Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was one of the great American poets of the 1800's.

Most critis rank her with R.W. Emerson, E.A. Poe and W. Whitman as the finest American poest of the century.

She was born in Amherst on the 10 of December 1830 and she died here on the 15 May 1886.

She wrote about 1700 poems, but only 7 were published during her lifetime, and those without her consent. She wrote her poetry in secret, while living in reclusion, so most of her work was discovered after her death by her sister. During her life she saw only a few close friend in her family home, in Amherst, and often she saw her "friends" only through the windows.

E. Dickinson gave an universal significance ti the most intimate experience and feelings. Her poetry indicates that before she could write about the world, she had to back away from it and comtemplate it from distance.

E. Dickinson's most important poems concern the relationship between the inner self and the external world and they were short and the untitled, usually written in four-line stanzas. Although she could write in a playful or witty stile, her outlook was basically tragic. She ecorded loneliness and anxiety without making these topics seem morbid.

She wrote: "the soul selects its own society. / Then shuts the door".

She analyzed emotions poetically, and tried to define and expose particular state of mind.

Example:

"For each ecstatic instant

We must an anguish pay

In keen and quivering ratio

To the ecstasy"

She wrote with great force about the ominousness and unfeeling qualities of nature:

"There's centain slant of light

Winter afternoons

That oppresses, like the weight

Of cathedral tunes"

She also expressed the soul's yearning for immortality and for communion with a remote and seemingly indifferent God:

"I know that he exist;

Somewhere, in silence,

He has hid his rare life

From our gross eyes."

Her poem "Because I could not stop for death" describes with beauty and simplicity the inevitable passage of the time and the certainty of death: this poem is reprinted in the Poetry Article.