Dr. Marc D. Baldwin Emily Dickinson Copyright © 2006 by Marc D. Baldwin, PhD

Microcosmic Emily The microcosm to Whitman’s macrocosm, Dickinson wrote short lines inspecting domestic and natural objects while Whitman wrote long lines of the city, the battlefield and the far-flung multitudes. Whitman explored large experiences while Dickinson minutely examined private experiences. Candid insights into her own mental and emotional life, her poetry resembles Blake’s and Yeats’ in the sense that infinity may be represented by small things as well as by large: "the brain is wider than the sky," she wrote.

Private Emily In the great Puritan tradition of diary keeping, Emily’s 1750 poems were her “letter to the world." She believed that the power of external things depends on our state of mind and that “the soul selects its own society.” Preferring her own created world than what she observed of society, she became a hermit by deliberate choice, mastering life by rejecting it— a doctrine she shared with the great evangelical preachers Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather.

Emily’s Poetic World Full of natural description, her poetry examines both moral and mystical experience. Seeking immortality or permanence, Emily is forever defining the gap between the living and the dead, and the tension between abstraction and sensation. No poet since William Blake has made such fruitful use of Protestant hymnology and Biblical imagery.

Thoroughly Modern Emily A precursor of the Imagist school, Emily’s verses violated the regularity of the 19th century hymnal form, anticipating instead the modern enlargement of melody by assonance, dissonance, and "off ‑ rhyme." Her verbal ambiguity—often paratactic and punctuated with dashes—brilliantly captures the most subtle psychological nuances.

Paradoxical Emily Many of her powerful poems are busy expressing their powerlessness and the impotency of words. Struggling to express the inexpressible, Emily’s act of looking for a subject became her subject. Often compared to the metaphysical poet John Donne, Emily employs paradoxes and riddles as an essential aspect of her mode of expression, as in this wonderful line: "It might be lonelier/Without the loneliness."

Transformative Emily The key moment in Emily’s poetry is often a transformation from absence or ignorance into presence or knowledge. The deprived speaker experiences a vision of the Kingdom or Truth which brings with it a separate peace of sorts. "I dwell in Possibility,” she said. "Spreading wide my narrow hands/To gather Paradise."

God Although she struggled with the problem of belief and refused to take anything on faith alone, she doesn't doubt His existence. She seemed frustrated that God was unattainable for her: "He who loves God must not expect to be loved in return."

Death Death was Emily’s constant companion. At the age of 17, five of her best friends died. The view from her bedroom window was a cemetery. So Emily’s intense joy at being alive was tempered by a keen awareness of her mortality. Unsure of whether or not she believed in an afterlife, Emily nonetheless believed in the Puritan theology of Redemption and Immortality. Yet, she ordered that upon her death all of her poems be burned. Fortunately, that order was not obeyed.

“Reading Whitman & Dickinson” Please watch my Lecture entitled “Reading Whitman & Dickinson” for a sample reading of some of her poems.