Emily Dickinson - Life, style and themes

Questo appunto di letteratura inglese è incentrato sulla figura della poetessa americana Emily Dickinson con un primo focus sulla sua vita e in seguito sulle tematiche da lei maggiormente trattate e il suo stile particolare.

Emily Dickinson: Life of a great poet and a solitary woman

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, which is in Massachusetts, from a Puritan family. His father was an famous layer who will be a member of the Congress, Edward Dickinson, and her mother was the fragile Emily Norcoss.
For that reason she received a religious education, until when she refused to declare her faith in public and came back home form the seminary.
From 1840 to 1847 she was a student at Amherst Academy and then she studied for a year at South Hadley.
Without any reasonable or well-known reasons when she was 23 she decided to live her whole life in her family’s house and her only form of contact with the world was writing letters especially to her friend Susan Gilbert and her poems. She didn’t give up on her education so she became a self-taught person with the help of Benjamin Newton who was his father’s assistant.
In any case, modern studies had shown that she was not ill nor victim of love failure.
She hid her mind and, as well as her person to everyone apart from her family, especially her sister Lavinia.
A really important meeting for her poetic conception that she made in her house was the one with Ralph Waldo Emerson who was a follower of the transcendentalism.
Soon her house became an intellectual centre for her little village where she was living since a lot of great personalities were used to come by like Samuel Bowles who was the director of the newspaper "Springfield Daily Republican" and whose she probably fell in love with secretly and Kate Anton Scott.
In 1860 it is esteemed she wrote about 400 poems which were sent by letters to the writer Thomas W. Higginson who was moved by her verses and her sensibility but, on the other hand, her literary works couldn’t be published.
Through the years she tended to isolate herself more and to break off all her superficial and circumstantial relationships but not her correspondences with her closest friends.
She died in 1886, and in 1890, Thomas Higginson published her work in “Poems by Emily Dickinson”, but only in 1955, her poetry was published in the same form as she wrote it.

per ulteriori approfondimenti sulla vita di Emily Dickinson vedi anche qui

Emily Dickinson: themes of her poems and influencers

Dickinson’s writings were influenced by the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, the Metaphysical poets, Emily Bronte, Robert Browning, John Keats, Walt Whitman and the Puritan tradition combined with Emerson’s transcendentalism. All of these influences, in addition to her genius, inventiveness and her condition both of outsider or rebel, depending on with which mentality she is going to be judjed, makes her a modernist poet who could possibly be living at the beginning of the Twentieth century.
Her poetry swings between unruly,explosive expressions of feeling and sensation inspired by the Romanticism, use of metaphors which echo the Neoclassicism.
Frequent themes in Dickinson’s poetry are death because the poet was deeply interested in deepening her knowledge of this phenomenon. This leads to the conception of death as the liberation from a constant state of anxiety and as the place were human beings tend to, in order to become one with the Universe.
And then the theme of love is explored by Dickinson in his various aspects. It is the expectation of eternity as the hope of a final spiritual union which is caused by the fact that not only is it lightly touchable by the feeling but also unattainable. Through this sensations the poet tries to disclose how she feels inside and she projects her desires in this conception of love
Nature is also found a lot of times in her poems because it can be present in three different ways which are through an objective description, by juxtaposing what is observed and the soul of the observer and as a source of imagery
Conflicting relationship with religion is also a burning point for the poet because sometimes she refers to it using dignified tones to honour the divinity but sometimes she fall into the tentation of blasphemous comments.
per ulteriori approfondimenti sui temi delle poesie di Emily Dickinson vedi anche qui

Emily Dickinson: Writing style

Her style has been defined as the poetry of economy and control, since she used to keep her poems short, using many monosyllabic words and rhetorical devices. She also is used to use many dashes in order not to break the rhythm of her poems and to let the reader reconsider and think about what had just been said. This could be considered also a sign of her introspection and existential extremism and of her sudden impulses which become ours since she wants us to be part of her astonishment. And again, it could be considered normal for Dickinson’s writing style not to use punctuations or commas because the grammar is bended to her wishes and needs.
per ulteriori approfondimenti sullo stile di Emily Dickinson vedi anche qui