Background of Emily Dickinson - Essay Example

?Emily Dickenson Order No. 758411 My topic of discussion that I have chosen is about the history and background of an and how it relates to the style of their work. The author I have chosen to discuss is the famous poet Emily Dickenson, (1830 – 1886) whose poetry I have always admired and appreciated. In this research paper, I am going to speak about the life and background of Emily Dickenson and discuss how it had influenced her style of writing and the common themes she made use of in her work. History or background of Emily Dickenson Emily Dickenson was born on the 10th of December, 1830 in a quiet Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts which was the home of her grandparents. She was the second child of three children, born to Edward, a lawyer and Emily Norcross Dickenson who tried hard to raise her to be a cultured Christian lady who would shoulder the responsibility of a family of her own. On the other hand, Emily did not allow herself to succumb to this pressure because she had an individuality of her own. Her elder brother was Austin and her younger sister was Lavinia. Her childhood and youth were eventful with activities like going to school, exploring nature around her, involving herself in religious activities, reading books, learning to sing and play the piano as well as writing letters and building significant relationships. Emily loved nature and always remained close to it. A lot of her inspiration came from nature and she wrote extensively on its beauty. One such poem was ‘A Bird Came Down’ where she uses simple words and a simple style to give so much expression. A bird came down the walk He did not know I saw He bit an angle – worm in halves And ate the fellow, raw. (Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886) With the expansion of her father’s legal and political career, there was a necessity to shift to a new place and hence the family purchased a new home which is now called North Pleasant Street, when Emily was 9 years old. During the early 19th century, formal schooling for girls was not common, but after High school Emily attended Amherst Academy for seven years and then enrolled herself in Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847 where she spent a year away from home. (A Study of Emily Dickinson, 1046) She lived mostly within the walls of her home and hardly socialized because she had a very small select group of friends who respected her feelings of preferring to live alone. However, this kind of domesticated life did not hamper her creative sensibilities and from her poems we can understand that her imagination was limitless. One of the writers who intrigued her with dark themes and triggered her imagination was Nathaniel Hawthorne (A Study of Emily Dickinson, 1047). In her own poetry she made use of such dark themes and techniques to give expression to her work. Though she was influenced by many good writers of her time, Shakespeare according to her was the literary master and many scholars have noticed Shakespearean influences in her work. (Kristin M. 2001, p. 167) During her early youthful years, Emily exhibited a social flair which however, was quite short lived. She made a lot of female friends and delighted in their friendship and these include Emily Fowler who became her sister-in- law, Abiah Root, Susan Gilbert and Abby Wood. She also had a good following of male friends, three of whom being Benjamin Newton, a clerk in her father’s office who always discussed books with her, Samuel Bowles, who was the Springfield Republican editor, and also a family friend and another person she addressed as “Dear master” in her letters. Biographers had analyzed that the strong passion that makes its presence felt in some of her love poems must have been drawn from her relationships with these people. (A Study of Emily Dickinson, pg. 1046) Emily’s biographer, George Whicher (1938) had this to say of her, stating that she was the ‘only American poet of her century, who treated the great lyric theme of love with entire candor and sincerity." He also added that her poems comprised of renunciation to professions of love to sexual passion and were usually deep and intense. However, no biographer could possibly identify the object of Emily’s love which was so convincing in her poems. One such poem of unrestrained ardent passion was “Wild Nights! Wild Nights!” Wild nights! Wild nights/ Were I with thee, Wild nights should be/ Our luxury! Futile the winds/ To a heart in port, Done with the compass, Done with the chart. (Emily Dickinson, 1830 – 1886) Emily’s later youthful years were filled with turmoil and regret as she witnessed the deaths of family and friends. Her house on Pleasant Street was located near a cemetery and her witnessing frequent burials could not be avoided. This resulted in a wave of religious revival and she began questioning the disposition of death and immortality of the human soul. Though her mother was already part of the church, it was only now that Emily’s father, sister, brother and friends joined the church. However, Emily never did and she is known to have remarked to a close friend, “I am one of the lingering bad ones.” (L 36) Death was one of the major themes used by Dickenson in her poems. To her Death was an ultimate experience and is the supreme touchstone on which she based many of her poems. One such poem on death was ‘The Chariot’ where she explains in poetic verse how death approached stealthily and took away life. Because I could not stop for Death,/ He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves/And Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put away My labor, and my leisure too,/ For his civility. (Emily Dickinson, 1830 – 1886) Emily’s most eventful writing years was the period between her late 20’s and early 30’s when she wrote the highest number of poems which she preferred to share privately among her family and friends. Her poetry remained almost virtually unpublished except for a few, and it is only after her death on May 15th, 1886 that it was published to a wider world through the effort of her friends and family. Some of her works that managed to get published were a letter “Magnum bonum, harem scarum” that was published in the Amherst College student publication, “The Indicator” in 1850 and “Sic transit gloria mundi which was a poem that was published in 1852 in the Springfield Daily Republican. As her poetic sensibilities matured over time, she began to unravel the sense of ‘difference’ between herself and others around her and this point she often expressed to her brother Austin. In Dickinson’s own words, “What makes a few of us so different from others? It’s a question I often ask myself” (L118) During the later part of her life Emily Dickinson withdrew from public life and led a more cloistered one with just her family, her brother’s family, her garden and very few close friends mainly due to her failing health. She preferred dressing mostly in white and passed her days as an eccentric recluse. (A Study of Emily Dickinson, pg. 1046) in fact, during the latter part of her life, she barely left her house and like her poetry, became reticent to the world around her. Her seclusion could have been a contributing factor to some of her poems that have an obscure quality. She was quite adept at compressing the language and bringing out breathtaking effects, but sometimes her compression of the language made a poem drastically incomprehensible. This feeling we find reflected in her poem ‘I went to Heaven’ I went to heaven,-- 'T was a small town, Lit with a ruby, Lathed with down. Stiller than the fields At the full dew, Beautiful as pictures No man drew. (Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886) Dickinson’s poems were profound in insights but the scope of her topics was quite limited. Even though she lived through the Civil War, yet her poems hardly made reference to it because she had little or no interest in political or social events. However Helen Vendler, an authority in Literature and judge of the Pulitzer Prize, points out that a few of Dickinson’s poems reflected the American Civil War. (Helen Vendler, 2010) One of her common themes she wrote about was the failure of identity and the lack of status she had in mind. Quite often she uses words such as ‘queen’, ‘imperial’, ‘royal’ and ‘lowly’ in her poems. She stressed on the need of right for the individual to gain integrity and one of the ways to achieve this was to make the right choice. In the exploration of the inner world or psychological condition, Adrienne Rich has this to say of Dickinson, "Dickinson is the American poet whose work consisted in exploring states of psychic extremity"; According to her, Emily seemed to say, the intense inner event, the personal and psychological, was inseparable from the universal." Some of her poems like “There was a certain slant of light” and “I felt a funeral in my brain” reflect these themes. Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) was one of the well renowned poets of America but who did not receive recognition until the 20th century. She was a poet who broke free from the conventional restraints of existing poetry and took liberty in crafting a new kind of persona. (Desmond Powell, 2006) She was one poet who looked at poetry like a double –edged sword, but nevertheless gave expression without confining herself to poetic norms. Dickinson wrote over 2000 poems but the major part of her poems, unfortunately were published only after her death and taken to a wider audience by her family and friends. (A Study of Emily Dickinson, 1047) It was only four years after she died that the first volume of poetry got published in 1890 and met with a resounding success, that in less than 2 years, it went through 11 editions. However, to make her poetry more accessible to 19th century readers, the editors made many changes like changing the syntax, assigning titles to them, and regularizing the grammar and punctuation to them to make it more acceptable to readers. (A Study of Emily Dickinson, 1048) Dickinson finally breathed her last in 1886 in Amherst, at the age of fifty six. Works Cited A Study of Emily Dickinson A Brief Biography Emily Dickinson’s Biography – Emily Dickinson Museum www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/emilys_biography Desmond Powell, (2006) Emily Dickinson. Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism. Ed. JessicaBomarito and Russel Whitaker, Vol. 17, Detroit, Gale. 2006. (From Literature Resource Center. Emily Dickinson – An overview www.academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/dickinson.html Emily Dickinson: The Poetry Foundation www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/emily-dickinson George Whicher, This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson (New York: Scribners, 1938). Kristin M. Dickinson’s bawdy: Shakespeare and sexual symbolism in Emily Dickinson’s writing to Susan Dickinson. Legacy: A Journal of American Women’s writing. 2001. p. 167. Michael Meyer (2011) The Bedford Introduction to Literature. 9th Ed. Boston, New York, pgs. 2272 Vendler, Helen. (2010) Dickinson, Emily, Literary criticism, poetry. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Poems by Emily Dickinson www.mith2.umd.edu/WomensStudies/.../Poetry/Dickinson/ Read More