Emily Dickinson - phases of her work

1. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)
PHASES IN DICKINSON’S WORK
● Her fear and anger at the "deep Stranger" did not wither her curiosity, however; she persisted
in her exploration, at times accepting, at times rejecting, but always relying upon
contemporary attitudes toward death.
● (337) Along with transformations in the conduct of her life and connections with the world,
Emily Dickinson's work underwent change in the last decade. Exhibiting shifts in thought and
the intent of imagery, her writings accumulate a new gentleness and tolerance occasioned
and tempered by sorrow. These fresh qualities appear most notably in the poems and letters
about her own bereavements.
● For Dickinson, the path of inquiry first led her through a dramatization of possibilities. Her
fascination with deprivation, for example, compelled her to enact it in her own life and in her
poems. Fashioning an existence of self-denial and examining the experience of imaginary
figures such as the thwarted lover or the beggar, she was able to discover a fundamental
oneness in renunciation and reward.
TIMELINE
Dickinson's poems generally fall into three distinct periods, the works in each period having
certain general characters in common.
● Pre-1861. These are often conventional and sentimental in nature.
[146]
Thomas H.
Johnson, who later published The Poems of Emily Dickinson, was able to date only
five of Dickinson's poems before 1858.
[147]
Two of these are mock valentines done in
an ornate and humorous style, and two others are conventional lyrics, one of which is
about missing her brother Austin. The fifth poem, which begins "I have a Bird in
spring", conveys her grief over the feared loss of friendship and was sent to her friend
Sue Gilbert.
[147]
● 1861–1865. This was her most creative period—these poems represent her most
vigorous and creative work. Johnson estimated that she composed 86 poems in
1861, 366 in 1862, 141 in 1863, and 174 in 1864. He also believed that during this
period, she fully developed her themes of life and mortality.
[148]
● Post-1866. It is estimated that two-thirds of the entire body of her poetry was written
before this year.
[148]
JanetW. Buell:
EARLY: (CURIOSITY)
Pre-1861 poems: very conventional, she doesn’t omit a lot of words yet, not so many caesuras
(still developing her style)
1) In some respects, Dickinson responded to society much like other female,
upper-middle- class New Englanders at the mid nineteenth century
2) In her work she meticulously explored the concepts of renunciation and
recompense and the concomitant deprivations she elected for herself. As she

2. entered middle age, her bereavements shifted from the distant or self-
imposed to the immediate and terribly real
PEAK: (LOSS)
3) For practical reasons, after her mother's stroke, Emily Dickinson simply did
not have the time to continue an intense life of the mind. The down-to-earth
duties of invalid care, added to her regular household tasks, occupied her
constantly.
4) Emily Dickinson's work underwent change in the last decade.
- Exhibiting shifts in thought and the intent of imagery, her writings
accumulate a new gentleness and tolerance occasioned and tempered by
sorrow.
LATE: (SOLACE)
5) Another attribute distinguishing Emily Dickinson's late writings is the
disappearance of the central plot of her early poems, the ecstatic meeting with
the "man of noon," the parting, and the frantic hope for a heavenly reunion.
There are no more wild nights.
- As the lover vanishes, so too the male deity fades as a paternalistic
target for defiance or an erotic object for courtship. She is no longer, in
Albert Gelpi's terms, the raped virgin or the unspoiled bride
6) The transformations in the experience of her final ten years brought
responsive shifts in her writing: the work of that decade demonstrates a
marked re-alignment of topic, emotion, and metaphysical conjecture.
7) Fashioning an existence of self-denial and examining the experience of
imaginary figures such as the thwarted lover or the beggar, she was able to
discover a fundamental oneness in renunciation and reward.
8) Acknowledging girlhood's end, she extended her sympathetic concern and
even conducted a romance grounded in reality.
- Finding solace from new sources, she capitalized upon her society's
approaches to death and in nature discerned the consolation of eternal
regeneration.
9) For Emily Dickinson, attaining solace required sacrifice. In her life, peace
came through a series of battering be- reavements and a loss of her own
vitality.
10)When one views the texts of the last ten years as a body of work, the
transforma- tions are clear. The dazzling idiosyncrasies of perception and
language have diminished, but the intelligence and imagination are vivid
still

3. DICKINSON AS A FEMINIST SPINSTER
Janet W. Buell:
1) Even though all her life Emily Dickinson played the role of daughter-at-home,
she effectively rebelled by repudiating a "normal" life of orthodox religion,
social visiting, neurasthenic illness, and subservience to a husband.
2) Emily's exclamations to Sue Gilbert on the subject of marriage sharply reflect
her parents' conventional union as well as Emily's opinion of the state:
1) Emily Dickinson's form of spinsterhood required courage.
- Although she was determined to explore immortality in the wider
circumference of virginal solitude, she needed a muse (SUE) and,
throughout her life, fastened upon male figures for inspiration and
safely remote infatuation.
2) Dickinson actively repudiates the role of “Angel in the House”, the willing
wife.
3) In her withdrawal, however, she was not untouched by her community. On the
contrary, the traditions and attitudes of her world affected her profoundly
4) To be a poet, in other words, Emily Dickinson had to transform the self-less
purity of the cult of true womanhood into an aggressive independence.
DICKINSON AND RELIGION
Janet W. Buell:
1) We can assume that Dickinson found even less consolation in lush effusions
than in her mystical experiences and evanescent ecstasies, none of which
offered lasting proof.
- She rejected blind faith; she needed evidence
2) Her reverence for nature, her sense of dwelling within a terrestrial Eden,
provided no guarantees of an afterlife either. (REF. DICKINSON AND
NATURE)
3) Dickinson used her poetry to try out possibilities and to express her anger at
the God who had clothed his promise in uncertainty.
- In addition to refusing easy explanations, Emily Dickin- son also
dismissed a view that to her was illogical
DICKINSON AND NATURE
Janet W. Buell:
1) In her lifelong attempt to trace the boundaries of certainties and possibilities,
she found that love and death become only more acutely felt. The lineaments
of Heaven still eluded her, but she grew to rely upon their earthly
manifestations, Art and Nature.

4. 2) Recognizing her poems as her immortality, and the ecstasy evoked by nature
as her "Eden," she gradually relinquished her hectic questioning.
3) Her reverence for nature, her sense of dwelling within a terrestrial Eden,
provided no guarantees of an afterlife either
4) Nothing is wasted, that the birds come back, that the calendar turns, are
important sources of solace.
5) In her last ten years, the season of summer became an important subject for
the poems, where she drew a parallel between the cycle of the seasons and
her art
- The late poems about summer all concern its departure, in silence and
stealth. They form a refrain of surprised regret that vitality ebbs so
unnoticeably. Still, a conviction remains that life journeys to a better place (As
imperceptibly as Grief)
6) Throughout her life Emily Dickinson continued to find her strongest
reassurance in the workings of nature.
7) Emily Dickinson established herself as monarch of all her immediate
surroundings
8) "The ode familiar-rules the Noon-,"and she draws on ordinary, local aspects of
nature-the robin, the buttercup, the nut, the snow-to show her native affinity
for all seasons.
DICKINSON AND LOSS (GRIEF)
Janet W. Buell:
1) Beginning with the death of her father in 1874 and mounting until the year of
her own death in 1886 at the age of fifty-six, losses of family members, close
friends, and eventually her own health carried sorrow from poetic imagination
into actual experience, reflected in both letters and poems.
2) As bereavements gathered in her own life, however-the last dozen years
brought an appalling series of losses-she no longer needed to conjure up
dramatis personae: her own experience furnished ample characterizations.
3) Rather than a desperate, sometimes angry, quest for explanation, her work
became a journey toward acceptance of mystery, an acknowledgment that the
unknown provides unexpected consolations.
4) At some time in the mid 1870s, Dickinson stopped sorting her poems into sets
(she had bound the fascicles only until 1864) and thereafter made no effort at
ordering them, obviously forgoing the thought of presentation of any sort, then
or postmortem. The abandonment of her tidy prac- tice indicates a
preoccupation with heavier concerns- the death of her family, friends,
romantic lovers, and onset of her fatal illness.

5. 5) More damaging than her grief was her Bright's disease, a failure of the
kidneys which can cause impaired vision,headache, insomnia, high blood
pressure, and ultimately unconsciousness.
6) for Emily Dickinson, her greatest fears had come to pass. The fervor of her
personal attachments was an important reason for avoiding wide
acquaintance: the potential for pain was too great. Her strategy for defending
against loss had been to act it out; now that practice pilgrimage would march
her into stark reality
7) In face of the relentless deaths, then, Emily Dickinson found consolation and
a certain acceptance. Adopting some attitudes of her culture, she could
imagine the dead as going ahead to prepare the way, making one's own
inevitable end more alluring.
DICKINSON AND DEATH
Janet W. Buell:
1) The attraction to deathbed behavior emerges in Dickin- son's poetry,
sometimes expressing convictions of lovers united in Eternity, but sometimes
conjuring scenes reminiscent of necrophilic attraction.
2) A late poem makes clear her belief that the terror of death is only in the
separation
3) forever is not forever except in death. But even the for- ever of the dead might
be another place, where there is another green life.
4) Dickinson accepts the human incapacity to close the circle of love and death
and immortality.
5) In face of the relentless deaths, then, Emily Dickinson found consolation and
a certain acceptance. Adopting some attitudes of her culture, she could
imagine the dead as going ahead to prepare the way, making one's own
inevitable end more alluring.
6) She could abandon erotic despair and the search for ecstatic union beyond
the grave. And she could study the cycles of nature as patterns for hu- man
existence and art.
TONE
Janet W. Buell:
1) In response to her trials with loss, the tone and focus of the poems and letters
changed. Rather than a desperate, sometimes angry, quest for explanation,
her work became a journey toward acceptance of mystery, an
acknowledgment that the unknown provides unexpected consolations.
2) Emily Dickinson's work underwent change in the last decade.

6. - Exhibiting shifts in thought and the intent of imagery, her writings
accumulate a new gentleness and tolerance occasioned and tempered
by sorrow.
●
Question: Reader’s of Emily Dickinson’s letters are shocked by the abysmal quality
of some of the things she admired, saved or included in her correspondence.
Some of the things she liked/talked about are pretty poor in taste, i.e. ‘not high
art/culture’. Sort of the equivalent of a respected author today, like Atwood, admitting
she kinda likes Twilight.
Cult of true womanhood - Atwood based THT on this idea, stereotypical feminine
thing about how women should be passive and stay at home. Women are supposed
to be graceful and soft spoken and submissive.
ED lived in a puritan society
Pretty young she got few intense bereavements (a close friend of her died when she
was a lil girl) then it traumatize her so she write poetry to cope which meditates on
grief, desires certainty of afterlife bc its a conservation of grief and death, immortality
religion funerals early and middle poetry her strategy of defending against loss ,
acting it out = writing poetry