Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson lived from 1830 to 1886. She is hailed as one of the great American poets who ever lived, experimenting with style and using poetry as a double edged sword. In her poems she strove to express the possible but to never leave you ungrounded in reality.
Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 to Edward and Emily (Norcross) Dickinson, an ambitious young lawyer and a mother who loved the sciences. She was educated at Amherst academy which encouraged students to attend lectures at Amherst College. Fell in love with botany, but often chided science through her poetry for its prying nature.
She was not religious, preferring the scientific method and the power of definition. Like Emerson said in 1838 “Always the seer is a sayer.” Poetry became her religion after her schooling where she often retreated from her friends and family and their overbearing religion. Though when she did, she still expressed loneliness to her friends in letters. She never married. Like many women of her time, her journals showed her ambivalence to marriage seeing the lack of self it afforded women. In her later years as a poet, she turned to a more vague style, such as seen in “I heard a Fly Buzz” where she asks reader to intuit the ending or infer the meaning to her disjointed phrases. By 1860 she had written 150 poems and wrote numerous letters to many people as it was her preferred way of communication. |
By 1865, her poems numbered 1100.
After her death, family found hand sewn books with 1800 poems in them.
After her death, family found hand sewn books with 1800 poems in them.
Her poems first published en masse in 1890 by a publisher Higginson, whom Dickinson had written to from 1860s on, and met with massive success
She was remarkably frank in writing about death. The poems she wrote upon the subject were brief and to the point, never focusing on sentimental imagery of the deathbed. Her views on life, love of science and the natural world, aversion to religion can be seen in the Featured Poem. The poem is simple, with no overt religious symbolism, Instead it is seemingly framed from the point of view of a corpse, that while friends and loved one morn, draws the inevitable fly.
During her lifetime was the civil war, a bloody war, in which her friend Higginson was a colonel in the Union of the first black regiment. The civil war was plagued with high mortality through such things as bacterial infections making death far more commonplace in Emily Dickinson’s life. And during those years she wrote 852 poems, often on the sorrow of the war.
She was remarkably frank in writing about death. The poems she wrote upon the subject were brief and to the point, never focusing on sentimental imagery of the deathbed. Her views on life, love of science and the natural world, aversion to religion can be seen in the Featured Poem. The poem is simple, with no overt religious symbolism, Instead it is seemingly framed from the point of view of a corpse, that while friends and loved one morn, draws the inevitable fly.
During her lifetime was the civil war, a bloody war, in which her friend Higginson was a colonel in the Union of the first black regiment. The civil war was plagued with high mortality through such things as bacterial infections making death far more commonplace in Emily Dickinson’s life. And during those years she wrote 852 poems, often on the sorrow of the war.