Emily Dickinson

Introduction

Emily Dickinson is one of the most original love poets in our language. She invites comparison only with Donne, and like him she strikes tones unheard before. The tracers of literary influence will find hard work here. She is light years apart from the Victorian lyricists, as Donne is from the Elizabethan and Jacobean sonneteers. And she is light years apart from the love poets of the present time, as indeed Donne is, too, despite all the adulation accorded him in the left wing camps (Thomas, 33).

There is in her lyrics little of that belief that love is the chief weapon of the gods against man, less of that helplessness in the presence of passion, none of that linking of love and evil, which occupy so many contemporary writers. She is out of our space and out of our time, she has wrested a faith from emotion, she looks on it and finds it good. She does not deny codes; she simply ignores them. Her love is "anterior to life, posterior to death," and she has no real power to renounce it. She can renounce only the immediate fulfillment, firm in the belief that in the end this all-embracing passion will not prove a delusion of earth. This is the mood of that magnificent poem "Of all the souls that stand create," wherein in three brief stanzas love and the tragedy of love and the immortal promise of love are caught in utter music for as long as our language shall endure. Such love has a mystical flavor, and necessarily becomes infused with a religious element. One is hard put to decide if some of Emily Dickinson's poems deal with an earthly or a more than earthly love, but it is safe to say that many which were looked upon as purely metaphysical a generation ago are read as simple love songs today. It is this metaphysical or religious element which, in conjunction with her secluded life, has caused Emily Dickinson to be called the New England Nun. One has but to read her fully to recognize how unfortunate this phrase of Mary Wilkins Freeman's is when applied to her. It gives no impression of the complete, unorthodox Emily, and it may well have caused some to misread her. Phrases are dynamite (Miller, 17).

Discussion

Love is a passionate tenderness that endures. Emily Dickinson's genius was suited to the expression of both its tenderness and its passion. It is the tenderness that predominates in poems like "I gave myself" and "Going to him! Happy Letter!" The famous lyric "Elysium is as far as to" shows how utterly felicitous was her form for this phase of emotion. But though it is a rare occurrence with her, she does not shrink from the full expression of passion itself. The exultancy of "Wild Nights!" is repeated in several other poems, such as "Mine by the right of the white election" and "What if I say I shall not wait?" In "Come slowly, ...