Chapter Five.Emily Dickson

1、Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)lifelifenEmily Dickinson was born into one of Amherst, Massachusetts most prominent families on 10 December 1830. nShe was the second child born to Emily Norcross (1804-1882) and Edward Dickinson (1803-1874), a Yale graduate, successful lawyer, Treasurer for Amherst Colleg

2、e and a United States Congressman. nEmily had an older brother named William Austin Dickinson (1829-1895) (known as Austin) who would marry her most intimate friend Susan Gilbert in 1856. n The Dickinsons were strong advocates for education and Emily too benefited from an early education in classic

3、literature, studying the writings of Virgil and Latin, mathematics, history, and botany. nDickinson proved to be a dazzling student and in 1847, though she was already somewhat of a homebody, at the age of seventeen Emily left for South Hadley, Massachusetts to attend the Mount Holyoke Female Semina

4、ry. nShe stayed there less than a year and some of the theories as to why she left are homesickness and poor health. nShe was in the midst of the college towns society and bustle although she started to spend more time alone, reading and maintaining lively correspondences with friends and relatives.

5、nEmily Dickinson died on 15 May 1886, at the age of fifty-six. She now rests in the West Cemetery of Amherst, Hampshire County, Massachusetts. Not wishing a church service, a gathering was held at the Homestead. Emily Dickinsons PoetrynEmily Dickinson had no abstract theory of poetry. It is not cert

6、ain if she was familiar with the poetic theories of Edgar Allan Poe, Coleridge, Emerson, Whitman and Matthew Arnold. When editor Thomas Higginson asked her to define poetry, she gave a subjective, emotional response: If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I kno

7、w that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way? The Character of Her Verse n1. Highly compressed, compact, shy of being exposed. n2. Her style is elliptical - she will say no more than s

8、he must - suggesting either a quality of uncertainty or one of finality. n3. Her lyrics are her highly subjective. One-fifth of them begin with I - she knows no other consciousness. n4. Ambiguity of meaning and syntax. Wrote Higginson: She almost always grasped whatever she sought, but with some fra

9、cture of grammar and dictionary on the way. n5. Concreteness - it is nearly a theorem of lyric poetry that it is as good as it is concrete. Even when she is talking of the most abstract of subjects, Emily specifies it by elaborating it in the concreteness of simile or metaphor. n6. Use of poetic for

10、ms such as alliteration, assonance, and consonance; also onomatopoetic effects n7. Obscurity. Higginson said . she was obscure, and sometimes inscrutable; and though obscurity is sometimes, in Coleridges phrase, a compliment to the reader, yet it is never safe to press this compliment too hard. Them

11、es In Emily Dickinsons Poetry A few themes occupied the poet: love, nature, doubt and faith, suffering, death, immortality - these John Donne has called the great granite obsessions of humankind. nLove: Though she was lonely and isolated, Emily appears to have loved deeply, perhaps only those who ha

12、ve loved and lost can love, with an intensity and desire which can never be fulfilled in the reality of the lovers touch. nNature: A fascination with nature consumed Emily. She summed all her lyrics as the simple news that nature told, she loved natures creatures no matter how insignificant - the ro

13、bin, the hummingbird, the bee, the butterfly, the rat .Only the serpent gave her a chill. nFaith And Doubt: Emilys theological orientation was Puritan - she was taught all the premises of Calvinistic dogma - but she reacted strenuously against two of them: infant damnation and Gods sovereign electio

14、n of His own. There was another force alive in her time that competed for her interests: that was the force of literary transcendentalism. This explains a kind of paradoxical or ambivalent attitude toward matters religious. She loved to speak of a compassionate Savior and the grandeur of the Scriptu

15、res, but she disliked the hypocrisy and arbitrariness of institutional church. nPain And Suffering: Emily displays an obsession with pain and suffering; there is an eagerness in her to examine pain, to measure it, to calculate it, to intellectualize it as fully as possible. Her last stanzas become a

16、 catalog of grief and its causes: death, want, cold, despair, exile. Emily says I like a look of Agony. nDeath: Many readers have been intrigued by Dickinsons ability to probe the fact of human death. She often adopts the pose of having already died before she writes her lyric. She can look straight

17、 at approaching death Structural Patterns nMajor pattern is that of a sermon: statement or introduction of topic, elaboration, and conclusion. There are three variations of this major pattern: n1. The poet makes her initial announcement of topic in an unfigured line.n2. She uses a figure for that pu

18、rpose.n3. She repeats her statement and its elaboration a number of times before drawing a conclusion. Im Nobody! Who Are You?nAlthough the following poem is short, only consisting of two stanzas, the image is clear and vivid and pregnant with meaning and it calls for deep thought. The poem might explain the reason why Emily Dickinson preferred solitude to public life and was contented to become a recluse and stayed away from the bustle and clamorous society which she thought to be material-oriented and fame-driven. nThe poem sketches three different types of people