Haley Elliott, Carrina Wilson,
Colby Wells
Who is she?

 Born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts
and died there on May 15, 1886
 Amherst, 50 miles from Boston, was well known as a
center for Education, based around Amherst College.
 Emily’s family were pillars of the local community; their
house known as “The Homestead” or “Mansion” and was
often used as a meeting place
 She was a bright student, and showed sharp intelligence
 She created many original writings of rhyming stories for
her classmates
The only verified
photograph of Emily
Dickinson, it was
made when she was
around 16 or 17
Edward Dickinson

 Father of Emily Dickinson
 He was a lawyer and highly
respected man in Amherst
 Her father was really strict, she
described her father by“his heart
was pure and terrible”
 His strictness can be shown
through his censorship of reading
materials; Walt Whitman for
example was considered “too
inappropriate” and his novels had
to be smuggled into the house
A Poet in the Bedroom

 She spent much of her adult life inside it, in an
upstairs corner bedroom, writing poems and letters
all night at a table the size of a child’s school desk,
sewing the poems into packets, locking the packets
away for discovery after she’d gone.
 She was bound in her room for a portion of her life
because of her affliction with Bright’s Disease which
is an illness affecting the kidneys, symptoms of
which include chronic pain and edema, which may
have contributed to her seclusion from the outside
world
Style of writing

 Dashes and Capitalization (emphasis)
 Ordinary Life = “mysterious actuality of death”
 “Romantics celebrate Imagination over Reason”,
Dickinson differed because she believed in the reality
of our actions in life
 She was very curious about death
 She also believed in producing the truth
 Differed from Whitman because she stressed
individuality over unity
1129

(1)Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
(2)Success in Circuit lies
(3)Too bright for our infirm Delight
(4)The Truth's superb surprise
(5)As Lightning to the Children eased
(6)With explanation kind
(7)The Truth must dazzle gradually
(8)Or every man be blind --
Truth

 Truth remains absolute
 It is challenging and judging to all of us
 “Beauty is truth and truth is beauty”-John Keats
449

(1)I died for Beauty -- but was scarce
(2)Adjusted in the Tomb
(3)When One who died for Truth, was lain
(4)In an adjoining room –
(5)He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
(6)"For Beauty", I replied –
(7)"And I -- for Truth -- Themself are One –
(8)We Brethren, are", He said –
(9)And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night –
(10)We talked between the Rooms –
(11)Until the Moss had reached our lips –
(12)And covered up -- our names --
Ode to a Grecian Urn

 By John Keats
 Urn=Poems
 Time leads to death
 Poems will always remain present throughout time
“Death is Defeat”

 Death is an apparent theme in Dickinson’s poems
and it could be driven by depressive events in her
life
 Through 1864-1865 she was send to an eye doctor in
Boston where she was forbidden to read and write,
this is the last time she would leave Amherst
 In the 1870s her mother was confined to her bed and
her father died in 1874

 In 1878, her friend Samuel Bowles died and her
nephew died shortly after.
 These depressive events caused her to: stop going
out in public and stay to writing in her solitude.
 Though she enjoyed her solitude she was constantly
touched with tragedy.
Emily’s Poems

 1775 poems survived
 Only 7 of her poems were published before she died and
they were anonymous
 When she died, Dickinson did not want any of her poems
published, she insisted that they were to be burned.
 However her younger sister Lavinia found her poems and
passed them over to Emily’s friends Thomas Higginson
and Mabel Todd
 Higginson and Todd edited most of her work and in 1890
her first collection of poetry was published.
A Great American Poet

 Feminist theory and queer studies have described
Emily as a shy, passive, recessive figure has been
transformed into an active, mettlesome, genderchallenging presence, a poet in control of her art and
environment, and fully conscious of the mechanics of
personal myth.
Sources

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/arts/design
/16emily.html?pagewanted=all
 http://www.biographyonline.net/poets/emily_dick
inson.html
 http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/dickinson/sec
tion7.rhtml