Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

family

Her father, Edward Dickinson, served as a state representative, as a state senator, and in the national House of Representatives

He helped found Amherst College

Emily’s mother frequently responded with silence, demanding the other person to figure out what she wanted to hear

From her, Emily learned the power of withholding communication

Dickinson seldom left Amherst

Her one lengthy absence was a year at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary (1847-48), in South Hadley, ten long miles away, where she was intensely homesick for her “own DEAR HOME.”

She admired Ralph Waldo Emerson and his ideas, but did not go next door to meet him when he stayed there during a lecture tour in 1857.

Passionate Relationships

Letters and love poems have convinced biographers that Dickinson may have experienced a number of passionate relationships. Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican Reverend Charles Wadsworth--she met him in 1855, and he

visited her in Amherst in 1860 and 1880 Judge Otis Phillips Lord--twenty years older than she, a

conservative Whig who had outlived his party

Literary Influences She knew the poetry of Longfellow, Holmes,

and Lowell. She identified with Hawthorne’s isolated,

gnarled, idiosyncratic characters. Emerson was an enduring favorite. She loved Thoreau, recognizing a kindred spirit

in the independent, nature-loving man who delighted in being the village crank of Concord.

Her father wanted to limit her access to books, believing that they were dangerous to her soul

Other Influences The Bible Dead and living British writers

Her knowledge of Shakespeare was minute and extremely personal.

Milton Keats She read the novels of Charles Dickins as they

appeared. Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Contemporary Female Favorites

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was immensely important as an example of a successful contemporary female poet.

The Bronte sisters She read George Eliot’s novels and poems as

they appeared and, after her death, eagerly awaited the biography.

She also saw the French George Sand as another literary queen.

Emily Dickinson led one of the most prosaic lives of any great poet. At a time when fellow poet Walt Whitman was ministering to the Civil War wounded and traveling across America—a time when America itself was reeling in the chaos of war, the tragedy of the Lincoln assassination, and the turmoil of Reconstruction—Dickinson lived a relatively untroubled life in her father’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born in 1830 and where she died in 1886.

Although popular myth often depicts Dickinson as the solitary genius, she, in fact, remained relatively active in Amherst social circles and often entertained visitors throughout her life.

However, she was certainly more isolated than a poet such as Whitman: Her world was bounded by her home and its surrounding countryside; the great events of her day play little role in her poetry.

Whitman eulogized Lincoln and wrote about the war; Dickinson, one of the great poets of inwardness ever to write in English, was no social poet—one emerge with almost no sense of the time in which she lived. Of course, social and historical ideas and values contributed in shaping her character, but Emily Dickinson’s ultimate context is herself, the milieu of her mind.

Dickinson’s Style Short Meter (8.6.8.6)--Dickinson found

poetic freedom within the confines of this meter.

The entire Dickinson family used dashes in their correspondence.

Dickinson capitalizes most common nouns.

Themes Life Love, including Marriage and the position of

women in society. Nature--she was well-schooled in

contemporary science. Time and Eternity Death and Mourning Religion and Faith Isolation and Depression Poetry and Language

Complex, Enigmatic Poems

Dickinson’s poems often have a sense of playful promise, challenging the reader to hit on the right interpretation.

She was seldom a moralist; she did not feel compelled to construct unified models.

I’m Nobody

The speaker welcomes the person who honestly identifies herself and who has a true identity. These qualities make that person "nobody" in society's eyes.

To be "somebody" is to have status in society; society, the majority, excludes or rejects those who lack status or are "nobody"--that is, "they'd banish us" for being nobody.

In stanza 2, the speaker rejects the role of "somebody" ("How dreary"). The frog comparison depicts "somebody" as self-important and constantly self-promoting. She also shows the false values of a society (the "admiring bog") which approves the frog-somebody.

Ironically, one of the most famous details of Dickinson lore today is that she was utterly un-famous during her lifetime—she lived a relatively reclusive life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and though she wrote nearly 1,800 poems, she published fewer than ten of them.

This poem is her most famous and most playful defense of the kind of spiritual privacy she favored, implying that to be a Nobody is a luxury incomprehensible to the dreary Somebodies—for they are too busy keeping their names in circulation, croaking like frogs in a swamp in the summertime.

Reference http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/

dickinson/section3.rhtml