Commentary
Emily Dickinson is one of the most significant poets writing at the end of the nineteenth century. Unlike Whitman, who was outgoing and frequently occupied with promoting himself and his work, Dickinson lived the life of a recluse. She ventured away from home only a few times, spending one year at a seminary and taking a few brief trips to Washington, Philadelphia, and Boston. The household she grew up in was devoutly Christian. She dressed only in white and her primary social group consisted of family members and a few others with whom she corresponded. She avoided social gatherings and often refused to see people. What is most surprising for a poet of her current stature and influence is that she only published a dozen poems during her lifetime and those were published anonymously.
Despite her reclusive nature—or perhaps because of it—Dickinson was a prolific poet, producing nearly two thousand poems. As you read in her biography, most of her work comes from forty notebooks found after her death.
Dickinson’s poetry is lyrical. “Lyric poetry” refers to short poems in first person that express intense and highly personal emotions.
We noted in Lesson One that much of Whitman’s stature ultimately rests on the innovation of the form and content of his poetry and our ability to differentiate it from European models. Much of Dickinson’s allure also relies on the fact that her poetry is unique. Her poems bear no clear influence from the long history of poetry that precedes them (she never even read Whitman, having been told by her father that the material was inappropriate).
To a romanticist, she is the epitome of a great poet—driven by a compulsion to create in the absence of stultifying external influences. Her poetry embodies a personal and passionate struggle with pain, loss, love, and death and her uncertainty about the existence of God and the meaning of life.
Not all of her poems are as dark as this brief introduction implies. Dickinson is at times playful and humorous, but her most memorable poems tend to be those that confront complicated human emotions and ideas.