January 9

AGENDA:


1. My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell. - Emily Dickinson


2. Understanding the poem and analyzing techniques


HW: Vocabulary next Friday - words are in vocabulary section of the blog. Start studying!


Background on Emily Dickinson:


Almost unknown as a poet in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson is now recognized as one of America's greatest poets and, in the view of some, as one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. The past fifty years or so have seen an outpouring of books and essays attempting to explain her poetry and her life. Some critics have used her life to try to explain her poetry, and others have tried to explain her life by referring to her poems, which they assume are autobiographical. Psychologically-oriented readers have subjected her to psychoanalytical diagnoses and labels, such as "a helpless agoraphobic trapped in her father's house"; her poetry has been interpreted as the last gasp of New England Puritanism; feminist critics see her as a victim of patriarchy in general or her father in particular; gender critics find homosexuality in her life and writings. These are just a few examples of the theorizing which Emily Dickinson and her poetry have inspired.

The large number of poems she wrote (over 1700 of them) makes it easy for critics to find support for their theories. And the fact that her life, her poems, and her letters are often difficult, if not impossible to understand invites speculation.

Emily Dickinson can be seen as eccentric or as psychologically unbalanced or even crazy. For example, from her late teens through her twenties she adopted the more childish spelling of her name, "Emilie"; her letters repeatedly express the wish to remain a child. She didn't learn to tell time until her mid-teens, because, she claimed, as a child she hadn't understood her father's explanation and didn't want him to know. She wore only white for almost her entire adult life. Of course there is a great deal of conjecture about her love life and her never marrying: are the references in her poems and letters to actual men whom she was in love with, or are the men and love imaginary? She became increasingly reclusive in her thirties until finally she almost never left the house. Her behavior at social gatherings in the Dickinson home, while she still attended them, was distinct. She asked whether a guest would rather have a glass of wine or a rose. One guest described her manner of appearing at such occasions: "a moment when conversation lagged a little, she would sweep in, clad in immaculate white, pass through the rooms, silently curtseying and saluting right and left, and sweep out again."

As a recluse, she occasionally stayed in her room rather than meet even close friends and rushed away when strangers visited; sometimes she talked with friends while hidden behind a partially open door. She stayed in her room and listened to her father's funeral service, which was held on the lawn of her home. She stayed in the next room to listen to a young woman play her piano and then sent her notes of appreciation. Even when ill, including when she was dying, she kept aloof; her doctor had to diagnose her as she walked by an open door. This does not mean that she cut herself off entirely from people; she had an extensive and active correspondence and saw an occasional, special visitor; she loved her brother's children and lowered baskets of baked goods via a pulley outside her window for neighborhood children.
And throughout her seclusion, Dickinson wrote poetry in her room. Some critics speculate that her withdrawal enabled her to write her poetry; it gave her both the space to write (her room) and the time to write by freeing her from woman's duties. Not even her sister Lavinia, on whom she depended, knew the extent of Emily's writing, not until she came across over 1700 poems after Emily's death.
Only a few of Dickinson's poems were published during her lifetime. For an editor preparing her poems for publication, determining the text of many poems presents problems.

Some poems are unfinished; a few even seem to be rough drafts.
More than one version exists of a number of poems. Because she did not publish these poems, she did not have to make a final decision about which word, line, or stanza she preferred. Also, she included poems in her letters, changing them to fit her correspondent or the subject of the letter. In her letters, she sometimes writes poems as prose and prose as poetry, so that it is hard to distinguish them. Her occasionally idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and word choice can be distracting to readers, so that editors have to decide whether to change her text to conform to modern usage.
But what matters is that Emily Dickinson's poetry speaks powerfully to us, the reader. It captures her insights and recreates meaningful events in living; it helps us to understand and even to re-live our own experiences through her intensity and with her emotional and intellectual clarity.

Note: Emily Dickinson did not name her poems; the titles were assigned by early editors of her poems. In her poems, Emily Dickinson used a variety of personas, including a little girl, a queen, a bride, a bridegroom, a wife, a dying woman, a nun, a boy, and a bee. Though nearly 150 of her poems begin with "I," the speaker is probably fictional, and the poem should not automatically be read as autobiography. Dickinson insisted on the distinction between her poetry and her life: "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse, it does not mean--me--but a supposed person."