Notes on Emily Dickinson

1. M.A III Semester
American literature
Emily Dickinson
Dr.Neeta Sharma
Department of English
SSMV,Bhilai

2. Introduction
• Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and
most original poets of all time. She took
definition as her province and challenged the
existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work.
Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry
David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she
experimented with expression in order to free it
from conventional restraints. Like writers such
as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for
the first person.

3. Continued
• The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and
Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the
inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined
and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define
meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became
a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical
language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Like
the Concord Transcendentalists whose works she knew well, she
saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the
individual, it as readily left him ungrounded. The literary
marketplace, however, offered new ground for her work in the last
decade of the 19th century. When the first volume of her poetry
was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with
stunning success.

4. Continued
• Going through 11 editions in less than two
years, the poems eventually extended far
beyond their first household audiences.
Dickinson is now known as one of the most
important American poets, and her poetry is
widely read among people of all ages and
interests.

5. Continued
• Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst,
Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830 to Edward and Emily
(Norcross) Dickinson. At the time of her birth, Emily’s father
was an ambitious young lawyer. Educated at Amherst and
Yale, he returned to his hometown and joined the ailing law
practice of his father, Samuel Fowler Dickinson. Edward also
joined his father in the family home, the Homestead, built
by Samuel Dickinson in 1813. Active in the Whig Party,
Edward Dickinson was elected to the Massachusetts State
Legislature (1837-1839) and the Massachusetts State
Senate (1842-1843). Between 1852 and 1855 he served a
single term as a representative from Massachusetts to the
U.S. Congress.

6. Continued
• In Amherst he presented himself as a model citizen and
prided himself on his civic work—treasurer of Amherst
College, supporter of Amherst Academy, secretary to
the Fire Society, and chairman of the annual Cattle
Show. Comparatively little is known of Emily’s mother,
who is often represented as the passive wife of a
domineering husband. Her few surviving letters
suggest a different picture, as does the scant
information about her early education at Monson
Academy. Academy papers and records discovered by
Martha Ackmann reveal a young woman dedicated to
her studies, particularly in the sciences.

7. Isolation
• Dickinson made the unusual decision to self-
isolate in order to free herself to be a poet. ...
Her niece Mattie describes how, during a visit,
her Aunt Emily gestured as if to lock her
bedroom door with an invisible key, then said
“It's just a turn

8. Poetess of Amherst
• Emily Dickinson grew up in a prominent and prosperous household in
Amherst, Massachusetts. Along with her younger siter Lavinia and older
brother Austin, she experienced a quiet and reserved family life headed by
her father Edward Dickinson. In a letter to Austin at law school, she once
described the atmosphere in her father's house as "pretty much all
sobriety." Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, was not as powerful a
presence in her life; she seems not to have been as emotionally accessible
as Dickinson would have liked. Her daughter is said to have characterized
her as not the sort of mother "to whom you hurry when you are
troubled." Both parents raised Dickinson to be a cultured Christian woman
who would one day be responsible for a family of her own. Her father
attempted to protect her from reading books that might "joggle" her
mind, particularly her religious faith, but Dickinson's individualistic
instincts and irreverent sensibilities created conflicts that did not allow her
to fall into step with the conventional piety, domesticity, and social duty
prescribed by her father and the orthodox Congregationalism of Amherst.

9. Dickinson Relationship
• Though Dickinson never married, she had significant
relationships with several men who were friends,
confidantes, and mentors. She also enjoyed an intimate
relationship with her friend Susan Huntington Gilbert, who
became her sister-in-law by marrying Austin. Susan and her
husband lived next door and were extremely close with
Dickinson. Biographers have attempted to find in a number
of her relationships the source for the passion of some of
her love poems and letters, but no biographer has been
able to identify definitely the object of Dickinson's love.
What matters, of course, is not with whom she was in love-
-if, in fact, there was any single person--but that she wrote
about such passions so intensely and convincingly in her
poetry.

10. Greatest Poets
• Today, Dickinson is regarded as one of America's
greatest poets, but when she died at the age of
fifty-six after devoting most of her life to writing
poetry, her nearly 2,000 poems--only a dozen of
which were published anonymously during her
lifetime--were unknown except to a small
numbers of friends and relatives. Dickinson was
not recognized as a major poet until the
twentieth century, when modern readers ranked
her as a major new voice whose literary
innovations were unmatched by any other
nineteenth-century poet in the United States.

11. Publications
• Dickinson neither completed many poems nor prepared them for
publication. She wrote her drafts on scraps of paper, grocery lists, and the
backs of recipes and used envelopes. Early editors of her poems took the
liberty of making them more accessible to nineteenth-century readers
when several volumes of selected poems were published in the 1890s. The
poems were made to appear like traditional nineteenth-century verse by
assigning them titles, rearranging their syntax, normalizing their grammar,
and regularizing their capitalizations. Instead of dashes editors used
standard punctuation; instead of the highly elliptical telegraphic lines so
characteristic of her poems editors added articles, conjunctions, and
prepositions to make them more readable and in line with conventional
expectations. In addition, the poems were made more predictable by
organizing them into categories such friends, nature, love, and death. Not
until 1955, when Thomas Johnson published Dickinson's complete works
in a form that attempted to be true to her manuscript versions, did
readers have an opportunity to see the full range of her style and themes.

12. Themes
• . . Dickinson found irony, ambiguity, and paradox lurking in
the simplest and commonest experiences. The materials
and subject matter of her poetry are quite conventional.
Her poems are filled with robins, bees, winter light,
household items, and domestic duties. These materials
represent the range of what she experienced in and around
her father's house. She used them because they
constituted so much of her life and, more importantly,
because she found meanings latent in them. Though her
world was simple, it was also complex in its beauties and its
terrors. Her lyric poems captures impressions of particular
moments, scenes, or moods, and she characteristically
focuses upon topics such as nature, love, immorality, death,
faith, doubt, pain, and the self.

13. The Soul selects her own society
Theme
• The Soul selects her own Society’ Dickinson explores
themes of self-reliance and strength. This poem suggests
that it is the best practice to keep one’s inner life reserved
for a select “one” or few. It is the best policy to open the
door for those people and then shut it again. This means
that no one can get in, no matter their status unless they
were selected for their pure intentions. The soul connects
to a single person or a few people on a deeper level. One
that goes beyond wealth or fame. Dickinson is remembered
as a reserved, reclusive woman, with few good friends. It is
quite easy to read this piece as her own thoughts on
forming relationships.
•

14. Form &Structure
• The Soul selects her own Society’ by Emily
Dickinson is a three-stanza poem that is
separated into sets of four lines, known
as quatrains. These quatrains follow a simple
rhyme scheme of ABAB, changing end sounds
from stanza to stanza. This was a less common
pattern in Dickinson’s poetry, but it does change
somewhat in the second and third stanza. The
second and fourth lines of both of these stanzas
make use of what is known as a half-rhyme. The
words “gate” and “mat” as well as “one” and
“stone” do not perfectly rhyme, only partially.

15. First Stanza
• In the first short stanza of ‘The Soul selects her own
Society’ the speaker begins with the line that later
came to be used as the title of the poem. This is a
common practice in regards to Emily Dickinson’s poetry
due to the fact that all of her poems remained
nameless after she wrote them. She describes in the
first lines how “The Soul,” whether her’s or anyone
else’s, selects the person, or perhaps people, she wants
to grow close to, and them “shuts the Door”. No one,
at this point, is allowed into her “divine Majesty”. The
select few, or one, are the only ones allowed to know
her truly and fully.

16. Stanza Two
• The soul’s strength and determination are emphasized
int he second stanza of ‘The Soul selects her own
Society’. Dickinson’s speaker notes that it does not
matter who comes knocking at the door of her soul. It
could be an Emperor “kneeling” on the mat of Chariots
“pausing— / At her low Gate”. Neither of these things
would convince her to open the metaphorical door to
her heart. This should prove to the reader that the type
of person at the door (their statue, wealth, grandeur).
The soul only opens for those it selects for reasons
above the mundane.
•

17. Stanza Three
• In the final four lines of ‘The Soul selects her own
Society,’ the speaker zooms back and speaks about the
soul’s exclusive selection process. She has known “her” to
choose “one” from the “ample nation” of people who want
to gain entry into her innermost life. She then closes the
“Valves of her attention— / Like Stone”. Thus suggesting
that no one will ever open the “valve” or door again. The
valve metaphor, in addition to the stone imagery, helps to
conclude the poem firmly. This is the way things are, the
speaker is saying, and there’s no one who could convince
the soul to change her mind.
•

18. Tone of the poem
• In 'The Soul selects her own
Society' Dickinson explores themes of self-
reliance and strength. This poem suggests that
it is the best practice to keep one's inner life
reserved for a select “one” or few. It is the
best policy to open the door for those people
and then shut it again.

19. Alliteration
• Alliteration is stylistic device when the first
consonant in a series of words is repeated. In
the opening line of the poem,
the speaker employs alliteration by writing
"Soul selects...Society." The repetition of the
consonant "s" makes this an example
of alliteration.

20. Conclusion
• Is it fair to say that "The Soul Selects Her
Own Society" is a reflection of Dickinson's
own personality?
• In the poem "The Soul Selects Her Own
Society" what is realistic about Dickinson's
idea of how people select their companions?
• Indicate and explain the poetic devices in
"The Soul selects her own Society."

21. Answer
• Alliteration is stylistic device when the first
consonant in a series of words is repeated. In
the opening line of the poem, the speaker
employs alliteration by writing "Soul
selects...Society." The repetition of the
consonant "s" makes this an example of
alliteration.

22. • Personification is when a non-human object is
given human attributes. Throughout the
poem, the speaker personifies the soul as a
female by referring to it as a "her" and "she."

23. Enjambment
• Enjambment is when a phrase or clause in
one line of a poem moves to the next line
without a terminating

24. Example
• For instance, take these lines from Romeo and
Juliet, where the second and fifth line are end-
stopped, and lines one, three, and four are
third are enjambed:
• When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

25. Example
• Here the second and fifth lines are clearly end-
stopped, as they conclude phrases or
sentences. (Although the sentence continues
after line 2, line 2 ends on a concluding note
for that phrase and line 3 begins a new part of
the sentence). Meanwhile, the first, third, and
fifth lines are enjambed, as the flow of the
sentence continues across the line breaks.

26. Emily Dickinson as a poet
• Poetry based on actual observation
• Her poetic characteristics
• Lonely life
• Reasons for her withdrawal from life
• Paradox of her personality
• Resemblance with Donne
• Mystical Poems
• Tragic Vision

27. As a poet
• Privatization of her life
• Her nature poems
• Love poems
• Poems of Death and Immortality
• Her poetic genius
• Pain in her poetry

28. Theme of love
• Pain of Renunciation
• Poem dealing with brides and marriages
• Heavenly union

29. Theme of poem
• Whole hearted and Ecstatic Devotion to the loved
ones
• Poem of dedication
• From Worldly love to Spiritual Union with God
• Struggle between Earthly love& Heavenly love
• Love does to her
• The divine status of love in her eyes
• Three Principal motifs
• Sentimental love poems

30. The Theme of pain and suffering
• Value of pain in her eyes
• Weight age given to pain
• Human plight

31. References
• https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emi
ly-dickinson
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emily-
Dickinson