NAAL: Dickinson
The Norton Anthology of American Literature
Volume B: American Literature, 1880-1865
Emily Dickinson
Biography
A life-long resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson left her hometown for only one year, when she attended Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary. She was raised in an intellectual and socially prominent family and at the age of eighteen had received a better formal education than most of her American contemporaries, both male and female. Yet Dickinson led a largely sequestered existence, and she devoted much of her time to writing poetry, producing close to eighteen hundred poems, which were characterized by terse lines, "slant" rhymes, and keen observation. Although most of Dickinson's work was not published in her lifetime, she did see three small collections of poems printed (1890, 1891, and 1896). A half-century later, the three volumes of The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) and two volumes of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958) appeared.
Explorations
Read as a group, Dickinson's poems seem to resist the masculinist poetics laid down by Emerson earlier in the nineteenth century--the idea that the "bard" must achieve dominion over experience and offer vast, coherent, overarching themes. Dickinson's experience of the world, through her poetry, seems more open-ended: dark moments commingle with hopeful ones, and poems that celebrate the small ordinary experience share space with poems that are mystical or overtly adventurous and speculative.
1. Read carefully several poems which convey high excitement, even ecstasy: for example, poems 214, 249, 528, 1072. What perceptions, hopes, or intuitions seem to underlie these celebrations? What is the effect of reading them alongside some of Dickinson's darker verses: for example, poems 67, 280, 341, 449, 465, 650, 712?
2. A number of these poems engage the natural world immediately around the Dickinson house: for example, poems 130, 285, 314, 328, 348, 824, 986. Describe Dickinson as a nature poet. Is she in the American Transcendental tradition? Is she a Romantic? What variations do you see in the tone and theme of these poems?
3. Dickinson's poems often engage, directly or subtly, with her own solitude and anonymity as an artist. Describe the variety of ways and moods in which this situation is addressed.
4. The Dickinson legend has loomed large in the reading of her poems. There is dramatic appeal in the tale of this brilliant artist living and dying out of the limelight and in the story of the discovery and gradual publication of the poems, their impact on the Moderns, and the eventual establishment of accurate and available texts. To what extent do you think we should bear in mind the Emily Dickinson biography, and the Emily Dickinson legend, in rereading the poems now?
Volume B: American Literature, 1880-1865
Emily Dickinson
Biography
A life-long resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson left her hometown for only one year, when she attended Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary. She was raised in an intellectual and socially prominent family and at the age of eighteen had received a better formal education than most of her American contemporaries, both male and female. Yet Dickinson led a largely sequestered existence, and she devoted much of her time to writing poetry, producing close to eighteen hundred poems, which were characterized by terse lines, "slant" rhymes, and keen observation. Although most of Dickinson's work was not published in her lifetime, she did see three small collections of poems printed (1890, 1891, and 1896). A half-century later, the three volumes of The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) and two volumes of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958) appeared.
Explorations
Read as a group, Dickinson's poems seem to resist the masculinist poetics laid down by Emerson earlier in the nineteenth century--the idea that the "bard" must achieve dominion over experience and offer vast, coherent, overarching themes. Dickinson's experience of the world, through her poetry, seems more open-ended: dark moments commingle with hopeful ones, and poems that celebrate the small ordinary experience share space with poems that are mystical or overtly adventurous and speculative.
1. Read carefully several poems which convey high excitement, even ecstasy: for example, poems 214, 249, 528, 1072. What perceptions, hopes, or intuitions seem to underlie these celebrations? What is the effect of reading them alongside some of Dickinson's darker verses: for example, poems 67, 280, 341, 449, 465, 650, 712?
2. A number of these poems engage the natural world immediately around the Dickinson house: for example, poems 130, 285, 314, 328, 348, 824, 986. Describe Dickinson as a nature poet. Is she in the American Transcendental tradition? Is she a Romantic? What variations do you see in the tone and theme of these poems?
3. Dickinson's poems often engage, directly or subtly, with her own solitude and anonymity as an artist. Describe the variety of ways and moods in which this situation is addressed.
4. The Dickinson legend has loomed large in the reading of her poems. There is dramatic appeal in the tale of this brilliant artist living and dying out of the limelight and in the story of the discovery and gradual publication of the poems, their impact on the Moderns, and the eventual establishment of accurate and available texts. To what extent do you think we should bear in mind the Emily Dickinson biography, and the Emily Dickinson legend, in rereading the poems now?
(Mittwoch, 17. Oktober 2007)
