Emily Dickinson 18301886

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Emily Dickinson1830-1886
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Introduction

• Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830
• Attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
• Severe homesickness led her to return home after
  one year
• Throughout her life, she seldom left her house
  and visitors were scarce

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Introduction

• By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost total
  physical isolation from the outside world, but
  maintained many correspondences and read widely.
• Spent a great deal of time with her family
• Died in Amherst in 1886

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Dickinsons Poetry

• Her poetry reflects her loneliness
• The speakers of her poems generally live in a
  state of want
• At the same time, her poems are also marked by
  the intimate recollection of inspirational
  moments which are decidedly life-giving and
  suggest the possibility of happiness

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Dickinsons Poetry

• Her work was heavily influenced by the
  seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets as well as
  her reading of the Book of Revelation and her
  upbringing in a Puritan New England town.
• Encourage a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative
  approach to Christianity.
• Also admired the work of Robert and Elizabeth
  Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats.

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Dickinsons Poetry

• She was dissuaded from reading the verse of her
  contemporary Walt Whitman by rumor of its
  disgracefulness.
• The two poets are now connected by the
  distinguished place they hold as the founders of
  a uniquely American poetic voice.

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Dickinsons Poetry

• She was not publicly recognized during her
  lifetime
• The first volume of her work was published
  posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955.

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Poetic Style

• Dash-like marks
• Various sizes and directions
• some are even vertical
• Often suggest a different type of pause
• sometimes a longer pause
• sometimes a shorter pause

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Poetic Style

• Departs from traditional forms as well as
  conventions of language and meter
• Influenced by musical forms such as hymns and
  ballads
• Modified them with her own sense of rhythm and
  sound
• Typically written in quatrains
• Unusual emphasis of words through capitalization
  or line position

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Poetic Style

• Meter
• Forms of hymn meter
• common meter
• 8/6/8/6 (syllables per line)
• long meter
• 8/8/8/8
• short meter
• 6/6/6/6
• common particular meter
• 8/8/6/8/8/6

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Poetic Style

• However, unlike writers of traditional hymns,
  Dickinson took liberties with the meter.
• She also allowed herself to use enjambment more
  frequently than traditional hymn writers,
  breaking a line where there is no natural or
  syntactic pause

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Poetic Style

• Capitalization
• Sometimes words are capitalized to signify
  importance
• Often a metrically stressed word will be
  capitalized as well

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Dickinsons Use of Rhyme

• Taken from Steven Fox, AP English Literature and
  Composition Presenter, 2005.

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Approximate Rhyme

• We say words rhyme when their end sounds are the
  same. By Emily Dickinson's time poets were
  stretching the limits of rhyme. Sounds that were
  almost the same were considered fair for rhyming.
  There are several pairs of consonants that are
  produced the same by our vocal apparatus, the
  only difference being whether or not we vibrate
  our vocal chords. Such sounds can be said to
  rhyme approximately

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Consonants
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Consonants
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Consonants
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Nasals
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Vowels
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Vowels
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Vowels and Consonants Mixed