Emily Dickinson. Viata Si Opera

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Argument ……………………………………………………………………………2

I. Emily Dickinson’s biography …………………………………………..………4

I.1.Family and childhood…………………………..……………………………….5

I.2. Later life ……………………………………….…….…………………………6

I.3. Decline and death ………………………………………………………………6

II. Early influences and writing…………………………………………………..8

II.1. A literary friendship ………………………………………………………….12

II.2 The creation of poems ………………………………………………………..14

II.3. The publication of Dickinson’s poetry ………………………………………15

III. Major characteristics of Emily Dickinson’s poetry………………………..20

III.1 Themes and motifs …………………………………………………………………………….20

III.2. Style …………………………………………………………………………22

IV. Conclusions …………………………………………………………………..27

V. Bibliography ……………………………………………………………….…31

Argument

How is it possible that this woman, who lived all her life in Amherst, a little village from Massachusetts, in the north of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, without any contact with the great European culture or any other literary movements, established a work that would change the course of contemporary poetry? From the solitude of her voluntary seclusion, this admirable woman managed to make one of the most original works of modern poetry.

Emily Dickinson’s poetry is among the works that are essential in the understanding of contemporary poetry. Almost at the same time with Laforgue and Rimbaud in France, and a few years after Hölderlin in Germany, this singular writer opened new channels to the flow of poetry of her time and ours. Emily Dickinson masterfully used various resources that later would be explored and exploited in a thousand different ways.

Emily Dickinson’s poetry is doubly misleading: first, it is misleading because it makes us believe that it consists in traditionalist poetry and dapper-in pejorative sense, which is not true, because it often displays outbreaks of a highly modern poetry, both in rhyme and meter, in syntax and punctuation.

Secondly, we say doubly misleading because as to the meaning of the poems, we are faced with a poetry that, at first glance, seems just one more example of religious poetry, and in particular Christian. However, if we make a thorough analysis, read it carefully, we see that these poems show a highly personal vision which does not exclude contradictions, a modern and anguished conception of existence which, although rooted in traditional Christian heritage, links her to the desolation of the twentieth century. Despite studies that have been long devoted to this author, her life remains an enigma for us.

During her existence, Emily Dickinson published only a few poems, and it was not until 1890, four years after her death in 1886, that her first book was published, with a small selection of the almost two thousand poems she left behind. Shortly afterwards, two other volumes of poetry were published, along with two collections of her correspondence.

In 1914, more poems were published, and it was not until 1950, when Harvard University bought all her manuscripts and publishing rights, that the meticulous edition of her complete works began. Critics have always considered her (and still do) as one of the best poets of nineteenth century American literature. As previously mentioned, a few of her poems were published in her lifetime anonymously; the rest, more than eight hundred poems, were found after her death in her home, where she had been living the last years of her life.

Dickinson’s voluntary isolation remains to this day a mystery to scholars of the writer. The isolation might have been the result of an impossible love or mental illness, many assumptions surrounding the private life of one of the most outstanding writers of world literature, she is one of the writers who, like Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams and Federico Garcia Lorca, have used more of their personal experiences as justification for his/her literary work. Some supporters of this approach, not being satisfied with their work, have also tried to challenge willingly biographies in their own field. While for some, the seclusion and solitude in which Dickinson lived throughout her life was due to her personal frustrations and dissatisfactions, for others this detention was voluntary because that is the ideal place for reflection and writing. Willingly or not, it is true that Dickinson spent her life in the family home, except for some sporadic trips made for cultural or health reasons.

During one of these trips, which were taken to Philadelphia in 1855, she heard a sermon delivered by Father Charles Wadsworth who apparently impressed her. This made them able to establish a profound relationship, even though he was married and had several children.

Later, in 1882, Dickinson received a marriage proposal made by Otis P. Lord, Judge of Salem, a widower eighteen years her senior. But Lord died in March 1884, which was a new love frustration in Dickinson’s life. She was called the poet of light due to the splendour and mysticism of her poems, due to the purity of their images and pristine innocence. She was a young woman who at one point in her life chose to depart from the adult world and its selfishness to take refuge in the quietness of her own home, to dream of a love which she never had and imagine a passion which would never hurt or break her heart. Many find it hard to understand her life, but the choice of that humble being at the same time resulted in an intense existence, a poetic legacy that became one of the greatest achievements in American literature. Unbeknownst and perhaps unwillingly, Emily Dickinson achieved immortality.

The first literary figure of the time to realize her worth as a poet was the cleric and writer Thomas Higginson who, despite acknowledging her genius and being her only literary and corresponding mentor, advised her not to publish her work because it went against the literary conventions of the time. However, her other literary friend, novelist Helen Jackson, tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to publish a book of poems, and although while she was still living, she only got to publish seven after her death. There were found among her papers 2,000 poems, some of which are only fragments. From this material, Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, a friend from Amherst, edited the first selection of her works, Poems (1890), which had a great popular success. Recent research suggests that there were two important people in her life who exercised some influence on her poetry: Charles Wadsworth, a clergyman from Philadelphia and Otis P. Lord, a friend of her father.

My goal in this paper is to do my best and know Emily Dickinson starting with her life, herself, and her poetry.

I: Emily Dickinson’s biography

Poetry, what is poetry? Poetry is more than words, prayers and rhymes. Through poetry, we can put on paper all our thoughts, poetry is expressing feelings to the fullest, making the current feelings take over the heart; the paper absorbs everything, and kindly lends itself as a means for better or worse, one can erase and erase but always leave a stain. But poetry is not written on paper, it is written in the hearts of those who write and those who read it and leave footprints on hearts, even more than on paper, hearts are similar to a sheet of paper, promises are written and anxieties are left behind; it feeds on words, making it bigger every time you pour your heart out.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10th, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father, Edward Dickinson, served as a judge and was a representative of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Meanwhile, her mother, Emily Norcross, was bedridden the last years of her life and both Emily and her younger sister Lavinia, had to take care of her. Both had an older brother named William.

Although there is little information about her childhood, we know that Emily grew up in a deeply Puritanical atmosphere and that at some point she decided she wanted to study, something uncommon among girls during that period of time.

In 1840, when Emily was ten, she was enrolled by her parents in Amherst Academy, an all school for boys until two years earlier when it had opened its doors for the first time for girls.

The small advantage offered her a unique opportunity: history, literature, mathematics, classical languages, everything was within reach and was studied by Emily with more or less difficulty and exceeding the requirements that she self-imposed while suffering poor health.

Seven years after leaving the centre and the family home, she joined the Mary Lyon of Mount Holyoke Seminary for Young Ladies where she also received religious training. Her stay at the seminary was brief, as a few months later she fell ill and had to return home. Emily would never study in a school afterwards.

Emily Dickinson is for some a naïve, conservative and withdrawn writer. For others, she is explosive, modern and deep.

Some see her naively in love with Reverend Charles Wadsworth with whom she had few encounters throughout her life. Others describe her as a fervent admirer of her sister, Susan Huntington Dickinson, who eventually became a devoted editor of her sister’s work. Some see her as the author of pastoral poems about nature.

Over time and for moral and economic reasons, she has been interpreted wrongly, she has been censored and thus a myth was created around her that often stripped her of her real value.

I.1. Family and childhood

Since childhood, Emily gave vent to her creativity in the form of verse. She wrote and read poems to very few people. Helen Hunt Jackson or her publisher Thomas Niles tried again and again without success to publish her poems, and after a long period of time of debates, Emily finally accepted.

Emily Dickinson was born in pre-Civil War times, when strong ideological and political currents in society clashed upper-middle American class.

Even the most affluent households lacked hot water and bathrooms inside the house and housework represented a huge burden for women despite their good economic position.

A girl receiving a good education was unusual for those times. Severe Puritanical religiosity was present everywhere, and practically the only accepted artistic expression was the music of the church choir.

In 1830, Protestant orthodoxy regarded novels as dissipated literature; card games and dance were not allowed; there were classical music concerts and the theatre was non-existent. Easter and Christmas were not celebrated (at least until 1864, when the first Episcopal Church in Amherst was established, introducing these customs) and no other meetings of single women were accepted, just the daily tea between neighbours was tolerated.

The education Emily received from her father certainly marked her character and life. An important role in her life was also played by her two brothers.

William, her older brother, was married to Susan Gilbert, a friend of Emily’s, settling somewhere near the family house.

Lavinia, the youngest of the family, best known under the name of Vinnie, also became a support for Emily. She is the one who after the death of writer, was busy collecting all hidden writings in order to make them known to the world. While she was alive, Emily always refused this idea. Being passionate about the letters, she took Latin and Greek lessons and became a consummate writer. In addition, she took piano lessons, singing, gardening (she enjoyed reading about the hidden mysteries of Botany).

Her family tried to awaken an interest in religion in the young girls’ minds, but it was never possible, because she was interested in discovering things about the world around them. For Emily, attending the seminar only meant good grades.

Early next year, after he was ill, he returned home. Starting from a basic mystical symbolism, we try to reach a higher ideological level that will lead us to have a slightly clearer picture of the Dickinson’s personality.

II.2. Later life

In 1861, when she had just turned thirty, Emily Dickinson began to reduce her appearance and to limit visits back home and to wear only white clothes.

A few months later, no one saw her. Her strange phobia about leaving home and others, made her reclusive in her room for the last fifteen years of her life. Emily Dickinson’s personality remains a mystery for her readers. There are two great mysteries: the first, not wanting to publish anything she wrote and always believing that her poems were not worthy of being shared with the public; the second, why would she end matters with life? She could have had it all: respect in the field, critical praise, fame, family, and so on and so forth.

Shortly after her death, her sister found in the room where Emily had lived the last years no less than forty volumes which appeared to have been written and hidden by the writer herself. Those jewels were hidden in the silence of their pages, over eight hundred poems that the world could enjoy when Emily was gone.

Most of the poems found were about love, a secret love that, according to some scholars, could have been the cause of her strange isolation from the world. But only she, the great Emily Dickinson knew the truth. Most importantly however, it was the exceptional legacy that she left to the world of literature and poetry lovers.

II.3 Decline and death

One could easily notice that many aspects of the biography of the author in question can be interpreted in one way or another, depending on the type of reasoning one would want to follow, something more than usual in literary criticism. As a result, at a first reading of Dickinson’s poems it is obvious that, apart from a latent preoccupation with death, various images are taken from nature. There are two men who might have broken the heart of the poetess. Some say it was a love from youth that her father flatly banned while others say they were the feelings for a married Protestant pastor who broke Emily’s heart, and the “quality of her mind…If the word great means anything in poetry, this poem is one of the greatest in the English language; it is flawless to the last detail. The rhythm charges with movement the pattern of suspended action back of the poem. Every image is precise and, moreover, not merely beautiful, but inextricably fused with the central idea. Every image extends and intensifies every other … No poet could have invented the elements of [this poem]; only a great poet could have used them so perfectly. Miss Dickinson was a deep mind writing from a deep culture, and when she came to poetry, she came infallibly” was strongly reflected in Because I could not stop for Death:

Because I could not stop for Death 

He kindly stopped for me  

The Carriage held but just ourselves  

And Immortality (…)

Since then – ‘tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses’ Heads

Were toward Eternity.

Until the end of her life Emily Dickinson had become, due to her extravagances and peculiar lifestyle a colourful character. She passed away on May 15th, 1886, “just before the whistles sounded for six”, after a long battle with Bright disease.

II: Early influences and writing

The case of Emily Dickinson is very special in American literature, due to the popularity she enjoyed and still does after her death, causing often for the public opinion to forget how isolated she was in life (first in her small village and then in her small room). Therefore, there are not many influences her poetry received either from her contemporaries or from her predecessors. The three main influences that can be traced in the work of this poet are the Bible, North American humour and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

As every American born before the Civil War, Emily was familiar with the Bible from her early childhood, and the influence that the scriptures operated on her already shows from her letters written during her youth. In her own words, she especially enjoyed the works of Alfred Tennyson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, John Keats and Robert Browning; she adored in particular the latter’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The only author who acknowledged having read the complete works of William Shakespeare was her. When she lost her sight almost completely (1864-5) she wrote that she doubted if, after reading all the plays of the great dramatist, she would still need to read other authors. She said that Keats was one of her favourite poets and made three references to William Wordsworth and two to Lord Byron.

As noted, these and many other writers and poets populated the days of Emily Dickinson, but apart from the three main influences considered above, it is difficult to say whether any of them had an effect on her poetry, which is a completely original product and – beyond all question – deeply personal. Her style is non-transferable and, therefore, neither imitated nor possible to imitate.

From 1853, she began to collect her poems in small hand-stitched booklets, some with illustrations and dedications. Along with poetry, Dickinson was fascinated by the epistolary genre, not only to keep in touch with distant people but as an act of communication with the closest ones. Her own brother Austin received weekly letter from her when he was studying law at Harvard, Dickinson maintained an extensive correspondence with Susan Gilbert, even when she married Austin, living near Evergreens.

In 1855, Emily and her sister Lavinia travelled to Washington to visit their father in Congress. On this trip, in Philadelphia, she met Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who became her dearest earthly friend. His personality contrasted with her shyness, both of different being different, as salt and sugar is. Both maintained a special correspondence focused mainly on spiritual matters.

From 1858, Emily Dickinson began to correspond with publishers from Springfield Republican, Dr. Holland and her husband, Samuel Bowles. This newspaper was one of the few that showed interest in the literary production of the time. This relationship continued for years, Holland being more receptive to the ingenuity and subtlety of the poet that her own husband was, Emily showed an unusual interest even though it did not seem that she had a refined poetic taste. It is in this period that the poems of love and hate were more obvious.

The duality of love / heartbreak is evident also in other poems of the time, and its gradual sublimation to a love for Christ and the marriage union with Him.

The use of narrative language by the poet is also an important element of her style. Dickinson recounts a story in each of her poems, presents ideas, concepts and feelings through an argument, which leads us to consider the issue of the similar poetry which, at that time, was produced by other various writers.

The Dickinson family was subscribed to various publications circulating throughout Connecticut, such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Monthly News Magazine, Scribner's Monthly and Springfield Republican.

Dickinson’s letters were full of references to such publications, and books that one would read or recommend, although the most repeated ones refer to famous authors of that time: Emerson, Longfellow and Brownings. The poet also cites a large number of American writers such as Helen H. Jackson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Liz Stuart Marcella Phelps and Bute as her inspirations.

The frequent references in her poetry were of intense and passionate feelings, her obnoxiously mentioned fascination with death, forbidden love and sadness and secret pain or a well-kept secret, are considered to be fundamental traits of expression in the feminine tradition of poetry.

Syntactic, structural, semantic and narrative aspects of Dickinson’s poetry are the echo of writers and texts that the poet knew well. Dickinson did not create her style out of nowhere. Detention really was not seclusion from the world of language.

Emily Dickinson was educated at a time when rhetoric was still a fundamental part of the curriculum throughout American schools of the nineteenth century. During rhetoric courses students received practical knowledge in areas such as style, memory, invention and elocution. Rhetorical figures were taught as derivations of style: the art of using linguistic alliteration in order to acquire eloquence in writing and in oral language. At Amherst Academy, Emily chose Classical Studies, which included Composition and Rhetoric, and studied, among others, the texts of Samuel Newman, a Practical system of Rhetoric, and Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, which would be an important step in her personal quest for power over language. Although Dickinson never used in her poems the concept of rhetoric, she did use grammatical terms and tropes such as rhyme, syntax, sentence, clause and circuit.

Due to her devotion to the word, Emily Dickinson created this poetic force through language by playing with sounds, double meanings and structures; the use of rhetorical figures gave her a different voice and an uncanny ability to make the poem have a special musicality, above space and time.

Given that, in any approach to Emily Dickinson, the basic textual unit of meaning is the poem, we could infer that the supra textual unit would be all her poetic corpus, which in turn would be subordinated to the whole of her work: poems, letters and prose.

The sub textual units of a poem by Emily Dickinson are the line and the word.

Sometimes the poem consists of a single line, in which case that line would be the highest level of the subtext.

Words are usually subordinated to the lines, but, as noted, sometimes a single line consists of a single word.

Textual and structural units are those above-units, influenced by a figure. That is, the figurative structures which made connections between structural and textual units: the functioning link between these figures is ranging from structural connections to the semantic domain, where those figures intensify and even generate the meaning of a text.

Emily Dickinson in her poetry uses the most traditional poetic unifying procedures: rhyme, meter, and rhythm, figurative, thematic, syntactic and verbal repetitions. But, in turn, she incorporates detachment consisting of the suppression of conjunctions that link words or members of a clause to give added strength to style. This figure is presented as a fundamental principle of poetry in Old English, another basic influence in her writings, but Dickinson’s disjunction is present not only in punctuation and syntax, but also in the theme and tone of the poem itself.

Dickinson also omits conjunctions to combine the two parts of the poem. So disjunctive meaning units make a new order of what at first might seem something known is believed.

The poetess reorganizes meaning through analogies and associations to express what were once expressionless verses.

Poetic language is thus fundamentally disjunctive. But along with the disjunction we make special reference to the repetition as a key figure in the Dickinsonian poetic language.

Emily Dickinson lived in a time when she was widely used in the poetic text; the use of repetition reflects what was considered customary in the literature of the nineteenth century.

Verbal, syntactical and structural thematic repetition, alliteration and assonance, also appeared in the poetry of other poets of her time; however Dickinson’s poetry itself is distinguished by the repetitions that particularly affect pronouns.

Emily Dickinson discovered at an early age her peculiar and distinctive poetic voice, and worked all her life to make it even more unique, but literary fame was not her objective. The specific practice of Dickinson as a writer might seem to most of the reading public as something fortuitous, but it was clearly the practice that best suited her temperament and her domestic situation.

During the day, while working on household chores, she wrote down sentences or fragments on pieces of paper and later, in her room, she ordered and proceeded to the formal elaboration of the poem. Both the prose and poetry of Dickinson are the result of innumerable tests, checks and drafts.

The arbitrary use of singular and plural forms of the noun deflects the meaning of the poem to metaphorical use. Altering the number of the name, the poetess blurs her character and makes it for a more particular sense. One of her favourite combinations consist in the pronouns ’our self’ and ’themselves’. The unique ’self’, attached to a plural reflexive pronoun, identifies different people with a symbolic feature.

This analysis will focus on thematic, theoretical and stylistic influences in the language of Emily Dickinson, examining the sources and models that determined their linguistic techniques and procedures. There is a strong confirmation that Dickinson was ’an assiduous reader, considered by some almost compulsive’, and it is also clear that, by the number of references and citations, one of her favourite texts was the Bible.

If Emily Dickinson is the only American poet reminiscent of Rilke in his obsessive preoccupation with states of consciousness and perception, it may be because the ’limitations’ of sex and social position allowed him inviolability of this kind of ’freedom’. In her peculiar family situation, Dickinson is a singularly lucky woman.

As Emily Brontë, whom she admired, Dickinson did not need to leave home, because the passions of the soul are inside.

Anyone who has read some of her poems must recognize the intense heroic nature of the inner search of the poetess.

Emily Dickinson’s poetry has no heirs or heiresses. By the thoroughness and accuracy of their perceptions of images we could think of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath, but the genius of her poetry is simply inimitable.

We can establish another relationship with Whitman, whose poetic heirs are innumerable: Whitman transformed American poetry forever; Dickinson established an aesthetic model that no other poet has approached. It is an end point.

II.1. A literary friendship

One of the most remarkable facts in the life of Emily Dickinson was her friendship with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor of The Atlantic Monthly. In his Introduction to The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson chooses three significant aspects in American literature of the nineteenth century, the third representing the first letter received from Emily Dickinson which included four poems.

Emily Dickinson wrote a well-known corpus of letters to the famous essayist and editor: Mr. Higginson. Higginson published in The Atlantic Monthly, Letter to a Young Contributor, a collection of tips and messages for those who wanted to see their writings published. Emily's letter and poems Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers, I'll tell you how the Sun Rose, The nearest Dream recedes –unrealized, and We play at Paste were her contributions and answer.

Higginson considered the publication of the poems irrelevant, because he considered strange her use of grammar, punctuation and spelling:

Her verses are remarkable, odd though …

Too delicate to publish –

Not strong enough …

Nevertheless, he could appreciate the creative originality of the poet, thus, he began a relationship that would continue for twenty years, in which Emily regarded him as her ’preceptor’.

The second letter to T. H. Higginson, written eleven days later, included three other poems: South Winds jostle them, Of all the Sounds despatched abroad, and There came a Day at Summer's full. As the first four of Emily's selected works, these were also chosen for their subject and prosodic variety.

Somehow between April 25th and June 7th, 1862, Emily Dickinson could accept, somehow, her literary destiny: “I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’ – that is foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin…you think my gait ‘spasmodic’. I am in danger, Sir. You think me ‘uncontrolled’. I have no Tribunal…The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows the Needle can” (third letter to Higginson).

The relationship with Higginson allowed her to continue her writing. When she asked in the first letter if her verse was alive enough, she was also asking whether Higginson considered it publishable.

The correspondence with her preceptor offered, within the safe environment of the disembodied letters, the role they normally played by the literary salons, gatherings or modern creative writing workshops, an option that was not available to a ’timid recluse’. Through these letters with a renowned literary figure, Dickinson could receive critical advice about her art and what seems to us more interesting, she was given the opportunity to implement her own ideas, to expose her thoughts and theories about the poetic text: her correspondence with T. H. Higginson became a substitute for the literary public she never had.

The years of greater poetic production from Dickinson (1861-1864), in which she wrote about 800 poems, coincide with the American Civil War. Although her unique personality and intimate poetry did lock herself in her intense inner world, the tension of those years characterized her unusual urge to write.

Between 1862 and 1863, the distance and danger hovered over her closest friends: Samuel Bowles was in Europe due to health problems, Wadsworth was assigned to San Francisco and Higginson served as an officer in the Union army.

After the Civil War, the productive capacity of Dickinson poetry was rare, and her letters are transformed into small collections of letters with a markedly epigrammatic style.

In 1870, she took the decision to seclude in Homestead and adopt her famous white election, thereafter wearing white permanently.

In August, she was visited by Higginson who described her as “a little plain woman with reddish hair, dressed all in white, and bringing me flowers as her introduction, and speaking in a soft voice frightened breathless childlike” (Dickinson’s letters to her sister-in-law Susan, 331-360). Her last years were marked by the death of those who were dearest to her, especially her father in 1874 and her nephew Gilbert, eight years old, disappearing in 1883, Samuel Bowles in 1878, Wadsworth in 1882.

The same year her mother died. Emily at this time is almost obsessed with death and the afterlife.

The idea of ​​death in her poetry was always associated with life and love; she certainly never maintained the puritanical idea of ​​death as the beginning of a new life. It is not the way to but the way in itself. It would appear then, that her idea of death is very close to agnosticism and existentialism: death is above all an inexplicable absurdity.

II.2. The creation of poems

Rather than explain or speak about sacred things, the poet prefers revelation: let people hear for themselves the soundless sound of the garden. Emily Dickinson was aware, as was Whitman, that all the ’authentic’ language is poetry and, as such, becomes a vehicle for the transcendence of self. It is important to note the subtle allusion to the Calvinist heritage of New England. In an interesting reversal of ​​received values, the Puritans believed that all earthly life was only a fleeting and intangible dream and the real life of the elect – the immortality of divine salvation – begins with death. Dickinson made available the visibility necessary to understand the value and meaning that underlie all religious metaphors.

Symbolic death becomes an entrance to life because it is able to fix the experience in words, and since she transforms into words both perceptions and intimate aspects and fleeting emotions, one way or another, she tells us all her personal life.

Numerous international conferences and lectures on poetry, abundant translations of her poems, plays, and works of fiction, essays and musicals on her poetic corpus are witnesses to the letter to the world that she never wrote:

This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me

The 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

It has therefore given us time to analyze, and do what many of their editors and critics have failed, let the language of Emily Dickinson speak for itself.

One of the aspects which highlight dickinsonian poetry is the wealth of natural elements which are presented as pretext and metaphorical lexicon in which it frames the poem.

Dickinson’s poetic language often creates a special syntactic ambiguity and semantics through the use of a simple phrase that describes two different subjects, usually without establishing the division of these contexts through the score:

Least Rivers – docile to some is

My Caspian – thee.

In the words of C. Paglia we can say that the fundamental qualities of the dickinsonian style are condensation and ellipsis which are words are “rammed into lines with such a force that syntax shatters and collapses into itself”.

The poetess experimented with words, and that special sense of experimentation makes her a modern and visionary author, far from the poetic conception of the time.

The concentration of ideas and suggestions in a confined space is what gives a fundamental value to each of the words; hence the epigram and the short poem are her half ideal expression. This makes no surface or discursive elements in her poetry. The speech is concentrated around one or two words that generate the body of the image of the poem.

II.3. The publication of Dickinson's poetry

The fact that Dickinson’s poetry does not reach the public during her short life, it becomes the first reference for one who approaches her biography and poetry. From all 1775 lyrical poems representing her contribution to world literature, she published only seven.

We think it is worth making a brief reference to them and to the opinion that Dickinson had on the publication of her poetry for Valentine’s Day celebration. Edited, they appeared on February 20th, 1852 in the Springfield Republican under the title of Sic transit gloria mundi. Emily Dickinson did not prepare her poems for editing; none of them shapes the text and have a title which would define it. The editors of the time encountered some uncorrected verses, often being normalized’ by regularizing grammatical issues, punctuation and even adding articles, conjunctions and prepositions, in line with conventional expectations of the reading public . With the poem Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers, published on March 1st, 1862, again in the Springfield Republican, following the insistence of her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, Dickinson returned to her fascination with death and the mysteries of beyond, including the always mysterious possibility of immortality:

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers

Untouched by Morning

And untouched by Noon

Sleep the meek members of Resurrection

Rafter of satin,

And Roof of stone.

Light laughs the breeze

In her Castle above them

Babbles the Bee in a stolid Ear,

Pipe the Sweet Birds in ignorant cadence

Ah, what sagacity perished here!

The poem is presented in two versions: one in 1859 and another in 1861: the first version suggest that ‘sleep in his grave’ is an euphemism for death also involves the ability to dream, also, the tomb alternates to the concept defined as nature itself.

The second interpretation of the poem was published in 1890 by Mabel Todd in Poems by Emily Dickinson.

Edited by Henry and Charles Sweetser, relatives of the Dickinson family, the poem was published anonymously on March 12th, 1864 in The Round Table, a cultural magazine in New York, entitled Some keep the Sabbath going to church in which Emily Dickinson showed her fidelity to her deep convictions about the church and the fulfilment of the obligations to her:

Some devote Sunday to go to church

I dedicate it to be at home,

with my goldfinch as chorus,

and my garden as dome …

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church

I keep it, staying at Home

With a Bobolink for a Chorister

And an Orchard, for a Dome

Some keep the Sabath in Surplice

I just wear mi Wings

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton – sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last

I’m going, all along.

Very much in line with the American transcendentalism of Emerson and near the naturalistic poetry advocated by Thoreau – the poetic concepts in Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple (published by Bowles in Springfield Republican on March 30th, 1864, again for mediation by Susan Gilbert) are relevant.

The dedication, sometimes obsessive, Emily’s natural and daily cycles did nothing but intensify her belief that each individual is locked in a private circle, out of all natural or cosmic phenomenon, the sunset sky shows a poem describing the elevation of the human aspiration but extinct in the end, without penetrating the private circuit, somehow remaining unchanged:

Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple

Leaping like Leopards to the Sky

Then at the feet of the old Horizon

Laying her spotted Face to die

Stooping as low as the Otter´s Window

Touching the Roof and tinting the Barn

Kissing her Bonnet to the Meadow

And the Juggler of Day is gone.

The barefoot boy is the main focus in A narrow Fellow in the Grass, published in the Springfield Daily Republican on February 14th, 1866, she recounts her adventures in a summer afternoon outside the gate of the family farm and his encounter with a snake while he remains on the grass while others are terrified.

The poem belongs to the series of riddles (enigmas) to which she was so fond of. Note that throughout the verses the word snake does not appear, however, its presence is constant throughout the poem.

This voluntary omission of the poetess was not respected by publishing houses, the poem and her inability to intervene in the score and the arrangement of the stanzas made Emily Dickinson address Higginson claiming that she was robbed.

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

Occasionally rides

You may have met Him – did you not

His notice sudden is

The Grass divides as with a Comb

A spotted shaft is seen

And then it closes at your feet

And opens further on

He likes a Boggy Acre

A Floor too cool for Corn

Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot

I more than once at Noon

Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash

Unbraiding in the Sun

When stooping to secure it

It wrinkled, and was gone

Several of Nature’s People

I know, and they know me

I feel for them a transport

Of cordiality

But never met this Fellow

Attended, or alone

Without a tighter breathing

And Zero at the Bone.

The last poem published, Success is Counted sweetest was included by Helen Hunt Jackson in A Masque of Poets: No name series Boston, Roberts Brothers on September 10th, 1878.

The verses quoted below reflect the conception of dickinsonian assessment of success through failure prior to knowledge, appreciation to what we estimate valuable through previous shortcomings. In her extensive poetic corpus, there are some other examples on this subject:

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne ´er succeed.

To comprehend a nectar

Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host

Who took the Flag today

Can tell the definition

So clear the Victory

As he defeated – dying

On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Burst agonized and clear!

The subjective component of any poetic work is the experience that aims to own humanity as a receiver. Dickinson was aware of it.

The materialism and vulgarity of the years after the Civil War (1861-65) – when the poet reaches her lyrical maturity – may not be as obvious as the materialism that currently besets our society, but the provincialism and lack of cultural values of American society in the second half of the nineteenth century were quite usual concepts of the time.

Emily Dickinson plays a double role in feminist theory: first, as the author of an original poetic lyricism that at after all, denied their womanhood; secondly Dickinson is a poet of such power and originality that her example comes even to engage the poetic institution.

Furthermore, where are all of her poems, all of them consist in a number of 1800? It is amazing how she went from an unknown reclusive individual to a world-wide renowned individual. Her life is a mixture of emotional intensity, differing loyalties, and personal sacrifice. From all her characters, neither of them had a personal connection to her, an inexplicable effort. Yet, her vitality and uniqueness assured her immortal role in world literature.

III: Major characteristics of Emily Dickinson’s poetry

Her poetry is powerful and filled with complex change and questions regarding the nature of immortality and death. Sometimes, it acquires characteristics of a mantra. The lines are short and compact, filled with meaning and enormous ideas. Her poetry moves in paths beset by great paradoxes and ambiguities that induce reflection. She is the author of more than 1700 poems which were virtually unknown until her sister Lavinia discovered them and had them published after her death.

The influence religion had upon her life is undeniable, both Calvinism and the Unitarian religion with their ideas and doctrines and opposition to some of them arise constantly in her letters and poems. Emily refused to accept the doctrine of the Original Sin. Insistently, she questioned some of the Calvinist views, and again and again mentions her exclusion from Heaven as a transcendentalist, often found God in nature and not in organized religion but in fluctuations and hesitations in their religious behaviour. There are moments of very intense experiences found in solitude which is revealed in her poetry.

The life and work of Dickinson consist in full moments of silence. We could say that silence is a distinguishing mark, since it is present in the vital attitude of the author, in her choice of imprisonment, just as it is found in her letters and poems to the limit where it becomes a blurred poetic identity. If we start from the texts themselves in an attempt to reconstruct her biography, we could stop at the transcendentalist and romantic conception of the writer, whose paradigmatic creation models are male, although from the biographical point of view, she feels more attracted to the great female voices they preceded it.

III.1 Themes and motifs

By matching the images of death and life in Dickinson’s poetry and comparing especially the attitudes she had towards life and death, these images express the gulf that separates them while being discovered. Many of the references can result in a funeral matching principle; but that identity does not go beyond what lies ahead, a membership of a Judeo-Christian culture, involving both the nineteenth-century Catholicism and Calvinism of the late nineteenth century US, because the imagery of death and the frequent references to it have a radically different view in each of Dickinson’s functional aspect. However, the transcendental reading of Dickinson results in different perspectives united by writing: a woman writing and therefore, challenging the society of the time, opens the way for other women and future generations.

Indeed, the poetic expression of Dickinson and the topics she is fonder of, offer a paradoxical contrast to her own ideologies and attitudes towards life. Therefore, Emily Dickinson seems to lead a much quieter life and certainly at home, her poetry is very far from the traditional mould of the contemporary American literature. Because, as Anna Priddy says, Dickinson had a vision of death and, more specifically, an unseen death of her contemporaries: If you look at a poem by one of Dickinson’s contemporaries, such as Julia A. Moore, you will find a very different view than the one presented in I heard a fly buzz—when I died. […] You might write an essay contrasting Dickinson’s deathbed scene in I heard a fly buzz— when I died with other presentations of the same scene by other writers contemporary to her:

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –

The Stillness in the Room 

Was like the Stillness in the Air –

Between the Heaves of Storm – 

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry – 

And Breaths were gathering firm 

For that last Onset – when the King 

Be witnessed – in the Room –

I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away 

What portion of me be 

Assignable – and then it was 

There interposed a Fly – 

With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –

Between the light – and me –

And then the Windows failed – and then 

I could not see to see –

On the contrary, her somewhat hectic life and participation in numerous revolutionary acts of the time contrasts with the formal conservatism and even theme of her poems. An overview of Dickinson’s life invites us to see a much more liberated woman and her American independent counterpart.

The biography of Emily Dickinson could confirm evident conservatism. However, the deep feelings that inevitably arise in her and her lines are an essential component of her ideology and world-view shows us a very different reality.

Emily Dickinson is innovative by proposing something that resembles a revolution of forms and literary tropes. Indeed, her images of death represents the mental death that involves a deep depression in which the author sometimes engulfed; which it is, insofar as it anticipates some experimental techniques and modernist literature, an aesthetic revolution.

In her lines, on the contrary, she is the subject of the liberal revolutions of the nineteenth century such as religion and death, merely consolidates its romanticism. In other words, she deeply and inevitably looks in the past, endorsing certain medieval roots and, therefore, much more traditional than she could think outcropping romanticism. In some of her fragments, these baroque and even medieval attitudes of the brevity of life, tempus fugit and the expiration of the things that were so dear to her are carefully found.

The function of the ritual and memorial of death seems to be confined to the creation of an unbearable mental environment, as unbearable as cerebral palsy, anguish and distress that can lead to a deep depression. Despite death, in some of Emily’s works, hope always comes and always is a preference which is given for life.

Emily Dickinson lived another liberal revolution, overcame the romantic transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson completely and teachers gave a surprising jump, at least as far as poetic creation refers to the future.

Death, however, is the perfect metaphor of despair and peace Emily craves before the unbearable mental pathology. Introspection of her character contrasts strongly against extroversion.

The deep meaning of the characters in her works is appreciated more clearly than the formal and aesthetic difference which has to do with the contrast of their characters. While some of her attitudes can result in baffling for instance, for the cause of abolitionism, Dickinson was waged in her own country which does not seem to exist-it is not mere paradoxes she merely shows that the roots of her poetic inspiration is much deeper than it seems. And at that depth it is where we see that the young woman who barely leaves her home in Amherst revolutionizes somehow literature resulting in literary projects which come intact to this day.

Nowadays, some doubt that the way of seeing life is closely linked to her narrative point of view and literary perspective.

III.2. Style

The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread, reached North America by 1820. Romantic ideas revolved around the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature and stressed the importance of art as an expression of self, both the individual aspect and society.

The development of the self became a major issue and the conscience itself became a fundamental method. If the self and nature are one, as the romantic theory goes, then self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If the individual self is the same for all humanity, then the individual has the moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering.

The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: it focused upon individualism, affirmed the value of the common people and aspired to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values.

Emily Dickinson is, one way or another, a link between her era and the literary sensibility of the twentieth century. Encouraged by a radical individualism, she loved nature and found deep inspiration in birds and other animals, plants and the cycle of the seasons in New England countryside.

Dickinson spent the latter part of her life in complete seclusion due to her extreme sensitivity, and perhaps to devote all her time to writing.

The Dickinson style, terse and often rich in images is even more modern and innovative than Walt Whitman, a pillar in literature. Sometimes it boasts a terrifying existential awareness. Their neat, clear, chiselled poems occupy a place among the most fascinating and challenging works in all American literature.

She had a one-of-a-kind style of writing which many people do not understand, a style filled with many characteristics which makes her stand outside of the crowd. Two characteristics of her writing that set her apart from other writers are the use of capitalization, and the use of dashes throughout her poems. She used the dash to emphasize, to indicate a missing word or words, or to replace a comma or period. She also capitalized nouns for no reason. She leaves out helping verbs and connecting words; she dropped endings from verbs and nouns. It is not always clear what her pronouns refer to: sometimes a pronoun refers to a word which does not appear in the poem. At her best, she achieves breathtaking effects by compressing language.

Syntactic, structural, semantic and narrative aspects of Dickinson's poems represent simply the reflection of texts and authors that the poet knew well. Dickinson did not invent her style from scratch but it had its birth in the pages of others, she created readings, studies and analysis so thoroughly done with everything that came her way: letters, newspapers , literary books were everyday food that helped her objectify her experiences and observations.

Through ‘rhyme’ we understand the metric term with which the repetition of sounds in two or more verses from the last accented vowel is designated; when the sounds are just repeating, we are talking about vowel or consonant assonance.

Although the rhyme is not essential feature in the poem for it to be considered as such, we conceptualize it as a distinctive literary feature: “Rhyme could be defined as identity, or close remembrance, of sound between two words or metrical phrases beginning at the vowel bearing the metrical stress and extending ordinarily to the end of the word or phrase”.

When an author tries to capture in her writings thoughts, abstractions, images, rhythms and experiences, plus a certain lexical corpus, he / she uses a fairly limited pre-verbal means that can facilitate and complete the communication task. These means or communication resources we could list, among others, the following: punctuation, capitalization, accents and the use of coerciveness. In poetry, however, it can also have the possibility of visual arrangement of the lines.

Emily Dickinson in the use of the visual layout and heterodox use underlined and used quotation marks as a part of her poetic mechanisms intended to indicate emphasis or irony, or highlight any segment of the poem. Some examples are the poem reproduced below:

I’ve nothing else- to bring, You know –

So I keep bringing These –

Just as the Night keeps fetching Stars –

To our familiar Eyes –

Maybe – we should’nt mind them –

Unless they did’nt come –

Then – Maybe it would puzzle us

To find our way Home!

“Speech” – is a prank of Parliament –

“Tears” – a trick of the nerve –

But the Heart with the heaviest freight on –

Does’nt – always – move –

The spelling of the poet is also heterodox, disharmonious, but it seems to us rather as a weakness, as a special intentional peculiarity. In fact there are references in her letters to her occasional misspellings, and the subsequent correction thereof, as well as changes of archaic words used by others closer to their time.

Within the special use of spelling, we highlight especially her habit to emphasize words through capitalization. This procedure is applied not only to nouns and pronouns:

They leave us with the Infinite –

But He – is not a man –

But also upon adjectives such as:

The Wild Rose – redden in the Bog –

This Bashful Globe of Ours would be

and even verbs:

Myself Conjectured were they Pearls –

I went to thank Her / But She Slept –

It Blistered to My Dream –

adverbs:

As near yourself – Today –

As Children, to the Rainbow’s scarf –

We see – Comparatively

including articles:

And bowing – with a Mighty look –

At me – The Sea withdrew –

The different assessments of this indiscriminate use of capital seem to converge in the analysis conducted by David T. Porter in which he states:”No single explanation serves to define the specific effect Dickinson intended or achieved by her habit of capitalization; rather, we may conclude that the usage is diffuse, indiscriminate, and in different poems serves to produce different effects”.

And also the contribution of this makes Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (1968) concluding that we must be satisfied with the acceptance of the habits of the poetess in capitalization observing it as a phenomenon used to emphasize certain words ” as part of the visual form of her poems. In editing her poems for readers´ volumes, one should keep all the capitals except those in minor words like articles”.

The use of capitalization does not follow any strict rule; often it is presented as something purely whimsical and recommended the use of capitalization with emphatic finality.

In this regard R.B. Sewall points out that it is a risky venture if Dickinson had the firm intention to use capital letters or not in certain words: ”At least this can be said: it is often difficult to tell from her handwriting whether she meant a given letter to be capitalized or not. There was no editor to demand clearer copy. T.W. Johnson and his colleagues had to do considerable guessing. Also, we have to remember this: Emily studied German, where every noun is capitalized”.

However, punctuation represents an even more striking informality that the graphic mechanisms of Emily Dickinson include the use of capitalization.

Dickinson’s punctuation is considered as a matter of style, personal expression.

The first editors of her work tended to match the metric poetry of the poetess, improve her rhymes and correct her poetic vocabulary, but never tried to change punctuation. As Brita Lindberg says, Emily Dickinson was always uncompromising with punctuation:”She lists alternative words in poems; she apologizes for her misspellings and modernizes archaisms in later copies of early poems; but she never apologizes for her unorthodox punctuation or provides variants for it, and where she does alter it from copy it is not done consistently to standardize her marks”.

With words from Miller Cristanne, we could state that even the casual reader immediately recognizes Emily Dickinson’s poetry by repetitive use of dashes, establishing and defining a visual sign of her poetic style:”Sometimes the poet’s dashes merely replace conventional punctuation, but often they occur where a comma (or any other mark in standard usage) would be unnecessary or wrong. These dashes correspond to pauses for breath or deliberation, or to signs of an impatient eagerness that cannot be bothered with the formalities of standard punctuation”.

Certainly the graphic mechanisms used by Emily Dickinson have a more rhetoric than a syntactic function. Punctuation for her, as her poetry, teaches the reader to trust their capacity for abstraction and relationship. Dickinson's dashes often have the aim of highlighting words whose meanings suggest isolation, to reflect the semantic content of the words that affect them and to create some suspense in the poetic text.

The primary function of punctuation is not to make a tangential sentence for the reader, but rather to separate words to impress upon emphasis, providing a rhythmic syncopation to the metric of a line

IV: Conclusions

Throughout history, the most privileged minds of women have had to fight for a place among the male elite. Making important decisions, the gain of wages that supported the family and even that related to the intellectual world was reserved for men, leaving for females to only concern upon the domestic life, i.e. chores, husband and children. However, despite both institutional and religious conventions, there have been women who, even living in societies and patriarchal cultures manage to overcome these prejudices and difficulties and go forward showing that they can become equally self-sufficient as men who can contribute with something to society, something more than what is traditionally and officially expected of them. In this sense, although it could be said that the term feminism is an anachronism in the nineteenth century, there have been many women who through their little rebellion against the tax system, have taken steps to advance the story of ideas and equality.

A poet of profound originality and owner of a peculiar life in the history of literature, freedom and creative independence exercised when writing the nearly two thousand poems, mostly brief but with dazzling intensity, today, she continues to be admired worldwide. An acute observer of this and other worlds, crumbled in detail and devotion to her art.

The natural beauty of its immediate surroundings provided a constant delight and spiritual reflections on itself which are the starting points of sound, crystalline lines, often endowed with a fine irony. Her personal work unfolds from the purity of solitude that unravels mysterious realities, achieving a unique style among her contemporaries. Her rebellious temperament, had the necessary insulation, powerful insights to let humanity read her poems:

This world is not seclusion

A Species stands beyond

Invisible, as Music

But positive, as Sound

It beckons, and it baffles

Philosophy, don't know

And through a Riddle, at the last

Sagacity, must go

To guess it, puzzles scholars

To gain it, Men have borne

Contempt of Generations

And Crucifixion, shown

Faith slips—and laughs, and rallies

Blushes, if any see

Plucks at a twig of Evidence

And asks a Vane, the way

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit

Strong Hallelujahs roll

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul

One of Dickinson’s life-long efforts was to express her indignation against God that gave human beings a life of constant deprivation and pain. Because Dickinson never saw God’s mercy on Earth, she refused to believe in the pleasures of an after-life. Unlike her sentimental poetess-peers she could not erase this pain in gratitude for everlasting life nor as the Puritans, could she accept it as deserved punishment for sin.

She brilliantly or succinctly managed to bring a painful emotion into language, one does not, for all that, palliate it, and that is what the speaker tries to do with the next gesture of thought. Having put forth unstable but generative concepts and imagery, the speaker then proceeds, quite unexpectedly, to reach into the world of the dead for a kindred spirit:

I probed Retrieveless things

My Duplicate – to borrow .

Since her duplicate qualifies only on the basis of also being Of Heavenly Love – forgot -, the core idea is that somebody already dead has been, like her, rejected by God. This makes it clear for the first time that the sole idea/feeling she is trying to think is derived not just from an acute awareness of her death but also, and especially, from her catastrophically alienated ontological status.

I tried to think a lonelier Thing

Than any I had seen

Some Polar Expiation An Omen in the Bone

Of Death’s tremendous nearness

I probed Retrieveless things

My Duplicate – to borrow

A Haggard comfort springs

From the belief that Somewhere

Within the Clutch of Thought

There dwells one other Creature

Of Heavenly Love – forgot

I plucked at our Partition

As One should pry the Walls

Between Himself – and Horror’s Twin

Within Opposing Cells

I almost strove to clasp his Hand,

Such Luxury – it grew

That as Myself could pity Him

Perhaps he – pitied me .

Despite its advertised struggle to the thinking movements, it is hard to know how to interpret even its most basic mental gesture of trying to think. Is it, as the bold opening line suggests, a proactive, virtuous struggle to conceptualize an extreme human possibility? Or is it a more reactive struggle to use language, arguments, and other mental tools to deal with the painful conditions into which the poet has been thrown? Perhaps, the main purpose of this poem and many others is not to invent or define an extreme experience but to deal with once it arrives, to knead it, battle it, alter it, realize it, or just survive it through thought.

When she died in 1886, Dickinson’s death certificate recorded her occupation as ‘At home’. The statement is both accurate and diminishing. Dickinson spent the first ten and last thirty years of her life in ‘The Homestead’, the house built by her grandfather in the small Massachusetts college town of Amherst. She had withdrawn from Amherst life to the extent that, when Mabel Loomis Todd arrived in the town in 1881, Dickinson had achieved local celebrity status for her reclusiveness: “I must tell you about the character of Amherst. It is a lady whom the people call the Myth…She has not been outside of her own house in fifteen years, except once to see a new church, when she crept out at night, and viewed it by moonlight…She dresses wholly in white, and her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful. She writes finely, no one ever sees her. Her sister…invited me to come and sing to her mother sometime…People tell me that the myth will hear every note – she will be near, but unseen”.

The poems that place Dickinson in the international English literary tradition have been of ten identified, and can be handled briefly. They include the poems that locate Dickinson as a feminist, either paying homage to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, or subverting male identity and its public forum. ‘I’m Nobody!’ therefore seems to begin precisely from the forum of male dialect humour, but turns into a devastating attack on the inflated creature, which Twain would later use to puncture a man more public than he:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog – 

To tell one’s name – the livelong June – 

To an admiring Bog!

V: Bibliography

Ardapaz, M., Emily Dickinson. Poemas, Madrid, Spain, Editorial Cátedra, 1987.

Bly, R.,American poetry: wildness and domesticity. Harper Perennial. New York, 1990.

Brooks, C.& R.P., Warren, Understanding poetry. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1938.

Cuddon, J.A., A dictionary of literary terms. Deutsch. London, 1977.

Elliot, E.,Columbia literary history of the United States. Columbia University Press. New York, 1988.

Ferlazzo, P., Critical essays on Emily Dickinson. G.K.Hall. Boston. Massachussetts,1984.

Jakobson, R., Linguistics and poetry, Madrid, 1981.

Johnston, T.H.,Complete poems of Emily Dickinson. Faber & Faber. London, 1970.

Lawson-Peebles R., American Literature Before 1880, Pearson Education Limited, UK, 2003.

Lindberg-Seyersted, B., The voice of the poet: Aspects of style in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge. Harvard University Press,UK, 1968

Miller, C., Emily Dickinson: a poet’s grammar. Harvard University Press, 1987.

Paglia, C., Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New Haven, Yale UP, USA, 1990.

Porter, D. T., The art of Emily Dickinson’s early poetry. Cambridge. Harvard University Press, UK, 1996.

Priddy , A. Bloom's How to Write about Emily Dickinson, Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data, New York, USA, 2008

Sewall Richard B., The Life of Emily Dickinson, 1998.

Tate, A., Reactionary essays on poetry and ideas, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons Publishing, USA, 1936.

Walker, C., The nightingale’s burden: women poets and American culture before 1900, Indiana University Press, USA, 1982.

Weibuch, R., Emily Dickinson’s poetry. University of Chicago. Chicago, 1981.