A Study Guide for Emily Dickinson's "There's a Certain Slant of Light"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Emily Dickinson's "There's a Certain Slant of Light," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535840804

Book preview

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There’s a Certain Slant of Light

Emily Dickinson

1861

Introduction

Written in 1861 at the beginning of Emily Dickinson’s most prolific period as a poet, There’s a Certain Slant of Light was first published in 1890 by Thomas Higginson in an edited version. It was not available in its original form until Thomas H. John-son’s 1955 edition of Dickinson’s Collected Works. In stark contrast to Emerson’s Romantic spiritualization of nature, this poem portrays nature as a distant, alien, and indifferent force fraught with reminders of death’s universal presence. Dickinson’s poem lays open the dialectic between outer nature and the inner self and places the source of meaning firmly within the interpretive self. In other words, all of the physical and psychological impressions that natural phenomena exert upon human consciousness only receive significance within the individual mind, Where the Meanings, are.

There’s a Certain Slant of Light also exemplifies Dickinson’s poetic treatment of grief and loss present in so many of her works. On the surface, the poem explores the depression that light deprivation may inflict upon the mind during winter. And yet it also opens out to a cluster of associations that are specific to Dickinson herself. Indirectly, for example, the poem reveals Dickinson’s ambivalence toward God, the force behind this winter light as well as the rest of nature. But overall, this work discloses the feelings of isolation and alienation all grieving people suffer After great pain. In brilliantly cut gem-like language, There’s a Certain Slant of Light casts light upon the quiet desperation that misery knows. This poem tells all the truth about pain but tells it slant, or indirectly

Author Biography

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, the second of three children to respectable, upper-middle-class Puritan parents. She would later describe her father as domineering and her mother as emotionally distant. Early on, she was a great admirer of and a great rival to her brother, Austin, born