Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) wrote her verse far different from that of other American poets, showed the fact that one could take a single household and an inactive life, and make enchanting poetry out of it.
Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her early letters and descriptions of herself in her youth reveal an attractive girl with a lively wit. Her later retirement from the world, though perhaps affected by an unhappy love affair, seems mainly to have resulted from her own personality, from a desire to separate her from the world. The range of her poetry suggests not her limited experiences but the power of her creativity and imagination.
Emily Dickinson was not predictable; yet the comic sense, widely abroad, upsetting much stability, was bound at last to break that tie holding the poet within the bondage of social preoccupation. Emily Dickinson was not only a lyric poet; she was in a profound sense a comic poet in the American tradition. She possessed the sense of scale and caught this within her small compass. A little tippler, she leaned against the sun. The grave for her was a living place whose elements grew large in stone. Purple mountains moved for her; a train, clouds, a pathway through a valley became huge and animate. Much of her poetry is in the ascending movement, full of morning imagery, of supernal mornings: seraphim tossing their snowy hats on high might be taken as her symbol. Her poetry is also comic in the Yankee strain, with its resilience and sudden unprepared ironical lines. Her use of an unstressed irony in a soft blank climax is the old formula grown almost fixed, yet fresh because it was used with a new depth—
(more…)
.