After the Civil War Dickinson restricted her contacts outside Amherst to the exchange of letters, and saw few of the visitors who came to meet her. In fact, most of her time she spent in her room. Although she lived a secluded life, her letters reveal knowledge of the writings of John Keats, John Ruskin and Sir Thomas Browne. Dickinson’s emotional life remains mysterious, despite much speculation about a possible disappointed love affair. Two candidates have been presented : Reverend Charles Wadsworth, with whom she corresponded, and Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield Republican, to whom she adderssed many poems.
She died in 1886 remaining a truly undiscovered genius. Originally branded an eccentric, Emily Dickinson is now recognized as a major poet of great depth, startling originality and courage. She had an immense breadth of vision and a passionate intensity and awe for life, love, nature, time and eternity.
Dickinson’s works have had a considerable influence on modern poetry. As Martha Shackford wrote in her book entitled The Poetry of Emily Dickinson : “ Dickinson’s frequent use of dashes, sporadic capitalization of nouns, off-rhymes, broken metre, unconventional metaphors have contributed her reputation as one of the most innovative poets of 19th century American literature. Her work is often cryptic and unmelodious in expression. Almost all of her poems are written in short measures, in which the effect of a curt brevity is increased by her verbal penuriousness. Compression and epigrammatical ambush are her aids. She proceeds, without preparation or apology, by sudden zigzags. The poetic game of hare-and-hounds, ellipse, inversions, and unexpected climaxes mislead those readers who pursue sweet reasonableness.”
There is no doubt that critics are justified in complaining that Emily’s work is often cryptic and unmelodious in expression. Nothing could seem less poetical than the poem Cocoon, a masterpiece of unspeakable sounds and chaotic rhymes :
Cocoon
Drab habitation of whom?
Tabernacle or tomb,
Or dome of worm,
Or porch of gnome,
Or some elf’s catacomb.
( The Works of Emily Dickinson )
Such poems, however, are not the only record of her writing. Most of her work includes a very significant human documents showing the hidden interior of an individual. To the general reader many of the poems seem uninspired, imperfect, crude, but in fact they are the most stimulating material that enables the penetration into poetic origins, into radical, creative energy. Poetry, to Dickinson, was the expression of vital meanings, the trasfer of passionate feeling and of deep conviction. According to the critics, her work is essentially lyric; it lacks the slow, retreating harmonies of epic measures, it does not seek to present leisurely details of any sort; its purpose is to objectify the swiftly-passing moments and to give them poignat expression. Idea and expression are indissolubly fused in her work. The simplicity and quivering responsiveness to emotional moods are a direct reflection of her personality. The objective medium is entirely conformable to the inner life, a life of a peculiarly dynamic force which agitates, arouses, spurs the reader.
The popular conception of the poet as a reclusive, eccentric figure has been challenged by later feminist critics who have also underlined her intellectual and artistic sophistication. They point out that Dickinson’s imagery reflects an intense and painful struggle over many years, that her verse is full of allusions to volcanoes, shipwrecks, funerals, and other manifestations of natural and human violence, which she hid into her writings. Pain and extreme psychic feelings were among her central themes. Pain widens the sense of time, it swallows the self, creates its own sense of eternity.
The secret of Emily Dickinoson’s wayward power seems to lie in three special characteristics, as it is described by Dareen Wardrop in Emily Dickinson’s Gothic, the first of which is her intensity of spiritual experience. Hers is the record of a soul endowed with unceasing activity in a world not material, but one where concrete facts are the cherished revelation of divine signifcance. Wardrop wrote : “ Inquisitive always, alert to the inner truths of life, impatient of the bfief destinies of convention, she isolated herself from the petty demands of social amenity. A sort of tireless, probing energy of mental action absorbed her, yet there is little speculation of a purely philosophical sort in her poetry. Her stubborn beliefs, learned in childhood, persisted to the end – her conviction that life is beauty, that love explains grief, and that immortality endures.” The quality of her writing is profoundly stirring, because it betrays, not the intellectual pioneer, but the acutely observant woman, whose capacity for feeling was profound. The still, small voice of tragic revelation is heard in her compressed lines. For sheer, grim, unrelieved expression of emotional truth there are few passages which can surpass the personal experience of hers.According to Wardrop, Emily’s absorption in the world of feeling found some relief in association with nature; yet although she loved nature and wrote many lyrics, her interpretations are always more or less swayed by her own state of being. The colours, the fragrances, the forms of the material world, meant to her a divine symbolism; but the spectacle of nature had in her eyes a more fugitive glory, a lesser consolation, than it had for Wordsworth and other true lovers of the earth. Her brilliant and beautiful transcripts of bird-life and of flower-life appear among her poems, although there is in some cases a “ childish fancifulness “ that disappoints the reader. Wardrop states that never has any poet described the haunting magic of autumnal days with such a fine perception of beauty as marks the opening stanzas of My Cricket. Most effective, however, are those poems where she describes not mere external beauty, but, rather, the effect of nature upon a sensitive observer.
It is essentially in the world of spiritual forces that her depth of a poetic originality is shown. Others may describe nature, but few can describe life as she does. Human nature, the experiences of the world of souls, was her special study, to which she brought, in addition to that quality of intensity, a second characteristics – which Wardop calls the keen sensitiveness to irony and paradox. Nearly all her perceptions are tinged with a penetrating sense of the conrast in human vicissitude. “ Controlled, alert, expectant, aware of the perpetual compromise between clay and spirit, she accepted the inscrutable truths of life in a fashion which reveals how humour and pathos content in her. It is this which gives her style those sudden turns and that startling imagery.” Humour is not, perhaps, a characteristics associated with pure lyric poetry, and yet Emily Dickinson’s trancendental humour is one of the deep sources of her supremacy. Wardrop states that both in thought and in expression she gains her “ piercing quality, her undeniable spiritual thrust, by this gift, stimulating, mystifying, but forever inspiring her readers to a profound conception of high destinies. Delight in challenging the convention, in the effort to establish through contrast, the reconcilement of the earthly and the eternal, are to be found in her imagery.” Although her similies and metaphors may be devoid of a “ languid aesthetic elegance” , they are quivering to express living ideas. She reverses the usual, transfixes homely daily phrases for poetic purposes. She tells immortal truths through the medium of a deep sentiment for old habitual things. More significantly irony and paradox appear in those analyses of truth where ahe reveals the deep note of tragic idealism. Wardrop notices that Emily took delight in “piquing the curiosity“ , and often her love for mysteroius challenging the symbolism led her to the borderland of obscurity. Her poems show a union of playfulness and of a terrible comment upon the thwarted aspirations of a suffering soul. Since life seemed, to her, seldom to move along wholly simple and direct ways, she dlighted to accentuate the fact that out of the apparent contradictions and discords are wrought the subtlest harmonies.
There is a third characteristic trait, a dauntless courage in accepting life. Existence, to Emily, was a momentuous experience, and she let no promises of a future life deter her from feeling the throbs of this one. No false comfort released her from dismay at present anguish. An energy of pain and joy swept her soul, but did not leave any residue of bitterness or of a sharp innuendo against the ways of the Almighty. Grief was a faith, not a disaster. She made no effort to smoother the recollections of old companionship by that species of spiritual death to which so many people consent. Her creed was expressed in her stanzas.
Only ten of Dickinson’s poems were published in her life-time – some without her permission, some containing drastic ‘improvements’. She stated that the publication is the auction of the mind, perhaps in part trying to console herself, thus she tied her poems in bundles and put them in a drawer. After Dickinson’s death her poems were brought up by her sister Lavinia, who amazed at the bulk of Emily’s poetry. She co-edited three volumes of her poems. Despite its editorial imperfections, the first volume became popular. In the early decades of the twetieth century, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet’s niece, transcribed and published more poems, and in 1945 essentially completed the task of bringing Dickinson’s poems to the public. The publication of Thomas H. Johnson’s edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems finally gave the readers a complete and accurate text. Johnson’s work was not made easier that the author had left the alternative versions of words, lines and sometimes the whole poems.
Emily Dickinson’s life is very much open to speculation, legend and myth simply beacause little is known about it. However, by way of biographical material in the extraordinary intimacy of her poetry, it would seem that there is everything known about her. Her voice is recognizable anywhere in her poems. The willingness to look with a clear directness at the spectacle of life is observable everywhere in her work. She presented the passionate fortitude, and this is the greatest contribution her poetry makes to the reading world. It is not expressed precisely in single poems, but rather is present in all, as a key and interpretation of her meditative scrunity. Without elaborate philosophy, yet with irresistible ways of expression, Emily Dickinson’s poems have a true lyric appeal, because they make abstractions, such as love, hope, loneliness, death and immortality, that seem near and intimate and faithful. She looked at existence with a vision so exalted and secure that the reader is long dominated by that very excess of spiritual conviction. Emily Dickinson is a poet in the deeper mystic qualities of feeling rather than in the external merit of precise rhymes and flawless art, her place belongs among those whose gifts are too intristic for renown.
Bibliography:
Benson – Sewall, Richard. The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York, 1994.
Farr, Judith, ed. Emily Dickinson ; A Collection of Critical Essays. New York, 1995.
Homans, Margaret. Woman Writers and Poetic Identity. Princeton, 1980.
Mondragon, Brenda C. Neurotic Poets. Vintage Books Edition, New York, 1997.
Shackford, Martha Hale. The Poetry of Emily Dickinson. The Atlantic Monthly, January 1913,
pp. 93-97
Wardrop, Dareen. Emily Dickinson’s Gothic. W.W.Norton & Comapny, New York, 1996.
Wordsworth Poetry Library, ed. The Works of Emily Dickinson. Hetfordshire, 1994.
Later feminist critics – associated with the Feminist Literary Movement after 1990.
Homans, Margaret Women Writers and Poetic Identity, Princeton, 1980.
Wordworth Poetry Library, ed. The Works of Emily Dickinson, Hetfordshire, 1994.
Wardrop, Dareen. Emily Dickinson’s Gothic, W.W.Norton & Company, New York, 1996.
Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity, Princeton, 1980.
