Reading Notes W8: Dickinson, Part A

Emily Dickinson (480-490)

  • With the unlikely combination of innocence and sophistication that Dickinson mysteriously become one of the best-known American poets (481)
  • Some of her works reflected the pain of "unrequited love and erotic desire"
  • No scholar has been able to determine the name of the one-or ones-she loved
  • In the 1850's, she began to write about serious issues of the day like from slavery and women's rights to the violence of the Civil War
  • Shakespeare, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Charlotte Bronte were her foremost inspirations (481)
  • After her death, her sister, Lavinia, discovered almost 2,000 poems stashed away in a box
  • Dickinson's use of punctuation  was most striking because of her dramatic dashes and the manuscripts suggest that they are even more innovative than they look on the printed page (482)
  • She also often capitalizes the nouns she uses in her poems to carry out the deeper meaning or significance of the word
  • In poem 449 "I died for Beauty" was kind of hard for me to interpret but I understood some of the lines
  • I believe the poem is about the act of truth and beauty 
"I died for Beauty-but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room-" (489)
  • The speaker tells us that he died for beauty and when he was laid in the tomb it was to find that someone else newly dead (who had died for truth) had been placed in the neighboring room"
  • He then questions "Why I failed?" on line 5 page 489, and the speaker answers that it was "For Beauty" one line 6 page 489
  • The neighbor then mentions he died for truth
"And I- for Truth-Themself are One-
We Brethren are:, He said-" 

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