Emily Dickinson is such a unique poet that it is very
difficult to place her in any single tradition—she seems to come from
everywhere and nowhere at once. Her poetic form, with her customary four-line
stanzas, ABCB rhyme schemes, and alternations in iambic meter between
tetrameter and trimeter, is derived from Psalms and Protestant hymns, but
Dickinson so thoroughly appropriates the forms—interposing her own long,
rhythmic dashes designed to interrupt the meter and indicate short pauses—that
the resemblance seems quite faint. Her subjects are often parts of the
topography of her own psyche; she explores her own feelings with painstaking
and often painful honesty but never loses sight of their universal poetic
application; one of her greatest techniques is to write about the particulars
of her own emotions in a kind of universal homiletic or adage-like tone (“After
great pain, a formal feeling comes”) that seems to describe the reader’s mind
as well as it does the poet’s. Dickinson
is not a “philosophical poet”; unlike Wordsworth or Yeats, she makes no effort
to organize her thoughts and feelings into a coherent, unified worldview.
Rather, her poems simply record thoughts and feelings experienced naturally
over the course of a lifetime devoted to reflection and creativity: the
powerful mind represented in these records is by turns astonishing, compelling,
moving, and thought-provoking, and emerges much more vividly than if Dickinson
had orchestrated her work according to a preconceived philosophical system.
Of course, Dickinson ’s
greatest achievement as a poet of inwardness is her brilliant, diamond-hard
language. Dickinson often writes
aphoristically, meaning that she compresses a great deal of meaning into a very
small number of words. This can make her poems hard to understand on a first
reading, but when their meaning does unveil itself, it often explodes in the
mind all at once, and lines that seemed baffling can become intensely and
unforgettably clear. Other poems—many of her most famous, in fact—are much less
difficult to understand, and they exhibit her extraordinary powers of
observation and description. Dickinson’s imagination can lead her into very
peculiar territory—some of her most famous poems are bizarre death-fantasies
and astonishing metaphorical conceits—but she is equally deft in her navigation
of the domestic, writing beautiful nature-lyrics alongside her wild flights of
imagination and often combining the two with great facility.
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