Dickinson’s Style and Tips on Reading Her Poetry
In many ways, Dickinson’s style prefigures modern poetry during the first part of the twentieth century. She employs grammar, punctuation, rhyme, and meter in unconventional ways, a tendency that did not become popular until decades after her death.
Personas
It is important when reading Dickinson’s poetry to remember that the speaker of every poem is not necessarily Dickinson. Typical of lyric poetry, Dickinson’s poems often employ “personas”; that is, she invents a fictional character (an implied poet, alter-ego) and then speaks through it. Thus, the speaker in Dickinson’s poems is not necessarily Dickinson herself, but a mask that she dons for the occasion. It may be easiest to understand persona by thinking of an actor playing a role in a film. We know that the actor is not the character—Mark Hamill is not Luke Skywalker, Julia Roberts is not Erin Brokovich. As Dickinson explains in a letter she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higgins, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, "When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person."
An example of persona can be found in “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (#340/280) from your assigned readings. In this poem, the speaker is suicidal and imaging her funeral and internment, but we cannot assume that this reflects suicidal notions in Dickinson. You might also note, when reading this poem, that by avoiding the tendency to see the speaker as the poet (by acknowledging her use of persona), we open the poem up to a broader reading. Consider the final stanza:
An then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing—then—
If we dismiss persona, we might be tempted to read this stanza as only narrating her burial (“to hit the World” = to fall into the Earth; to be “Finished knowing” = to lose, at death, the ability to think). But if we acknowledge the presence of a persona—a mask—then we open up the possibility that the poet behind the persona may be articulating a more significant point: a differentiation between the physical world and the world of the mind, between the real and the imaginary. It is reason that holds us aloft, and when reason fails (“a Plank in Reason, broke”), we fall to the physical world, a world where we cannot “know” any more. Just as physical desire is sometimes said to deprive us of our ability to think, Dickinson may, through the poet’s persona, be telling us that the only way we can rise above the physical world is through reason.