physically sheltered, burned white-hot.
EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886) THE EXPERIMENTAL POETESS
Emily Dickinson is nowadays considered one of the most relevant American poet although she was almost unknown in her lifetime. Over the time, she demonstrated to be an experimental poet who was able to innovate and anticipate modernist features.
She grew up in a privileged environment and received formal education, however, she finally left school because of her opposition to profess Christianism. She lived isolated in her family home, avoiding social contacts and concentrating herself in reading and writing. She gradually stopped to visit family and friends, having however regular contacts with her sister-in-law through epistolary exchange. That is the reason why it is thought she suffered depression and maybe agoraphobia.
The main themes in her poetry are nature, death and immortality, and she is constantly struggling with states of mind and mental distress. In her poetry, Dickinson demonstrates metrical unconventionalism and in her letters, she even breaks boundaries between prose and poetry, shifting from one to another. Dickinson’s poems are short and intense, she economises language maximising disconcerting effect. She uses capitalization and punctuation as a poetic device and creates powerful images that convey meaning in an indirect way, letting the reader free to react and interpret them.
Emily Dickinson also dissociates herself from the “I” of her poems, the implied author being somebody else. She acts as intermediary between nature and the reader, transmitting its message to the world.
The metrical structure in Dickinson’s poems is usually the hymn meter which is composed by two quatrains of alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter. To interrupt this structure and give a restlessness and sometimes distressing effect, she uses caesuras and seven syllables lines. The rhyme structure is variable, and she plays with rhythm using alliterations.
We can find a good example of her ability to convey messages through apparent simplicity in her poem “This is my letter to the world”, often used as introduction to her work.
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me -
That simple News that Nature told -
With tender Majesty
Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see
For love of Her – Sweet – Countrymen –
Judge tenderly – of Me
In this poem, the poet is introducing her main commitment, which is to transmit nature message (v.3). Nevertheless, we can also find other messages as the impression the poet has that the world is going on without noticing her (v.2). The poem follows the hymn meter which, as we said, is composed by two quatrains of alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter.
Thís is / my lét / ter to / the wórld iambic tetrameter (8 syllables)
That né / ver wróte / to Mé iambic trimeter (6 syllables)
We can also observe the use of capitalization in order to give emphasis to certain words, and the use of punctuation signs as hyphens.
Emily Dickinson language is suggestive and behind an appearance of simplicity hides a world of deep and moving feelings that the reader is free to interpret. Her capacity to break rules and create beautiful, intense and enigmatic poems establish her as one of the most relevant poets of her time.