Dickinson has perhaps unfairly earned a reputation for being a rather morbid poet, focused intently on death. Death was certainly a preoccupation of Dickinson's, especially as her New England culture was permeated with evangelical Christian questions of salvation, redemption, and the afterlife. However, Dickinson also wrote powerfully about nature and questions of knowledge, faith, and love. When Dickinson did write about death, she wrote it 'slant', coming to the subject with her own distinctive twist.
In the poem 'I heard a Fly buzz — when I died' in Poems, Third Series ; Chapter Dickinson enumerates the elements of a conventional and pious deathbed scene: 'I willed my Keepsakes — Signed away What portion of me be Assignable…'. The speaker has completed her earthly business while the watchers wait for 'that last Onset — when the King Be witnessed — in the Room —'.
But, as the first line of the poem hints, the watchers and the dying speaker do not witness the coming of Christ the Bridegroom but that of a mundane housefly.
Her family had deep roots in New England. Her paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was well known as the founder of Amherst College. Her father worked at Amherst and served as a state legislator. Dickinson ultimately never joined a particular church or denomination, steadfastly going against the religious norms of the time.
Dickinson began writing as a teenager. In , Dickinson ventured outside of Amherst, as far as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There, she befriended a minister named Charles Wadsworth, who would also become a cherished correspondent. Among her peers, Dickinson's closest friend and adviser was a woman named Susan Gilbert, who may have been an amorous interest of Dickinson's as well. In , Gilbert married Dickinson's brother, William.
The Dickinson family lived on a large home known as the Homestead in Amherst. After their marriage, William and Susan settled in a property next to the Homestead known as the Evergreens. Emily and sister Lavinia served as chief caregivers for their ailing mother until she passed away in Neither Emily nor her sister ever married and lived together at the Homestead until their respective deaths.
Like a lot of young artists I felt trapped in my often-boring outer circumstances and yearned to express myself in a bigger way and to find someone who would actually understand me.
I was also drawn to the way Emily Dickinson uses irony in her work, and to the ironies of her life story — most centrally the fact that she wrote nearly 2, poems, one of the greatest bodies of work in the English language, and almost none of it was published while she lived.
She was a true weirdo outsider artist who reinvented the rules of poetry and managed to contain infinitely huge ideas on miniature scraps of paper. Part of what makes Dickinson feel so contemporary is its take on the gender dynamics that continue to influence how writing is perceived. How can I not try to tell the story of this powerful love sustained over decades, love that generated art that sustains us still?
And the fact that Emily Dickinson went her own way, as it were, gives me strength time and again to do the same, to refuse the advice and admonitions of naysayers. Kristen Tracy , poet and acclaimed author. Tracy, a writer from Idaho who writes books for teens and tweens, recalls feeling smothered by her surroundings as a young writer, like Emily feels growing up in Amherst, Massachusetts.
I read Emily Dickinson in high school and I thought she was totally wild. Her poems were rhythmic and alive and clever and surprising. I always wanted my own writing to have that wildness. I always felt like she gave her writing so much energy, as if she were emptying herself onto the page, but in a very precise and careful way.
She also often writes about morbidity. She always possessed a fascination with death and illness and she often speaks of premature burial, hanging, suffocation, stabbing, and guillotines. Historians see this preoccupation with death as an expression of her needy self-image. Dickinson addressed several of her poems to Jesus and emphasized the contemporary pertinence of the gospel. She uses wit and colloquial language to present these ancient themes in a lighter, more modernly relatable way.
The last theme that Emily Dickinson often wrote about is the undiscovered continent. Scholars consider this place to be an expression of a tangible and visitable place, both intense and private. Emily Dickinson was an incredibly prolific and influential writer, though her genius was work was not appreciated until after her death.
Her unique and honest style created personal and emotionally relatable work. These things continue to make her work popular in the modern literary world. Ultius is the trusted provider of content solutions for consumers around the world. You read that right —We're giving away free scholarship money! Our next drawing will be held soon. Apply today for your chance to win!
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