Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but returned home after one year. She continued to live in her family home with her younger sister, mother and father. Her brother and his wife lived next door. Dickinson rarely left her house or received visitors. Those whom she did associate with, however, had a powerful affect on her poetry.
It is speculated that the two most influential people in her life were Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she met on a trip to Philadelphia, and her sister-in-law, Susan. In 1860, Wadsworth left for the West Coast, causing Dickinson terrible grief. Afterward, she lived in isolation from the rest of the world. Despite this, she enthusiastically continued correspondences and avidly remained au currant with popular published works.
One of the correspondences she maintained was with her sister-in-law Susan. Throughout her works, Dickinson wrote many love poems to her. It is widely accepted that they had a love affair which spanned many years. After her death in Amherst in 1886, Dickinson's brother and his mistress tried to destroy all evidence of this relationship.
She admired female poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Helen Hunt Jackson. Her work also seems to be influenced by her Puritanical upbringing. Dickinson was prolific to say the least; however, she was not recognized for her work during her lifetime. Her work was published in 1890, four years after her death.
Dickinson's poetry is...
" 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
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
This poem talks of light in winter and compares it to a cathedral, and says that both kinds are "oppressive." It is not easy to figure out exactly what Dickinson is saying in this poem, but much of her poetry seems to have the belief that organized religion is oppressive, where as nature and intrinsic feelings about God are liberating. Many critics note that a religious crisis was probably the
(Jones, p. 49). These confessional poems are often "searing in their self-inquiry" and "harrowing to the reader" and typically take their metaphors from texts and paintings of Dickinson's day. Some scholars posit that the "Master" is an unattainable composite figure, "human, with specific characteristics, but godlike." (Jones, p. 49). Recent scholars have posited that Dickinson saw the mind and spirit as tangible, places and that for much of her life
(Ibid) Romantic Loves in her Life: Emily's name has been romantically associated with a number of people. However, whether by design or by co-incidence, all her love affairs seemed doomed for failure from the start -- as her objects of desire were almost always unattainable. Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a married man with children, whom she met on a rare visit to Philadelphia in 1855, has been mentioned as one of
Emily graduated from high school and attended college for one year (Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary) which was fairly unusual for women at that time. She remained at home in her parents' house all her life, caring for her invalid mother and becoming increasingly reclusive. It is from this quiet reclusive lifestyle that the many poems for which Emily Dickinson is so well-known today sprang, among them "Because I could
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