Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound's poem "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is inspired by Chinese poetry, and dramatizes the situation of the Chinese wife of a traveling salesman. In its empathetic portrayal of the life of a woman, it resembles poems by Emily Dickinson -- but the difference is, of course, that Pound's form is fundamentally dramatic. Pound announces, in his title, the speaker of the poem. Dickinson's lyric voice, by contrast, announces no dramatized speaker. Nonetheless, we may identify certain aspects of Pound's work by comparing it with three of Dickinson's lyrics: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," "If you were coming in the fall, and "She rose to his requirement." I will identify the ways in which each of these Dickinson lyrics illuminate Pound's poem, and in conclusion will show that "She rose to his requirement" is the closest in terms of overall poetic effect.
Dickinson's "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" is, in some ways, a manifesto for poetic reticence. This reticence is also the modus operandi of Pound in "The River-Merchant's Wife." Dickinson makes it clear that suggestion works better as an expression of the truth than outright or blatant statement. The final simile compares poetic utterance not to a lightning-bolt, but to the explanation given to children to make the lightning-bolt less frightening: "as lightning to the children eased / with explanation kind / the truth must dazzle gradually / or every man be blind." Similarly, Pound's method of dramatizing the speaker's situation in "The River-Merchant's Wife" is gradual: we learn the progress of the...
Emily Dickinson: Discussion Response It never ceases to amaze me how few of Emily Dickinson's poems were read during the author's lifetime and how she persevered in writing them for so long, staying true to her spare style of writing. Many years later, modernist writers would use many of Dickinson's hallmarks as a writer, such as her fragmented prose, her innovative use of grammar, and her elliptical meanings. I do not
" typical way in which a poem by Dickinson is structured is by the use of the "omitted center." This means that an initial statement is followed by an apparent lack in development and continuity and the inclusion of strange and seemingly alien ideas. However, these often contradictory ideas and images work towards a sense of wholeness and integrity which is essentially open-ended in terms of its meaning. "Often the
Emily Dickinson and "The World is Not Conclusion" The poems of Emily Dickinson have been interpreted in a multitude of ways and often it is hard to separate the narrator of her works with the woman who wrote them. Few authors have such a close association between the individual and their work as Emily Dickinson. In Dickinson's poetry, the narrator and the poet are often seen as interchangeable beings. Themes that
Emily Dickinson's poem 632 ("The Brain -- is wider than the sky -- ") is, in its own riddling way, a poem that grapples with the Christian religion, while at the same time being a poem about the poetic imagination itself. Dickinson's religious concerns are perhaps most evident when considering the form of the poem (and indeed the form of so many of her poems). The meter and the rhyme
.. "I could not see to see" (from Dickinson, "465"). Words; phrases, and lines of poetry composed by Dickinson, within a given poem, are also typically set off, bookend-like (if not ruptured entirely at the center) by her liberal use of various punctuation "slices" (or perhaps "splices" is the better word) appearing most often in the form of either short and/or longer dashes (or combinations of these), e.g.: "-"; and/or
The study of geology becomes a central underlying theme in many of her works due to the influence of Hitchcock. Dickinson adopted the view that the study of nature should be an intermingled spiritual as well as naturalist journey, and as a result, places strong emphasis on how to explore spiritual and romantic Truth, through the allegory of nature and geology. Dickinson's poetic vision was not to advocate the strong
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