone of "The Soul selects her own
Society--" is quieter, grander, and more ominous. The idea that "The
Soul selects her own Society" (that people choose a few companions
who matter to them and exclude everyone else from their inner
consciousness) conjures up images of a solemn ceremony with the
ritual closing of the door, the chariots, the emperor, and the ponderous
Valves of the Soul's attention. Essentially, the middle stanza functions
to emphasize the Soul's stonily uncompromising attitude toward
anyone trying to enter into her Society once the metaphorical door is
shut--even chariots, even an emperor, cannot persuade her. The third
stanza then illustrates the severity of the Soul's exclusiveness--even
from "an ample nation" of people, she easily settles on one single
person to include, summarily and unhesitatingly locking out everyone
else. The concluding stanza, with its emphasis on the "One" who is
chosen, gives "The Soul selects her own Society--" the feel of a tragic
love poem, although we need not reduce our understanding of the
poem to see its theme as merely romantic. The poem is an excellent
example of Dickinson's tightly focused skills with metaphor and
imagery; cycling through her regal list of door, divine Majority,
chariots, emperor, mat, ample nation, and stony valves of attention,
Dickinson continually surprises the reader with her vivid and
unexpected series of images, each of which furthers the somber mood
of the poem.
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/dickinson/section4.rhtml

The Brain--is wider than the Sky--"

Summary
The speaker declares that the brain is wider than the sky, for if they
are held side by side, the brain will absorb the sky "With ease--and
You--beside." She says that the brain is deeper than the sea, for if they
are held "Blue to Blue," the brain will absorb the sea as sponges and
buckets absorb water. The brain, the speaker insists, is the "weight of
God"--for if they are hefted "Pound for Pound," the brain's weight will
differ from the weight of God only in the way that syllable differs from
sound.
Form
This poem employs all of Dickinson's familiar formal patterns: it
consists of three four-line stanzas metered iambically, with tetrameter
used for the first and third lines of each stanza and trimeter used for
the second and fourth lines; it follows ABCB rhyme schemes in each
stanza; and uses the long dash as a rhythmic device designed to break
up the flow of the meter and indicate short pauses.
Commentary
Another of Dickinson's most famous poems, "The Brain--is wider than
the Sky--" is in many ways also one of her easiest to understand--a
remarkable fact, given that the poem's theme is actually the quite
complicated relationship between the mind and the outer world. Using
the homiletic mode that characterizes much of her early poetry--"the
brain is wider than the sky" is as homiletic a statement as "success is
counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed"--, Dickinson testifies to
the mind's capacity to absorb, interpret, and subsume perception and
experience. The brain is wider than the sky despite the sky's awesome
size because the brain is able to incorporate the universe into itself,
and thereby even to absorb the ocean. The source of this capacity, in
this poem, is God. In an astonishing comparison Dickinson likens the
minds capacbilities to "the weight of God", differing from that weight
only as syllable differs from sound.
This final stanza reads quite easily, but is actually rather complex--it is
difficult to know precisely what Dickinson means. The brain differs
from God, or from the weight of God, as syllable differs from sound; the
difference between syllable and sound is that syllable is given human
structure as part of a word, while sound is raw, unformed. Thus
Dickinson seems to conceive of God here as an essence that takes its
form from that of the human mind.
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/dickinson/section9.rhtml

Study Questions
Think about Dickinson's descriptions of nature, such as in "A Bird came
down the Walk" and "A narrow Fellow in the Grass." What techniques
does she use to create her indelible images? What makes poems such
as these memorable despite their thematic simplicity?
Answer for Study Question #1

Her main techniques are metaphor and a new and startling application
of language; both techniques result in powerful images. In "A Bird
came down the Walk," Dickinson spectacularly closes the poem with a
stanza equating flight through the air with movement through water,
leading to the breathtaking line, "Butterflies, off Banks of Noon / Leap,
splashless as they swim." In "A narrow Fellow," she uses surprising
language to convey the impression of a snake moving ("It wrinkled,
and was gone--") and of her own chill on seeing the snake ("Zero at the
Bone"). Thematically uncomplicated, Dickinson's nature poems
nevertheless describe important ways in which human beings interact
with creatures of nature--:These creatures can shy from humanity, like
the Bird, or pose a threat, like the Narrow Fellow. In both cases,
Dickinson creates memorable poems by closely observing details of the
physical world and by vividly generating new images in the mind.

Dickinson is often described as a poet of "inwardness." What do you

think this means? How does Dickinson convey the inner workings of
the mind in a poem such as "I cannot live with You"?

Answer for Study Question #2

To say that Dickinson is a poet of inwardness is simply to recognize

that her own thoughts and feelings are her most important subjects;
moreover, her treatment of them avoids all reference to the relevant
social or philosophical issues of her day. In "I cannot live with You,"
Dickinson shows the mind as it speculates painfully on what might
have been (life with the beloved, death with the beloved, heaven with
the beloved) even as it acknowledges that these will never be;
Dickinson indicates the despair inherent in this knowledge with the
repeated rhetorical construction, "I cannot...with You." In the final
stanza, Dickinson's speaker is unable to confront the reality of her
separation from her beloved, and her delicate metaphors reflect this
(as in "the Door ajar / That Oceans are"). Ultimately, however, the
speaker realizes that she cannot evade her predicament, and she ends
her poem with the single word that summarizes her feelings:
"Despair."

Think about Dickinson's tone. Does she seem to be writing for other
people or only for herself? How might she universalize private
feelings?
Answer for Study Question #3

Though she was a reclusive individual and a poet of extraordinary

inward depth, Dickinson's poems are not simply private shorthand for
her own thoughts; on the contrary, Dickinson tends to embody her own
experience in universalizing language, implying two things: one, that
other human beings will identify with her thoughts and feelings; and
two, that her poetry will enable her audience to enter into and share
her experience. Poetry, like letter-writing (she described her poems as
"My letter to the World / That never wrote to Me"), was never a
solitary endeavor for Dickinson; she always had a reader in mind, even
though she did not publish during her lifetime. Her most common
technique for universalizing her own experience is to present her
observations in the form of homilies, short moral aphorisms, such as
"Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed."

Compare and contrast two of Dickinson's poems that deal with the
subject of death. How does Dickinson portray the fact of death in a
new and startling way in each? What are her apparent attitudes about
dying?
Throughout her poetic career, Dickinson relied largely on a single,
powerfully focused style and on a single set of formal characteristics
for her poems. What are some of these characteristics? How might her
style be described? What is the effect of this kind of uniformity on the
work of a poet with so much imaginative range?
Dickinson's poems often introduce an idea, then develop it with a
sequence of metaphoric images. Name two examples of this kind of
poem. What are some of her images? How do they work as metaphors?
Compare an early Dickinson poem (such as "'Hope' is the thing with
feathers") to a later one (such as "My life closed twice before its
close"). How has her work changed? How has it remained the same?
Did Dickinson experience much development as a poet as she grew
older, or did her work largely remain the same?

“Success is counted sweetest..."

"'Hope' is the thing with feathers--..."
"I'm Nobody! Who are you?"
"The Soul selects her own Society--"
"A Bird came down the Walk--..."
"After great pain, a formal feeling comes--..."
"I died for Beauty--but was scarce..."
"I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--..."
"The Brain--is wider than the Sky--"