![]() ![]() They aren’t just “reflections” on life.Īs with her sight disability, Dickinson tends to use disadvantages, limitations, and negative emotions more generally as occasions for glimpsing into something more fundamental about life. In other words, there’s a real, literal materiality to some of these meditations. She often complains about trouble with her sight and often uses it as a way to meditate on the relationship between subjectivity and reality, e.g., in poem #258, a “certain Slant of light” “oppresses” her. It’s assumed she suffered from exotropia or if not that, she clearly had a condition that impacted her vision. More recently, Dickinson has attracted attention from disability studies because she had a serious eye problem. The emblems of Dickinson are inspired by Emerson, but how they operate and what kinds of techniques make them work is very different from Whitman’s hieroglyphics. But how to “emblematize” or decode the emblems of nature is precisely what poets such as Whitman and Dickinson work out in distinctive ways. The importance of emblematic framing harkens back to Emerson’s Nature, the foundation of American Transcendentalism. Any concrete sensation is, for a Dickinson lyric, highly emblematic of an internal state. Rather than cataloguing an epic list of variegated sites, a la Whitman, Dickinson lyrical poetry often interweaves intense emotion, abstract concepts, and just a smattering of concretion curated for effect. The poem above, #458, is typical of Dickinson’s landscape. ![]() Whereas Whitman’s poetry flows forth in an almost libidinal outpouring, overcoming limitations through a spiritual and erotic embrace of all things, Dickinson’s poetry almost seems to contract the world into a deeply private subject/speaker. As a contemporary, Walt Whitman often represents the counterpart to Dickinson. One way to think about Dickinson’s poetry is in relation to other mid 19th-century American lyricists, especially those belonging to the Transcendentalist movement. Dashes = Stronger than a comma, weaker than a period perhaps expresses the movement of thought.Poem #465: “I heard a fly buzz” poem ends with a dash lines are very iambic, alternating between tetrameter (four feet) and trimeter (three feet) plays with slant rhyme, but ends with strong rhyme that helps with closure.For Dickinson, white was the color of passion and intensity the soul burned white hot.Considered an eccentric in Amherst, known for only wearing white outside the home.1858-1865: wrote 800 poems, but rarely left her room.Dickinson imagines “seeing” as a form of power, playing with the homonym “I” and “eye”.The following video offers a helpful introduction to reading Emily Dickinson. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |