Dickinson's Poetry (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

By SparkNotes

Dickinson's Poetry (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Emily Dickinson
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• Language: English
• Publisher: SparkNotes
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781411474826

Book preview

Cover of SparkNotes Guide to Dickinson’s Poetry by SparkNotes Editors

Dickinson’s Poetry

Emily Dickinson

© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7482-6

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Contents

Context

Analysis

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Success is counted sweetest...

'Hope' is the thing with feathers—...

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

The Soul selects her own Society—

A Bird came down the Walk—...

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—...

I died for Beauty—but was scarce...

I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—...

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

Study Questions and Essay Topics

Review & Resources

Context

Emily Dickinson led one of the most prosaic lives of any great poet. At a time when fellow poet Walt Whitman was ministering to the Civil War wounded and traveling across America—a time when America itself was reeling in the chaos of war, the tragedy of the Lincoln assassination, and the turmoil of Reconstruction—Dickinson lived a relatively untroubled life in her father’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born in

1830

and where she died in

1886

. Although popular myth often depicts Dickinson as the solitary genius, she, in fact, remained relatively active in Amherst social circles and often entertained visitors throughout her life. However, she was certainly more isolated than a poet such as Whitman: Her world was bounded by her home and its surrounding countryside; the great events of her day play little role in her poetry. Whitman eulogized Lincoln and wrote about the war; Dickinson, one of the great poets of inwardness ever to write in English, was no social poet—one could read through her Collected Poems—

1,776

in all—and emerge with almost no sense of the time in