Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
1. Life
•She was born into a middle-class Puritan family in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830.
•Her father, a lawyer and a politician, influenced her emotional development and
religious belief.
•She received her university education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.
•She refused to declare her faith in public, as required by the Puritan tradition.
•She interrupted her studies and returned home.
•She began a life of seclusion and only wore white clothes as ambiguous emblems of
spiritual marriage and singleness.
•She never left her father’s house except for some walks in the garden.
•She died in 1886.
•Poems by Emily Dickinson appeared in 1890 published by the literary critic Thomas
W. Higginson.
•A complete edition of her poems appeared in 1955, edited by Thomas Johnson.
•A collection of her letters was published in 1958.
2. Influences on Dickinson
•The Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, the Metaphysical poets.
•Contemporary writers like Emily Brontë.
•The Puritan tradition..
•Emerson’s Transcendentalism..
3. Themes
•Death and loss.
•Love and desire.
•Time.
•Fear, sorrow and despair.
•God.
•Nature.
•Man’s relation to the universe.
3. The theme of death
Death from the point of view of:
•the person dying;
•a witness.
Death è the great mystery, connected with eternity, a liberation from anxiety.
Death è the place where the human being tends towards, in order to become one with the
universe.
3. The theme of love
Love is explored through a full range of emotions:
•from ecstatic and sensual celebration
•to the despair due to separation.
Love è expectation of eternity as the hope of a final spiritual union.
3. The theme of nature
Different from man: a source of wonder or fear.
Can be presented:
•through an objective description;
•by juxtaposing the thing observed and the soul of the observer è the natural object
leads to philosophical speculation;;
•as a source of imagery to emphasise an abstract concept or theme.
