DICKINSON ON ONE PAGE (ALMOST)

PERSONALITY/TECHNIQUES REVEALED IN LETTERS

--incredible compression & elision

--fascination with paradox

--visual metaphor for mental process  (firmament from fin)

--notions of God not orthodox

--poetry=witchcraft=power (unlike her own physical smallness)

SOME GENERAL POINTS ABOUT HER POETRY

--based upon simple hymns/ballads (3/4 beats per line)

--formal simplicity/appearance belies compressed complexity of image sequence (often cryptic)

--Dickinson: minimalist (unlike Whitman)

--but manuscripts reveal small poem expands out onto page, as if page were mind/world/text united in some vast, intense conception

--God/truth so intense must be approached obliquely

--full epiphany often withheld; fascination with threshold moments (particularly death moment--ah yes, wasn't the professor harping on this about Poe ... the poetics of the threshold!)

--Dickinson has different voices/ personalities (persona):  little girl, sentimental poet of nature, lover, Christic martyr, feminist

--often key types of process/images get repeated in different contexts: e.g., sound filling up/not filling up space, the notion of solidity/vacuum--i.e. she is the poet of lack (and its potential opposite)

FOUR TIPS FOR READING DICKINSON'S POETRY

1) Don't become obsessed with getting every detail to fit an overall interpretation.  The more complex poems invariably contain lines/ideas that are difficult to make sense of.

2) Because of the absence of standard punctuation, you have to play around to get a feeling for what words combine with other words to form what otherwise would be a "logical" sentence unit.

3) Keep in mind that she switches metaphors/similes very abruptly, and that she may simultaneously be talking, say, about God and love.

4) You won't like every poem--perhaps only a few; but treasure, reread, etc., the ones that you do.  (E.g., I prefer the poems in which she or her persona addresses a particular, palpable, personal experience rather than the ones that are more abstract and gnomic, or nature-oriented.)

DICKINSON: THEMATIC GROUPS

beginner poems

            61        Papa above

            67        Success is counted sweetest

            130      These are the days when Birds come back

feminist poems

            187      How many times these low feet staggered

            303      The soul selects her own society

            732      She rose to his requirements

depression

            258      There's a certain slant of light

            341      After great pain, a formal feeling comes

            280      I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

death or threshhold of truth/grace

            241      I like a look of Agony

            315      he fumbles      

            338      I know that he exists

            547      I've seen a Dying Eye

            465      I heard a fly buzz

unorthodox/poetic power

            593      I think I was enchanted

            1545    The bible is an antique