M.A III Semester Unit-2
- 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