Emily Dickinson's Private World
There are poets and writers like Jack Kerouac and Walt Whitman who lived intensely, who hurtled from one experience to the next and sought to capture it all in their poetry and prose. Then there are poets like Emily Dickinson, who possessed such a rich imagination that though she saw no one but her family for the last twenty-five years of her she created some of the finest poetry ever written. Dickinson was an intensely private person who published just ten poems in her lifetime, in part because she was discouraged from publishing by publishers who didn't understand her poetic methods (Farr, pg. 5). An issue of the Atlantic monthly (which Dickinson read religiously) from January of 1960 recommended that anyone who wanted to be an artist must be lifted away and isolated from worldly surroundings (Farr, pg. 9). It appears that Dickinson took these words to heart. Her poems convey both a sense of intellectual superiority and a sense of isolation that she seems to both cherish and yearn to liberate herself from. Both the structure of her poems and her syntax reveal the contradictions within a poet whose imagination was fed by her solitude but who also desired tangible sensual experiences. It is u
Dickinson's poems reflect the cloistered and enclosed world in which she lived-- they are rarely longer than a stanza or two, reminding the reader of small parcels with intricate wrapping that conceals their true intent. Within the poems the lines themselves are short- most are written in tetrameter or trimeter. She left the majority of them written on small slips of paper in her miniscule handwriting and concealed in fascicles throughout her chambers (Farr, pg. 8). Her life and her poetry can seem deceptively small in scale at first glance. However, there is nothing small about the ideas and reflections encompassed within her poetry. Dickinson's poetry often reflected her voluntary disconnection from society. In "The soul selects her own society"(Ellman and O'Clair, pg. 48), the poet has "shut the door" on the rest of the world. She placed herself in a "divine majority", akin to Gods and emperors, which is reflective of her feelings of intellectual superiority over society. She was "Unmoved" by the chariots and emperors who paused at her gate, she had no desire to engage in communication with those outside her sphere. In the last stanza the lines "I've known her from an ample nation/ Choose One--/Then close the valves of her attention/like stone" indicate that she chooses to remain in "her own society" -she was the "One" whose company she preferred to that of emperors. She seemed to be content with her life as a recluse, but a closer reading of her poetry reveals insecurities that were masked by her private demeanor. She refused to see visitors for most of the last part of her life, and would speak to them only from behind doors or at opposite ends of the staircase (Farr, pg 6). She maintained relationships with people only through correspondence. This allowed her to maintain contact with the outside world without having to deal with the trauma of face to face interaction. By closing herself off from interaction with others, "closing the valves of her attention" she ensured that she would not be touched by the world and potentially wounded by it. She structured her world so that she was shielded from the possibilities of love and loss that are inherent in human interaction. For Dickinson this method of coping seems to have been successful at least to the extent that she found fulfillment in her poetry and she was able to find meaning and joy in her relationship with nature instead of with the outside world. The prism of Dickinson's personality was multifaceted, and though she was content to live in her own enclosed world there was definitely a part of
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Approximate Word count = 1745
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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