Emily Dickinson

Introduction

Emily Dickinson has been acclaimed by reviewers as one of the most original and significant poets to appear from the literary tradition of America. Though, Dickinson received none of this significant praise during her era. She has been so much acclaimed that people have even thought that she deserved canonization. Dickinson was a religious poet more than formally, but her thematic sense of religion lies not in her assurance, but in her continual questioning of God, in her attempt to define his nature and that of his world. Although she was always a poet of definition, straightforward definition was too direct for her: “The Riddle we can guess/ We speedily despise,” she wrote. Her works often begin, “It was not” or “It was like,” with the poem being an oblique attempt to define the “it.” “I like to see it lap the Miles”is a typical Dickinson riddle poem.

Thesis Statement

Although Emily Dickinson has been acclaimed as one of the most original and significant poets of all times but still she does not deserve canonization.

Discussion

This spiritual movement appears in Dickinson's other overtly religious poems. The poem “This World is not Conclusion” likewise starts with an apparent statement followed by a period and then moves quickly toward doubt. Again, in “It's easy to invent a Life”, God seems to be playing with man, and although the poem begins with man's birth as God's invention, it ends with death as God's simply “leaving out a Man.” In poem, “Of God we ask one favor,” the favor requested is that he forgive man, but it is clear that humans do not know for what they ask forgiveness and, as in Frost's “Forgive, O Lord,” it is clear that the greater crime is not man's but God's. In “I never lost as much but twice”, an early but accomplished work, God is “Burglar! Banker — Father!” robbing the poet, making her poor. (Ward, 92)

Writing about Emily Dickinson is necessarily a perilous and ambitious undertaking, partly because a whole cluster of myths and misunderstandings still clings to this enigmatic New England writer and partly because her internal life is colorless in the extreme. Emily Dickinson did not marry; she rarely left her home in Amherst, Massachusetts (except for a year or so at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and very brief visits to Philadelphia and Boston, the latter for much-needed medical attention to her eyes) (McQuade, 68). There is, in fact, nothing remarkable about this brilliant, auburnhaired woman except for the fact that she wrote some 1,775 poems during her lifetime and by general account is one of the finest poets to have lived and written in America (Habegger, 123). Her voice and her verse forms are unique: Emily Dickinson must be considered an American original. It is fitting, then, that Cynthia Griffin Wolff takes great pains to show the American roots of this creative genius while at the same time debunking many of the wrongheaded notions that have persisted in the popular imagination. (Bianchi, 18-20) ...