Emily Dickinson: A Simple Bio/Background Info
By Dalia Saj
A woman of intricate and unique poems, Emily Dickinson was an amazing poet.
A daughter, sister, friend, and her own person, Emily Dickinson is an amazing poet, who, through her work, was able to inspire and touch the hearts and minds of many people around the world, even today. “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.” Her words have been able to touch me as well. Having gone through many moments of growing up, maturing, depression, disapproval, and losses, I was able to make many connections between her life and mine.
“A poet who took definition as her province, Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work,” (poetryfoundation.org). Emily, like most poets, had dominating elements in the way that she wrote her poems. “To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized,” (poetryfoundation.org) is a great way of describing her poems. She had a very unique style of writing that many others didn’t have. Accepting things the way that they normally were was not something she could deal with, so in her writing, she would include a lot of possible, but intriguing and intricate elements. One of the elements I found was in the poem ““Hope” is the Thing with Feathers”, where she used the literary elements of personification and metaphors to describe and meaningfully show hope. Another interesting element found in her poem “I Never Heard the Word Escape” was a little bit of irony, which explained her unique style; she wrote about escaping, but she gave the poem a sort of childish element so that it seemed silly, even though the poem was serious. With the use of words such as “I tug childish at my bars” and “a flying attitude”, she gave the poem that playful mood, where in reality, escaping can be a dangerous thing. Moreover, throughout her life, she was mostly a lonely and almost anti-social person, only keeping close to her family, especially her siblings, and her closest friends and poets and others she admired. “Dickinson's poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want, but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly life-giving and suggest the possibility of happiness,” (poets.org). Emily Dickinson’s poems, when researched about, all have that sad, depressing, yet a bit of a confusing theme to it. There were many reasons to why this came right from Emily’s life, and it included not only her family, but also other poets, her friends, and many other factors of her life.
Emily Dickinson was definitely a unique poet with an equally unique life. Throughout her life, she was one who seldom left her home, and barely communicated with people or visitors. However, the people that Emily did come to know and talk to had a colossal impact on her life and more importantly, her writing. Some of those people were Reverend Charles Wadsworth, Otis P. Lord, a Supreme Court Judge, Samuel Bowles, newspaper editor, poets Robert Browning, Elizabeth Browning, and John Keats, and many other poets. “Her work was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity,” (poets.org). One thing that I found interesting was that one of Emily’s influential figures was the Book of Revelations in the Bible. This is one point in her life when I can relate. I was also brought up with a similar religious view, and being a God respecting and loving girl, I am happy that Emily used the Bible as a way to express her feelings to thousands of people around the world. On a different note, Emily’s life was a quite depressing one, and it could have definitely influenced her writing. Emily’s father was a lawyer from the time she was born, so Emily’s life could have been in a varied cultural manner, which could have allowed for Emily to see different aspects of the world. This could have contributed to the reasons why Emily could not accept things the way they were. During the time when she attended Amherst Academy, her growth as a poet starts to show, especially after the principal of that school unexpectedly dies. This moment of her life could have affected her by making her despair show up into the poems that she wrote. In her later years, she lived in sort of a physical isolation form everyone in her home, reading and writing, and only spending time with family. Emily’s siblings, Lavinia and Austin, were her closest companions. Her relationship with the two could have influenced her writing style to not only include loneliness, but maybe even love at some points. “For Dickinson, the pace of such visits was mind-numbing, and she began limiting the number of visits she made or received. She baked bread and tended the garden, but she would neither dust nor visit. There was one other duty she gladly took on. As the elder of Austin’s two sisters, she slotted herself into the expected role of counselor and confidante. In the nineteenth century the sister was expected to act as moral guide to her brother; Dickinson rose to that requirement—but on her own terms. Known at school as a “wit,” she put a sharp edge on her sweetest remarks. In her early letters to Austin, she represented the eldest child as the rising hope of the family,” (poetryfoundation.org). As it can be seen, Emily’s siblings were one of the most important things in her life. Everywhere she can be researched, it can be found how important her siblings were to her. Even during the times of her despair, she always was able to keep her work coming, and her intellectual partners throughout her poems were Austin and Lavinia. Another important time where her sibling, more specifically her sister, comes in, is after her death. Lavinia discovers forty hand bound volumes of nearly 1800 of Emily’s poems, and later on, with the help of some others, Lavinia is the one who allowed for the possibility of publishing Emily’s work and making it known world-wide.
Being a woman of not much communication with the outside world, Emily had a lot of time on her hands. This allowed her to try new styles of poem-writing, which is what, in my opinion, probably led to her almost random, flowing style of writing. “…she tried out different voices. At times she sounded like the female protagonist from a contemporary novel; at times, she was the narrator who chastises her characters for their failure to see beyond complicated circumstances. She played the wit and sounded the divine, exploring the possibility of the new converts’ religious faith only to come up short against its distinct unreality in her own experience. And finally, she confronted the difference imposed by that challenging change of state from daughter/sister to wife,” (poetryfoundation.org). Doing this with her poetry would have allowed for Emily to become such a great poet simply because of the fact that she could write about experiences and moments that she personally didn’t even go through. She could have just used, for instance, her mother as an example of a wife, and then written a poem about that as if she was the wife. In addition, another aspect of Emily’s life that could have shaped her writing could have been her friendships. Emily had a pretty close relationship with her brother, Austin’s, wife, Susan Gilbert. Emily had often felt as if she had a lot in comparison with her. She and Susan would write to each other, and through Emily’s letters, Emily had shared more than 270 of her poems with Susan. However, later on, Emily noticed that their friendship was fading away, especially when the two women got into an argument about a topic based on religion. After this, Emily’s and Susan’s friendship went downhill, and the two separated. Since Emily valued her friendship with the people she knew and loved, this was a very sad moment in her life. I personally feel that her life is seriously in deterioration at this point of time for Emily. “With the passing of time, Dickinson's social life began to be carried on less through personal contact than through correspondence. Her letters, like her poems, display a witty and constantly stimulated mind expressing itself in effortlessly fresh and inventive turns of phrase. As she matured, she became increasingly aware of the gap between herself and her family in intellectual and religious attitudes. Hers was a profoundly religious sensibility, but not at all a conventional one. She caused something of a stir as a young woman by her refusal to accept the God of her parents. Accepting things as they were, or as the majority of people saw them, was never quite her style,” (shadowpoetry.com). So, as it can be seen, Emily’s life has had a lot of depression and despair, and thus, I felt that her poems literally come out of her life and soul.
In summation, Emily Dickinson was an interesting poet with a disheartening life. “Because Emily Dickinson rarely sought publication of her poetry and was largely unappreciated as an artist by critics during her lifetime, fewer than a dozen of the more than 1770 poems now credited to her were published before her death,” (web.ebscohost.com). The sentence “May 15, 1886, Emily Dickinson dies, virtually unpublished and unknown as a poet,” would have stayed true even until today if Emily was never found. If Emily hadn’t been discovered, the world would have missed out on a lot, because her work was just that touching to hundreds and thousands of people. Her poetry was an insight into her mind, her heart, her life, and her experiences. The way the wrote her poetry, though confusing to interpret at first, held a lot of significance and meaning behind them once it touches one’s heart. Like Emily once said, “We never know how high we are till we are called to rise. Then if we are true to form our statures touch the skies,” (goodreads.com).