英美文学选读学习笔记 Emily Dickinson

Miss Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born into a Calvinist family of Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father, a prominent lawyer and Congressman, played a big role in her life.  Emily attended Amherst Academy from 1840 to 1847 and also spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. The school was strongly congregational, where she suffered serious religious crisis. After 1862, affected by an unhappy love affair with Reverend Charles Wadsworth, she became a total recluse, living a normal New England village life only with her family. Her private life wastty much in order. She kept the house, sent letters to her friends, wrote poetry, and read intensively by herself. Her favorite writers were Keats, the Brontes, the Brownings, and George Eliot; classic myths, the Bible, and Shakespeare were what Emily drew commonly on for allusions and references in her poetry and letters. Speaking of her contemporary American intellectual resources, Thoreau and Emerson, especially the latter, were the first and the foremost. In general, Dickinson wanted to live simply as a complete independent being, and so she did, as a spinster.

Dickinson's poetry writing began in the early 1850s. Altogether, she wrote 1,775 poems, of which only seven had appeared during her lifetime. Dickinson called this stream of tiny, aphoristic poems a continuous fragmented "letter to the world," a way to bridge her private world with the public. After her death in 1886, her poems were discovered by her sister Lavinia. With the help of Mrs. M. L. Todd and Thomas Wentworth, the first volume of 115 poems appeared in 1890. Later, two more volumes of poetry and two volumes of letters were published, with much more to come out in 1914, which finally made Emily Dickinson, especially her withdrawn self, known to the outside world. As her poetry continues to be issued after its first appearance in 1890, her fame has kept rising. She is now recognized not only as a great poetess on her own right but as a poetess of considerable influence upon American poetry of the sent century.

Dickinson's poems are usually based on her own experiences, her sorrows and joys. But within her little lyrics Dickinson addresses those issues that concern the whole human beings, which include religion, death, immortality, love, and nature. In some of her poems she wrote about her doubt and belief about religious subjects. While she desired salvation and immortality, she denied the orthodox view of paradise. Although she believed in God, she sometimes doubted His benevolence. Closely related to Dickinson's religious poetry are her poems concerning death and immortality, ranging over the physical as well as the psychological and emotional aspects of death. She looked at death from the point of view of both the living and the dying. She even imagined her own death, the loss of her own body, and the journey of her soul to the unknown. Perhaps Dickinson's greatest rendering of the moment of death is to be found in "I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died --", a poem universally considered one of her masterpieces.

Love is another subject Dickinson dwelt on. One group of her love poems treats the suffering and frustration love can cause. These poems are clearly the reflection of her own unhappy experience, closely related to her deepest and most private feelings. Many of them are striking and original depictions of the longing for shared moments, the pain of separation, and the futility of finding happiness, such as "If you were coming in the Fall," "There came a Day at Summer's full," "I cannot live with You --", etc. The other group of love poems focuses on the physical aspect of desire, in which Dickinson dealt with, allegorically, the influence of the male authorities over the female, emphasizing the power of physical attraction and exssing a mixture of fear and fascination for the mysterious magnetism between sexes. However, it is those poems dealing with marriage that have aroused critical attention first. "I'm ceded- I've stopped being theirs," "I'm 'wife'-- I've finished that --" are but a few examples to show Dickinson's confusion and doubt about the role of women in the 19th century America.

More than five hundred poems Dickinson wrote are about nature, in which her general skepticism about the relationship between man and nature is well-exssed. On the one hand, she shared with her romantic and transcendental decessors who believed that a mythical bond between man and nature existed, that nature revealed to man things about mankind and universe. On the other hand, she felt strongly about nature's inscrutability and indifference to the life and interests of human beings. However, Dickinson managed to write about nature in the affirmation of the sheer joy and the apciation, unaffected by philosophical speculations. Her acute observations, her concern for cise details and her interest in nature are pervasive, from sketches of flowers, insects, birds, to the sunset, the fully detailed summer storms, the change of seasons; from keen perception to witty analysis.

Dickinson's poetry is unique and unconventional in its own way. Her poems have no s, hence are always quoted by their first lines. In her poetry there is a particular stress pattern, in which dashes are used as a musical device to create cadence and capital letters as a means of emphasis. The form of her poetry is more or less like that of the hymns in community churches, familiar, communal, and sometimes, irregular. Dickinson's irregular or sometimes inverted sentence structure also confuses readers. However, her poetic idiom is noted for its laconic brevity, directness and plainness. Her poems are usually short, rarely more than twenty lines, and many of them are centered on a single image or symbol and focused on one subject matter. Due to her deliberate seclusion, her poems tend to be very personal and meditative. She frequently uses personae to render the tone more familiar to the reader, and personification to vivify some abstract ideas. Dickinson's poetry, despite its ostensible formal simplicity, is remarkable for its variety, subtlety and richness; and her limited private world has never confined the limitless power of her creativity and imagination.