Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson

lived alone, and she wrote some of the most

beautiful poetry the world has ever known... When she went upstairs

and closed her bedroom door, she

mastered life by rejecting it.

Emily Dickinson• Born Dec 10, 1830 – Amherst, Mass

• Dickinson family were pillars of the local community, a wealthy and socially prominent family.

• Died at the age of 55, 1886, from Bight’s disease – kidney degeneration – suggested cause accumulation of stress throughout life. Her request not to be paraded through the streets in a funeral possession was respected. Forever the recluse, she was buried in the same solitude that she desired in life.

Family background• Older brother Austin and younger

sister Lavinia (Vinnie)• Distanced relationship with an

emotionally cold mother• Strict Calvinistic father who

wanted to bring his children up within the rigid Calvinist religious doctrine – a lawyer and US congressman.

• Wished to please her father , but independently-minded and willing to refuse prevailing orthodoxy on certain issues, including religion

Calvinism

• Calvinists believed that humans were inherently sinful and most were doomed to Hell

• Only a small number would be saved – those who proclaimed their faith in Jesus as the true saviour – public declaration of faith was an important element of the doctrine → The Great Revival

Dickinson & Religion• Emily never accepted doctrine of ‘original sin’

never making a formal declaration of faith• Community and family expectations to join the

‘saved’ – but she rebelled against this Puritan dogma.

• Some sense of exclusion from the orthodox religion through her rejection of it.

• She claimed spiritual independence and became a religious skeptic, at times referring to herself as a pagan.

• Religious references in her poetry – “being shut out of heaven” yet paradoxically revealing a profoundly religious temperament.

• For Emily religious experience not simply intellectual statement of belief – more accurately reflected in the beauty of nature and experiences of ecstatic joy.

Education• Bright, conscientious student with

an affinity for music• Studies often interrupted by poor

health (but may have been due to her rebellious nature and non-compliance with the school’s religious ethics)

• Affected greatly throughout her life by the deaths of family members and close friends through sickness. Felt these losses very heavily, barely coping with the sadness.

• Suffered periods of melancholy

Emily Dickinson• Undertook domestic duties at home –

gardening & baking. It is with nature that she felt an affinity, and she would send posies (of beautiful flowers she had cultivated in her garden) to her friends with poetry.

• Described as a beautiful and delicate young woman with a soft voice and dark eyes

• Quick-witted and intelligent, with a good sense of humour, but shy, silent, and often seemingly ill-at-ease in the company of strangers – a life of self-imposed social exclusion.

Emily Dickinson• Began to dress in mostly, or all, white

clothes, and to retreat from public life• Gradually reduced social contact –

suggested reasons, shyness and discomfort (possible epilepsy, bipolar disorder)

• By her late twenties was essentially a recluse, and considered eccentric by her neighbours and community.

• However, it gave her the opportunity to focus on the larger issues of existence and release her intellectual and creative gifts.

• Principles of honesty, simplicity and high minded morals.

• Close friendship with Susan, Austin’s wife, sharing a love of literature and nature.

Dickinson & Writing• Maintained contact with select

friends and family through personal correspondence – prolific letter writer

• She also kept in touch with the community through sermons, newspapers, radio, popular literature and magazines

• Began writing poetry in secret – wrote over 1800 poems in her lifetime

Dickinson’s Poetry• Most of her correspondence

destroyed by her sister• Poems kept secretly• Only 7 poems published

during her lifetime – mostly anonymously and with heavy editing to make her poems more acceptable.

• Most poems composed during 1861-1865 (Civil War period)

Dickinson’s style• Poetry a male dominated field of artistic pursuit. In Amherst, religious leaders warned their

congregations that a passion for poetry was dangerous for women as it heightened their natural sensibilities.

• Transcendental Movement in literature – associated with the movement through her poetic preoccupations. Transcendentalism was influenced by English Romanticism (sublimity of nature) and include the belief that “fulfilment of human potential could be accomplished through an acute awareness of the beauty and truth of the natural world”. (Emerson and Thoreau)

• Wrote outside the conventions of the time – irregular style, punctuation, grammar and unusual/irregular patterns of rhyme and rhythm – an unorthodox style (not belonging to the trends of conventional poetry of her time).

• During her lifetime, publishers could not appreciate the innovation of Dickinson’s form – they could not see beyond it to appreciate her jewels of imagery and unexpected and fresh metaphors.

• One critic of the time stated that ‘an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar’

• Dickinson chose not to publish in her lifetime as she knew her poems would appeal to a very limited audience because her thinking conflicted with prevailing ideologies of her day.

• Literary exclusion• She was not fully appreciated as one of America’s great poets until about the 1950s.

Female Poet

• During the early 20th C Modern period her poetry became highly valued – irregularities in her poetry were interpreted as ‘consciously artistic’ – failure to conform to 19th C poetic form was no longer surprising or distasteful to a new generation of readers

• Has been described as a ‘pre-modern’ poet• Feminism also hailed her as one of the foremost

female poets

Dickinson & personal relationships• Male ‘mentors’• Unrequited love?• Sexuality• Nature• Death & Morbidity• Confessional poems• Religion• How much of this can, or should,

we interpret in her poetry????• Be very careful not to assume

that the personas in her poems are her voice and not that of another individual.

Contextual Influences• Era of rigid social conventions in a

conservative society.• Christian – strong evangelical revolution –

the Great Revival.• Influenced by the Bible, classical

mythology, George Eliot, Shakespeare – but not many of her contemporaries.

• The works of other poets like the Brownings, Bronte sisters, Keats and in particular, Emerson - opened up spiritual ideas beyond the strict Calvinism.

• Patriarchal society – women’s role was to marry, be homemakers and have children. They had no independent means and were reliant on men, subservient to their fathers, then husbands. Single women were pitied and sometimes ridiculed

Dickinson & Paradox• Paradox of isolation and unity – a struggle

never resollved• For every ecstatic joy there seems to be a

contrasting doubt and uncertainty• The paradoxical relationship between

longing to belong and being isolated from society. Two phrases which defined Dickinson at her death: “Called back”(being with Nature and God) and “At home”(describing her occupation) carved on her tombstone – are contradictory and describe the tension in her poetry between estrangement and belonging.

• Connects with readers and communicates perspectives on Belonging and Not Belonging, Inclusion and Exclusion

• We are both a part of Nature and separate from it.

In conclusion• Though she was born to a prominent academic,

authoritarian and puritan family, Dickinson was headstrong and wilful, forging an independent, individual identity, discarding many of their values.

• While spiritual, she rejected religious piety; though learned, she rejected academia; though personable, she rejected society.

• It is through her solitude and asceticism (life of self-denial) that she probed the inner depths of our existence.

• Her poetry was where she kept her ideas safe from the repressive patriarchal and theocratic authorities.

• Her choice of isolation can be seen as Dickinson seeking intellectual and emotional freedom from the restricted expectations of women’s lives.

• Her poetry is a means of communication between herself and the world – a way for her to interpret the world, live in the world, yet away from it.

• Dickinson’s poetry – in its startling originality as well as in the recurring sense of yearning and unrequited hope – is a representation of isolation.

• There is the repeated sense of the individual alone in the face of the big questions of humanity, not the least of which is death.

• Her focus on these big questions of humanity is unifying. We are united in the face of desires, hunger, passion, loneliness and death. We are isolated and yet conjoined by the simple fact of our shared humanity.

• That is the paradox of Dickinson’s poetry, echoed by the stylistic paradox of its apparent simplicity and complexity/opacity.

Dickinson’s poetry• “conversations in the mind”• Purpose – to challenge the thinking of

patriarchy and theocracy.• To express her conflicted thinking about

her father, love, the meaning of life, death, immortality, being a woman and a poet, and language itself.

• Her lyrics explore moments of being – existential dramas – to explore the meaning of a particular moment.

• She attempted to capture the physical and psychic aspects of life experiences imaginatively through language.

• A colloquial and confessional tone• Particular language techniques were

chosen to actively engage her audience.

• Gaps and silences are created through playing with grammar, punctuation, capitalisation, line breaks, omission, word choices, imagery, rhythm and rhyme.

• Her syntax is colloquial, using imperatives, exclamations, questions and contradictions to create a sense of immediacy and directness.

• She became famous for her use of dashes to create an abrupt and compressive rush, omitting connectives and breaking lines and syntax to heighten ambiguity and open up meaning.

• She uses rhyme shifts to signal shifts in the speaker’s perspective. As she moves from concrete thinking to abstract thinking, the rhyme scheme becomes less rigid and disappears.

• Many of her stanzas have half-rhymes because she experimented with combining iambic pentameter with the simple verse patterns of traditional English hymns.

Publication