EMILY DICKINSON AND HER POETRY

劉立平

INTRODUCTION

Among the ranks of other such acclaimed poets as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson is considered one of the most original 19th Century American poets and is the first important woman poet in the history of American literature. She is noted for her unconventional broken rhyming meter and use of dashes and random capitalisation as well as her creative use of metaphor and overall innovative style. She was a deeply sensitive woman who questioned the puritanical background of her Calvinist family and soulfully explored her own spirituality, often in poignant, deeply personal poetry. She admired the works of John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but avoided the florid and romantic style of her time, creating poems of pure and concise imagery, at times witty and sardonic, often boldly frank and illuminating the keen insight she had into the human condition. At times characterised as a semi-invalid, a hermit, a heartbroken introvert, or a neurotic agoraphobic, her poetry is sometimes brooding and sometimes joyous and celebratory. Her sophistication and profound intellect has been lauded by laymen and scholars alike and influenced many other authors and poets into the 21st Century.

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley but severe homesickness led her to return home after one year. Her fame as a poet did not come until some years after her death. Emily Dickinsons death, like her life, was quiet and virtually unnoticed, only a few people had known the fifty-six year old spinster, daughter of Amherst Colleges lawyer, and fewer still suspected that her name would be remembered for generations to come.

Only seven poems had been published during Dickinsons lifetime. Seventy years after her death the collected works of Emily Dickinson were published, including her letters and a total of 1,775 poems. Now, Emily Dickinsons poems are among Americas favorites, most of all, perhaps, because they help us see ordinary things in new ways.

PART ONE:

ABOUT EMILY DICKINSONS LIFE

Emily Dickinson was born in one of Amherst, Massachusetts most prominent families on 10 December 1830. She was the second child born to Emily Norcross (1804-1882) and Edward Dickinson (1803-1874), a Yale graduate, successful lawyer, Treasurer for Amherst College and a United States Congressman. Her grandfather Samuel Fowler Dickinson (1775-1838) was a Dartmouth graduate, accomplished lawyer and one of the founders of Amherst College. He also built one of the first brick homes in the New England town on Main Street, which is now a National Historic Landmark ‘The Homestead and one of the now preserved Dickinson homes in the Emily Dickinson Historic District.

When Emily Dickinson was a young girl, she was happy and outgoing. She was loved by family and her intimate friends. Her father was a man of considerable means and strong personality and her mother, the exact opposite, was gentle and dependent, and devoted to the care of her family.

No one who knew Dickinson will think of her as morbid or withdrawn. Maybe it is because of the visit to Philadelphia. During her visit to Philadelphia, she had apparently fallen in love with the eminent and happily married Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she faces to face no more than four times. Biographers have suggested that she had renounced him because he was married, and she seemed inspired to continue even more intensely with the writing of poetry. Wadsworths religious beliefs and presumptions gave Emily a sharp, and often welcome, contrast to the transcendentalist writings and easy assumptions of Emerson. Many of Dickinsons critics believe that Wadsworth was the focal point of Emilys love poems.

For the rest of her life, Emily Dickinson was to withdraw more and more from social contracts, never leaving her fathers home, until finally she became that familiar feature of nineteenth century New England villages.

It is too easy to imagine that feminine modesty at that time and the shyness born of her withdrawal has caused delay in publication of most of these poems until after her death. She failed to publish because she could not find a way to reach the world in her own ways and she would not accept compromise, she was contented merely to enclose her poems in letters to friends rather than in the covers of a book, and in that way they could be accepted without alteration. In spite of her isolation she remained keenly alive to the world around her, her imagination took her in long flights of fancy. Her verses are filled with the names of faraway, exotic places that she visited only in imagination. On the other hand, she could make poetic drama out of things around her—a cracked plate on a shelf in the dining room or the sound of a honeybee in the garden. She was fascinated by life. After her death in 1886, T.W. Higginson, a respected critic of the day, worked with Emily Dickinsons niece to produce a volume of her poems. A brief popularity was followed by indifference. The volume, only with the appearance of a second collection in the twentieth-century guarantied Emily Dickinsons reputation as Americas most original and important woman poet. She had not written for fame in her lifetime. When fame arrived, she had long since been freed from what she called” the lone effort to live, and its leak reward.” Her fame has continually increased, and the little New England spinster, confined in her lifetime to a single house and garden, is now recognized not only as a great poetess on her own right but as a poetess of considerable influence on American poetry of the present century.

PART TWO:

HER THEMES AND APPROACH TO

POETRY

Emily Dickinson knew little theories about technique as a poet could be, as her test for poetry shows—“if I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” As a result of Emily Dickinsons life of solitude, she was able to focus on her world more sharply than other authors of her time-contemporary authors who had no effect on her writing-Emily was original and innovative in her poetry, most often drawing on the Bible, Classical mythology, and Shakespeare for allusions and references. Her poetry rebelled against conventional forms not because she was aware of the act as rebellion against established methods, but because she was an unusual person. Emily Dickinsons work was greatly influenced by the Metaphysical Poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as by her Puritan upbringing and the Book of Revelation. She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and John Keats. Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet, she wrote soul, God, man, nature and death. She was more than a little in love with death. Because many of the most influential and precious friendships of Emilys passed away: Emilys father died in 1878, J.G. Holland died in 1881, her nephew Gilbert died in 1883 and both Charles Wadsworth and Emilys mother died in 1882, which gave away to the more concentrated obsession with death in her poetry. Of 1,500 poems she wrote, more than 600 have to do with dying. Almost all of her poems are brief, rarely more than 12 or 15 lines in length. Dickinsons poetry is strange, different and whimsical, her “l(fā)etter to the world,”, which, she said never wrote to her. It is not the verse of a lonely, self-pitying spinster, absorbed in private grief. In looking at nature, her microscopic eye catches new images, a snake becomes “”a whip—lash unbraiding in the sun,” and the jay is “A prompt, executive bird.” But nature is not her chief concern: “I thought nature was enough/Till human nature came.” Though she saw little of people, she saw through them quite easily. Her poetry is full of surprising figures of speech, familiar words in unfamiliar uses, sudden change of tone, metrical irregularities and deliberately imperfect rhymes. In poetry, she explored the implications of breaking the law just short of breaking off communication with readers. She cut across the customary chronological linearity of poetry. She built a new poetic form from her fractural sense of being eternally on intellectual borders, where confident has culine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagogy.

Emily Dickinsons poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want; but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly life-giving and suggest the possibility of future happiness.

PART THREE:

DICKINSONS MASTERPEICES

As we all know Emily Dickinsons poetry mixed gaiety and gloom. She was more than a little in love with death. There was one of the most famous poems named Because I could not stop for death.

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.

We passed the School, Where Children strove at Recess—in the Ring,

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain,

We passed the Setting Sun,

Or rather—He passed Us.

The Dews drew quivering and chill,

For only Gossamer, my Gown,

My Tippet—Only Tulle

We paused before a House that seemed,

A Swelling of the Ground;

The Roof was scarcely visible,

The Cornice—in the Ground.

Since then—‘tis Centuries—and yet,

Feels shorter than the Day,

I first surmised the Horses Heads

Were toward Eternity.

Undoubtedly Emily Dickinsons richest personifications of death are those which portray him as a gentleman caller or as a suitor. This poem is one of her more popular poems which is well-realized rendition of the complex character of Death and which is also a remarkable brief statement of Dickinsons own ambivalent reactions to death. The poem is a dramatic representation of the passage from this world of the living to the afterlife. The event is couched in a metaphorical use of an activity familiar enough to men and women of the nineteenth century—a formal but friendly drive in a carriage in the country of a gentleman and his intended lady. The gentleman in question, however, is Death himself, and her memories are infused with the subtle tensions of one not completely at rest. The opening of the poem has an understated casualness of tone.

In the first line the persona is too busy and too satisfied as she lives her life to both to stop for the gentlemans call, but, through his kindness and consideration, she is compelled at last to go with him. In the third line, the dramatic scene is set in the carriage. The situation is one of intimacy—“the Carriage held but just Ourselves.” He has called on her as a beau, and, like a true gentleman, he has included a chaperone, “Immortality.”

The first line of the second stanza indicates the peacefulness and pleasantness surrounding an appointment with a beau. He drives leisurely, without hast—as if they had all the time in the world. She who could not stop for Death in the first stanza is completely fascinated by him in the second and third lines of this stanza. He is such an artful charmer that she needs neither labor nor leisure, for in his “Civility” he has taken care of everything.

By the third stanza, they are nearing the edge of town, the seemingly irrelative elements of children, “Gazing Grain,” and “Setting Sun,” the sensations that a dying lady experience, are transferred to these parts of the world. She is gazing, and the notion is transferred to the sun. The mention of children “setting”, and this notion is transferred to the sun. The mention of children “striving” at redness is a preparation for the stasis, or lack of motion, described in the succeeding images. In addition, the three elements summarize the progress and passage of a lifetime. As critic Charles R. Anderson described them, “The seemingly disparate parts of this are fused into a vivid reenactment of the mortal experience. It includes the three states of youth, maturity, and age, the cycle of day from morning to evening, and even a suggestion of seasonal progression from spring through ripening to decline.”

In the fourth stanza, the lady is getting closer to death, for “The Dews” now grow “quivering and chill” upon her skin, the traditional associations of the coldness of death. In the third line, however, the lady is still holding onto life by giving a rational explanation about her chill. She is not really dying, she seems to say: she is cold simply because her gown is thin. But she cannot escape her death, for she reveals even in her garments the dying influence: her gown is gossamer, a substance associated with spirits and other worldliness, and her tippet made of is something one might expect to see around the shoulders of a deceased woman.

In the fifth stanza, they have arrived at a country cemetery. The house is the House of death, a fresh grave sketched only with a few details. The roof is a small tombstone, and the cornice, the molding around a coffins lid, is already placed“in the Ground.” The lady is alone now, her gentleman friend has vanished unexplained.

In the sixth stanza the words “first surmised” contribute a note of ironic surprise. All along, then, she did not realize where her kind, intimate, slow—driving, civil suitor was taking her. It was not until after the school children, the “Gazing Grain,” the “Setting Sun,” and the “Swelling of the Ground” that she began to realize where she was heading. She had, therefore, apparently been tricked, seduced and then abandoned. In these terms: Dickinson is being terribly ironic throughout the poem. She is saying “kindly,” “slowly drove,” and “Civility” in retrospect through clenched teeth.

The emotion of intimacy created in the carriage is ironically suffocating. The characteristic peacefulness of the drive, then, is really rigor mortis. Also the hints about mortality scattered throughout the poem are dramatic ironies of the most subtle and provocative sort, since the reader is not fully aware of their real meaning until the very end of the poem.

In its account of Death on one hand as the country suitor and on the other as the deceitful seducer, the poem reflects a basic ambiguity about death and immortality. Is death a release from a lifetime of work and suffering, is it the gateway to a lasting peace in paradise, or is it simply a cold, mindless annihilation? Explicator of volume fifty Issue one once cited Shaw and M.N. as saying that through Dickinsons boundless amalgamation and progressive ordering of the temporal world with the spiritual universe, Dickinson dialectically shapes meaning from the limitations of life, allowing the reader momentarily to glimpse a universe in which the seemingly distinct and discontinuous stages of existence are holistically implicated and purposed.

CONCLUSION

Emily Dickinson is now considered a powerful and persistent figure in American culture. Although much of the early reception concentrated on Dickinson's eccentric and secluded nature, she has become widely acknowledged as an innovative, pre-modernist poet. As early as 1891, William Dean Howells wrote that "If nothing else had come out of our life but this strange poetry, we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson, America, or New England rather, had made a distinctive addition to the literature of the world, and could not be left out of any record of it." Twentieth-century critic Harold Bloom has placed her alongside Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane as a major American poet.

Emily Dickinsons works have had considerable influence on modern poetry. Her frequent use of dashes, sporadic capitalization of nouns, off rhymes, unconventional metaphors have contributed her reputation as one of the most innovative poets of 19th century American literature. Like Chinas “Red Dream Mansion” Study Society established at home and abroad for the countrys No. one masterpiece, “The Emily Dickinson International Society will hold its 5th international conference with the theme being “Emily Dickinson:Realms of Amplitude” at the Hilo Hawaiian Hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii from July 30th through August 1st, 2004. The society, through The Johns Hopkins University Press, edits and publishes “The Emily Dickinson Journal” twice annually.

In the great lime of New England poets that leads from Edward Taylor to Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson is one of the greatest. As a woman poet lived in a booming poem time, when Robert, John Keats and Edward Taylor left their deep footprints, Emily Dickinson and her poetry must mean more to the cycle of literature, to women, to the world……