Assignment

Subject :American Literature

Topic :Emily Dikinson as an American poetess

Submit to : Sir Tanzil ur Rehman

Submitted by : Group No :03

Sr.No Name Roll No

01 Shahid Saleem 1006

02 Fatima Zahra 1026

03 Shakeela Abid 1046

04 Ahmad Sohail Amir 1086

05 Haroon Ashraf 1106

06 Muazma Tahira 1126

07 Asma khalid 1146

08 Usaila Munawar 1030

MA English Morning (B) 3rd semester .

Date:...............................
 Who Was Emily Dickinson?
Fast Facts: Emily Dickinson
Full Name: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Known For: American poet
Born: December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts
Died: May 15, 1886 in Amherst, Massachusetts
Parents: Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson
Education: Amherst Academy, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
Published Works: She wrote 1800 poems but a few of her poems
were published during her lifetime .First series of Poems (1890),
Second Series (1891), and Third Series (1896).
Emily Dickinson left school as a teenager, eventually living a
reclusive life on the family homestead. There, she secretly
created bundles of poetry and wrote hundreds of letters. Due to
a discovery by sister Lavinia, Dickinson's remarkable work was
published after her death—on May 15, 1886, in Amherst—and
she is now considered one of the towering figures of American
literature.

Notable Quote: "If I read a book and it makes my whole body

so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know
that is poetry."
Early Life and Education
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born into a prominent family in
Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a
lawyer, a politician, and a trustee of Amherst College, of which
his father, Samuel Dickinson, was a founder. He and his wife
Emily (nee Norcross) had three children; Emily Dickinson was the
second child and eldest daughter, and she had an older brother,
William Austin (who generally went by his middle name), and a
younger sister, Lavinia. By all accounts, Dickinson was a pleasant,
well-behaved child who particularly loved music.

Because Dickinson’s father was adamant that his children be

well-educated, Dickinson received a more rigorous and more
classical education than many other girls of her era. When she
was ten, she and her sister began attending Amherst Academy,
a former academy for boys that had just begun accepting female
students two years earlier. Dickinson continued to excel at her
studies, despite their rigorous and challenging nature, and
studied literature, the sciences, history, philosophy, and Latin.
Occasionally, she did have to take time off from school due to
repeated illnesses.

Dickinson’s preoccupation with death began at this young age as

well. At the age of fourteen, she suffered her first major loss
when her friend and cousin Sophia Holland died of typhus.
After completing her education at Amherst Academy, Dickinson
enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She spent less than
a year there, but explanations for her early departure vary
depending on the source: her family wanted her to return home,
she disliked the intense, evangelical religious atmosphere, she
was lonely, she didn’t like the teaching style. In any case, she
returned home by the time she was 18 years old.

Dickinson did not travel much outside of Amherst, slowly

developing the later reputation for being reclusive and eccentric.
She cared for her mother, who was essentially homebound with
chronic illnesses from the 1850s onward. As she became more
and more cut off from the outside world, however, Dickinson
leaned more into her inner world and thus into her creative
output.

Major works
1.BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH
2. I’M NOBODY! WHO ARE YOU?
3. HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS
4. I FELT A FUNERAL, IN MY BRAIN
5. I DWELL IN POSSIBILITY
6. MUCH MADNESS IS DIVINEST SENSE
7. MY LIFE HAD STOOD – A LOADED GUN
8. I HEARD A FLY BUZZ
9. TELL ALL THE TRUTH BUT TELL IT SLANT —
10. I MEASURE EVERY GRIEF I MEET
 Dikinson's poetic Style

Form and Tone

Dickinson’s poems are lyrics, generally defined as short poems
with a single speaker who expresses thought and feeling. As in
most lyric poetry, the speaker in Dickinson’s poems is often
identified in the first person,“I.” Dickinson reminded a reader that
the “I” in her poetry does not necessarily speak for the poet
herself: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse
– it does not mean – me – but a supposed person” .
For some of Dickinson’s poems, more than one manuscript
version exists. “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose” exists in two
manuscripts. In one, the poem is broken into four stanzas of four
lines each; in the other, as you can see ,there are no stanza
breaks.

The poem describes the natural phenomena of sunrise and

sunset, but it also describes the difficulties of perceiving the
world around us.
As the poem,
“I” becomes less certain about what it knows: “But how he set –
I know not –There seemed a purple stile.”
One of Dickinson’s special gifts as a poet is her ability to describe
abstract concepts with concrete images.

Meter and Rhyme

Dickinson’s verse is often associated with common meter, which
is defined by alternating lines of eight syllables and six syllables
(8686). This pattern–one of several types of metrical “feet”–is
known as an “iamb.” Common meter is often used in sung music,
especially hymns .
An example of common meter in the poem
{ “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose.”}

As with meter, Dickinson’s employment of rhyme is experimental

and often not exact. Rhyme that is not perfect is called “slant
rhyme” or “approximate rhyme.
Her use of meter is also somewhat unconventional, as she avoids
the popular pentameter for tetrameter or trimeter, and even
then is irregular in her use of meter within a poem. In other ways,
however, her poems stuck to some conventions; she often used
ballad stanza forms and ABCB rhyme schemes.

Punctuation and Syntax

Dickinson most often punctuated her poems with dashes, rather
than the more expected array of periods, commas, and other
punctuation marks. She also capitalized interior words, not just
words at the beginning of a line. Her reasons are not entirely
clear.
 While Dickinson’s dashes often stand in for more varied
punctuation, at other times they serve as bridges between
sections of the poem—bridges that are not otherwise readily
apparent.
Diction
Dickinson’s editing process often focused on word choice rather
than on experiments with form or structure. She recorded variant
wordings with a “+” footnote on her manuscript.

The themes of Dickinson’s poetry

Sometimes with humor, sometimes with pathos, Dickinson writes
about her subjects. Remembering that she had a strong wit . A
keen observer, she used images from nature, religion, law, music,
commerce, medicine, fashion, and domestic activities to probe
universal themes: the wonders of nature, the identity of the self,
death and immortality, and love.

Theme of Nature
Emily Dickinson feels the necessity and profundity of nature. It
plays an important role to make her poetic theme glorious and
age-worthy. To her nature is extremely harmonious. It is an
image of human. She considers nature as the gentlest mother as
she finds mother like love amidst nature. Nature is the source of
joy and beauty. So, we cannot refuse Emily Dickinson's actual
conection with nature as in her poem ;
" A Bird come down the walk" and "A narrow Fellow in the Grass"
Theme of Love
Emily Dickinson’s treatment of love shows her as a representative
figure in the field of love and emotion. Her love poems are
psychological as well as autobiographical. Love is a mystic life
force it should be free from voluptuousness. Her poems run the
range from renunciation to professions of love to sexual passion;
they are generally intense.

"If you were coming in the fall"

"I cannot live with you"
"I early took my dog"
"Wild nights! Wild nights!"

Theme of Death
Death is one of the foremost themes in Dickinson’s poetry. No
two poems have exactly the same understanding of death,
however. Death is sometimes gentle, sometimes menacing,
sometimes simply inevitable. In “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died
–,” Dickinson investigates the physical process of dying. In
“Because I could not stop for Death –,“ she personifies death, and
presents the process of dying as simply the realization that there
is eternal life. Death is personified in many guises in her poems,
ranging from a suitor to a tyrant. Her attitude is ambivalent;
death is a terror to be feared and avoided, a trick played on
humanity by God, a welcome relief, and a blessed way to heaven.
Immortality is often related to death.

"I heard a fly buzz when I died"

"Because I could not stop for Death"
"Safe in their alabaster chambers"
"I died for beauty, but was scarce"

Theme of Immortality
Immortality have covered an important place in her poetic
world. Emily Dickinson says death functions as a connecting link
between life and immortality. The conventional idea of
immortality, with its insistence upon splendor and a majestic
transformation, is in her poem uniquely reworked to present her
belief in the reality of the soul after death.

Theme of Pain and Sufferings

The theme of pain and sufferings is also an organic part of her
poetic theme. Actually, Emily Dickinson is a poet of universal grief
whose poetic feelings goes on with the stream of eternal
sufferings. Pain plays a necessary role in human life. The amount
of pain we experience generally exceeds the joy or other positive
value contrasted with pain. Pain earns us purer moments of
ecstasy and makes joy more vital. The pain of loss or of
lacking/not having enhances our appreciation of victory, success,
etc.; the pain of separation indicates the degree of our desire for
union, whether with another human being or God. Food imagery
is associated with this theme; hunger and thirst are the
prerequisites for comprehending the value of food and drink.
"Pain has an element of blank"
"Success is counted sweetest"
"After great pain a formal feeling comes"
"I measure every grief I meet"
"I had been hungry all the years"
"My life closed twice before its close"

Theme of God and Religion

Man's relationship to God and nature is concerned throughout
Dickinson's life.
Her attitude toward God in her poems ranges from friendliness
to anger and bitterness, and He is at times indifferent, at other
times cruel.
"He fumbles at your spirit"
"Heaven is what I cannot reach!"
"The heart asks pleasure first"

Conclusion
While her eccentric nature and choice of a secluded life has
occupied much of Dickinson’s image in popular culture, she is still
regarded as a highly respected and highly influential American
poet.