Dickinson notes Essay Example

through texts the ways in which exploring the concept and significance of belonging may broaden and deepen their understanding of themselves and their world.

Texts: Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (deed. James Reeves) Related Material. Texts of your own choosing relevant to Belonging. You can draw your chosen texts from a variety of sources, in a range of genres and media. 3 Belonging: Some questions to ponder How may it be possible for an individual to both 'belong and 'not belong to a place, group, community, the larger world? What might be the consequences of having an ambivalent 'sense of belonging to some person, thing, place, idea, etc.? In what ways can 'belonging' or 'not belonging shape our sense of self and identity? How might our perception of our own identity and belonging shape our response to others?

Why is time an important notion when discussing belonging and attitudes to belonging? Consider the movement through life and the way that we belong to different age groups, generations, etc... Throughout the passage of our life. Why and when might we choose not to belong? What influences our choice not to belong? What barriers to belonging might we experience? Relationship of the reader to the text - The syllabus states: "In engaging with the texts, a responder may experience and understand the possibilities presented by a sense of belonging to, or exclusion from the text and the world it represents. This engagement may be influenced by the different ways perspectives are given voice in or are absent from a text. How can perceptions and ideas of belonging be constructed in texts? How can I belong

to or be excluded from a text? How are perspectives given a voice or silenced in a text? You need to consider your relationship with the texts you study. Do you feel a sense of belonging with the text, with the world it portrays and by extension with the composer? This is a particularly interesting question given our prescribed text, Emily Dickinson poetry. COMPOSER, PERSONA and RESPONDER (or CPRM) You need to ask yourself: whose sense of belonging is relevant here? Are we talking about the writer, a character or the reader? How might all these experiences be linked?

You need to go further than consider only the experience portrayed in the plot or events of the text. 4 Emily Dickinson This pr©CICS of her life is from The Oxford Companion to English Literature, deed. Margaret Durable (1985): DICKINSON, Emily Elizabeth American poet, born in Amherst, Massachusetts, the daughter of a successful lawyer. She was educated at Amherst Academy (1834-41) Ana Mount Holyoke (184/-8); ruling near early years seen was lively, witty, and sociable, but from her mid-twenties she gradually withdrew into an inner world, eventually, in her forties, refusing to leave her home, and avoiding all intact with strangers, although she maintained intimate correspondences with people she never saw face to face.

Her emotional life remains mysterious, despite much speculation about a possible disappointed love affair, for which one candidate is the Revved Charles Headwords, with whom she corresponded and who twice visited her; another is Samuel Bowels, editor of the Springfield Republican, to whom she sent and addressed many poems, She wrote poetry from girlhood onward, but only seven poems out of nearly

2,000 are known to have been published during her lifetime, and those appeared anonymously and much edited. She at one stage actively sought publication, but her contemporaries found her work bewildering, and she appears to have accepted her lot as an unrecognized writer - her 'Barefoot-Rank. From c. 858 she assembled many of her poems in packets or fascicles', which were discovered after her death; a selection, arranged and edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higgins, appeared in 1890. Full publication was delayed by family difficulties, but eventually other editions and volumes of letters appeared, restoring her individual punctuation and presentation. At first regarded as an eccentric minor tote, she is now considered a major writer of startling originality. Her work presents recurrent themes - a mystic apprehension of the natural world, a preoccupation with poetic vocation, fame, death, and immortality - and is expressed in a rhetoric and language of her own, cryptic, elliptical, and at times self-traumatizing and hyperbolic.

Her imagery reflects an intense and painful inner struggle over many years; she refers to herself as the queen of Calvary, and her verse if full of allusions to volcanoes, shipwrecks, funerals, storms, imprisonments, and other manifestations of natural and human violence. Her simultaneous conviction of isolation and 'election' was traumatized in her way of life, which is vividly described in a two-volume biography by R. B. Seawall, published in 1974. Some thoughts on Dickinson and her context - Technically, Dickinson was a Romantic poet, and while references to nature in her poetry demonstrate some sympathy with the concerns of the time, her poetry can hardly be said to belong to the

aesthetics of the period. Indeed, Dickinson poetry was way before its time; Modernist in focus, intensely compressed and elliptical - occasionally more gap than content.

In her essay "Longing and Belonging: Emily Dickinson poetics of distance," Dry Elizabeth McMahon focuses on the paradoxical relationship in Dickinson poetry between longing and belonging. She points out the two phrases that defined Dickinson at her death: "Called back" that was carved on her tombstone and "At home" which described her occupation are contradictory and describe the tension in her poetry between estrangement and belonging. As McMahon states: 5 The understanding of death as a process of being 'called back implies that lived experience Is a pergola AT transience Ana exploration. Accordingly, ten unman student in this schema is always an ©magi©, whose experience of self and others, place and time, is of an intensity of distance.

This distance is experienced as absence, insufficiency and inadequacy but it is also a space of desire: of seeking and anticipation, the distance between recognition of the desired object and its (impossible) attainment. It is death that enables the bridging of distance as the conduit for the expatriates return to the 'ancient homestead'. (p. 74) We will be focusing on the paradox within Dickinson poetry of the representation of isolation and of unity. As McMahon puts it: "much of the energy and intensity of each poem resides in the spark of an unresolved, galvanism tension" between longing and belonging. We are interested in the paradoxical balance within Dickinson poetry that emphasis but never resolves the struggle between isolation and unity.

The paradoxes in her poetry have been referred to by critics as

parallelism - where opposite positions are compared and kept parallel, never meeting but at the same time never diverging, always equidistant but always apart. It is easy in this investigation to be distracted by a biographical approach to Dickinson work. Certainly, her life enacts a very deliberate and dramatic approach to the question of belonging versus isolation: she chose isolation. For much of her adult life she lived in seclusion with only her family for company, albeit with the rare visit from an outsider which she prized and anticipated keenly, and indeed she retreated more and more into the confines of her bedroom.

She wrote in isolation and shared her poetry only with the very few, in particular Thomas Higgins whom she chose as her mentor. At the same time, we must be mindful of T. S. Elite's instruction that the "significant motion" of poetry "has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. " Dickinson poetry - in its startling originality as well as in the recurring sense of yearning and unrequited hope - is a representation of isolation. There is the repeated sense of the individual alone in the face of the big questions of humanity (not least of which is death). At the same time, her focus on these big questions of humanity is unifying.

That is, we are united in the face of hunger, passion, loneliness and death. We are isolated and yet conjoined by the simple fact of our shared humanity. That is the paradox of Dickinson poetry, echoed by the stylistic paradox of simplicity and complexity. We must consider the relationship between the poet

and her reader through the poetry. What is so extraordinary is the effect of Dickinson poetry. Poetry is, after all, a form of communication and communication is about bridging gaps, about creating community and belonging. We will look at the way in which the reader is drawn into her poetry by its apparent simplicity and tone of confession and but also kept at one remove by its complexity and opacity.

Dickinson unique poetic sensibility includes and distances us at the same time. This is very relevant because writing became her form of communication (in addition to poetry she wrote many extraordinarily poetic letters) and a way of reaching across her self- imposed exile to remind others of their shared humanity. Dickinson was fascinated by the individual and with individual experience. She wrote to Higgins: "To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations, thou friends are, if possible, an event more fair... A letter always feels to me like Immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend... There seems a spectral power In thong t Tanat walks alone. seen 010 not renounce experience - intellectual perhaps rather than physical - by isolating herself but she was aware of loneliness. Her famous lines 6 It might be lonelier Without the loneliness articulate one of the prime paradoxes of her life. The intensity of her experience of life is at the heart of her sense of belonging to humanity while at the same time refusing to belong in purely social terms to the conventional small-town world of Amherst and the accepted occupations of women of her day. In this context, one

could see her choice of isolation as a rejection of the moieties suffocating experience of being part of a community and, indeed, as a bid for social freedom.

One is tempted to see Dickinson as seeking intellectual and emotional freedom from the restricted expectations of women's lives, and this would perhaps be confirmed by the often brutal and unfeminine imagery of her poetry, suggesting that she was unmoved and unmodified by social expectation. Critics and biographers have speculated as to the initiating event that sent her into reclusion, and there has been much discussion about a doomed and/or unrequited love for a married Calvinist minister, Rev. Charles Headwords. For our purposes, however, it is enough to consider that Dickinson chose isolation as the better position from which to contemplate the extraordinary business of being alive. Her first letter to Higgins is telling. Reeves starts his Introduction with it, but I will quote some of it here: Mr. Higgins, - Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?...

Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude. I think this points to the significance of Dickinson poetry as a meaner of communication between herself and the world. She speaks of it as something living and it's interesting to consider it as an extension of herself, a way for her to interpret and live in the world while also away from it. And it has turned out to be her immortality, a concept that she refers to constantly in her poetry and which is, of course, associated with death. Features of Dickinson poetry to

look out for - A childlike voice and a general view of the world from a naive position.

A critic - whose essay I have a copy of but whose name is completely lost to me (in one of those filing tragedies that we have all experienced) - has said of Dickinson that in her vocation of childhood, she emphasized "weakness, fear, and the attempt to find love. " Hunger is also an experience she associates with childhood as a "symbol of the child's powerful but undirected demands on life. " According to this nameless critic (bless! ), Dickinson regarded herself as a "little girl" throughout her life and she made a cult of childishness in her poems. Certainly, the simplicity of diction and observation is childlike while the import is often far more complex and sophisticated.

I nee same critic NAS also salad something Tanat Is very relevant to our paradoxical eating of Dickinson: "The real facts of nature in the mind of a child are that it is a playful world of equally sentient creatures and that it may at any time erupt into a hostile force which devours and destroys. " References to nature, as befits a poet of the Romantic period although, as the point above makes clear, her attitude to nature was largely paradoxical and I think can be fitted 7 into the longing/belonging dichotomy effectively. Consider in particular "A narrow fellow in the grass". References to death - arguably existential in approach. Fred White discusses Dickinson existential sensibilities and its similarities with the ideas of the Danish philosopher Sorer Segregated.

Segregated wrote, "Death in earnest gives life force as

nothing else does; it makes one alert as nothing else does. " Similarly, Dickinson is fascinated by the way that the presence of death adds value to life; she is aware of the relationship between binaries that constitutes our experience of the world. (Fred D. White, "Emily Dickinson existential dramas", The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, deed. Wendy Martin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, up. 1-106). Biblical allusion - it is not surprising, given her background and context, that Dickinson should have used biblical imagery in her poetry. However, her use of the Bible is unorthodox and paradoxical.

Her approach to Biblical imagery may well be tied to her religious skepticism and her existential sensibilities and can be traced biographically. In terms of the poems we are studying, it is most clearly seen in the complexity surrounding various Biblical allusions she uses, most obviously in "A narrow fellow in the grass. " Severe compression and economy of language. This sometimes leads Dickinson to stretch and break syntax. She is interested in generating meaning that goes beyond the "simple" meaning of a syntactically correct sentence. The use of ellipsis in Dickinson poetry allows her to accentuate what is not said as much as want Is salad - tans Is Itself a central paradox In near poetry: Tanat we are as aware of the words that she does not include as those that she does.

Silence and presence coexist and rely on one another for meaning. Note the repeated use of words such as "may' - raising the question of the alternative, of uncertainty and bout Punctuation - Dickinson is known for her idiosyncratic use of the

dash. In the edition that we are studying, many of the dashes have been replaced by more conventional punctuation such as commas and full-stops, but if you look at the versions of the poems that McMahon quotes in her article, you can see that some editors have maintained the dash even where formal rules of syntax (see the point above) would forbid them. Indeed, McMahon makes a very useful observation about Dickinson use of punctuation: "...

Dickinson poetry confounds the reader's ability to separate he senses of belonging and estrangement in her work: at the level of punctuation, her famous use of the dash serves to both connect and separate sense, sound and breath: her arresting lexicon and syntax force us to confront the limits and gaps in the capacity of language to meet experience and convey meaning. At the same time, they reconnect us to words in a material, bodily relation - and to the language system itself - as if for the first time. "(up. 74-5) Colloquial syntax - Dickinson liberally uses imperatives, exclamations and questions to create a sense of immediacy and directness.

According to one critic, her colloquial quenches (use of contractions for egg) are "conspicuous signs of a poetic language that refuses to be tamed and leveled. " Her use of contractions creates a greater intimacy between the poet and her reader than more formal diction would generate, and increases the sense that her poetry is an immediate, unmediated (for, indeed, she did not edit her poetry) expression of emotion that connects her with her readers and, indeed, with all 8 people. Dickinson use of repetitions also increases the sense

of informality and of conversation and spontaneity which forges a sense of belonging within the immunity of reader and writer.

Ambiguity - the double meaning present throughout Dickinson poetry which I have been considering as a paradoxical approach to belonging and exclusion can also be seen as an expression of the privacy (and therefore the intimacy) of her work. The reader has to get close to her, to read her poetry within the context of the symbols that recur, to understand the multiple layers of her often deceptively simple poems. The poems are multilayered in meaning, charged with ambiguity and opacity. It is the process AT grappling Walt ten courtly AT ten poems Tanat ten reader earlier most leisure and is rewarded with a sense of belonging to the poem I the sense that it is explicable and familiar and forms part of one's intellectual make up.

Oxymoron - Cindy Mackenzie says this about Dickinson use of the oxymoron: "For in Dickinson oxymoron constructions, the unknown can never be fully realized because the tension between the two terms is sustained by the ideological interplay between them. Thus the oxymoron enacts the movement of desire kept alive by the fact that neither terms subsumes the other, but that each is sustained in a relationship of inclusive reciprocity... The size of the space between each term is exaggerated in a way that forces their separation, rather than encourages their union. " (Cindy Mackenzie, "Heavenly Hurt": Dickinson Wounded Text,' The Emily Dickinson Journal 9. 2, 55-63, quoted by McMahon) The sound of Dickinson language is very important.

Consider the use of rhyme half-rhyme non-rhyme sight-rhyme assonance alliteration As

her thoughts move from the concrete to the abstract her rhyme scheme tends to become less rigid and even disappears. It is very important to read her poetry aloud to hear her choice of words and to allow the half-rhymes to clang and draw attention to themselves. The relationship between the physical and the metaphysical: the way that sensual imagery in Dickinson poetry gives rise to meditations on metaphysical ideas or transcendent experience. This is particularly interesting given the prevalence of biblical imagery in Dickinson poetry. Many critics have discussed Dickinson religious skepticism. The poems themselves - No. 66: "This is my letter to the world" (p. 0) Note the Juxtaposition of the public declaration of the "letter to the world" and the privacy of the personal pronoun 9 Contrast between unity - communicating with the world - and the isolation evoked by never wrote to me" Dickinson evokes an enormous spatial movement between the world and "me" "Tender majesty': what is the effect of this oxymoron? "Her message is committed / To hands I cannot see": consider the tension here between faith and lack of faith How is the speaker separated from her "fellow countrymen" - what effect does this have? How does the final line raise the question of a lack of tenderness and how does this effect your reading of the poem as a whole? How does the poem oscillate between a sense of isolation and connection, between the universal and the individual? Is there resolution or intensification of this paradox? No. 67: "l died for beauty, but was scarce" (p. 1) Compare this poem with Keats' famous Romantic poem "Ode on

a Grecian Urn" ODE ON A GRECIAN URN (1820) By John Keats Thou still unrevised bride of quietness, Thou foster child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who cants thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcade? What men or gods are these? What maidens loath? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbre's? What wild ecstasy? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, Pipe to the spirit deities of no tone.

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou cants not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bola Lover, never, never cants tone KISS, Though winning near the goal---yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unaware-deed, Forever piping songs forever new; More happy love! More happy, happy love! Forever warm and still to be enjoyed, Forever panting, and forever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. 10 Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead's thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?

What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of

this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can ever return. O Attic shape! Fair attitude! With breed Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shall remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sty's, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"---that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Dickinson clearly picks up the metaphor from Keats of Truth and Beauty being