Sunday, March 19, 2023

Emily Dickinson

                                                           Emily Dickinson was an American poet during the 1800s. She 

was born in Massachusetts to a good family that had strong ties to their community. She is renowned as one of the most influential poets, but during her life, she received little to no regard. Most of her poems explore the inner experience and one’s own mind. She manages to make a topic that is normally considered to be scary a comfortable one. One’s own mind is painful isolation because you encounter your truest form and you cannot escape it. It was a comfortable and necessary part of Emily Dickinson's creative process. In that isolation, she generated her creativity, which developed into poems. At first, her isolation was limited to solo activities such as gardening, reading, writing, and cooking, but later in life, she became completely withdrawn, isolating herself in her room. This isolation allowed Dickinson to develop different perspectives, from the mystical to the critical, and many in between. This isolation was critical to the creative process because it allowed her endless creative opportunities. Emily Dickinson's  poems are considered to be short poems, written in the first person, sometimes with humor or pathos, describing abstract concepts with concrete images, and dealing with topics about which she is knowledgeable and passionate. One of her poems,

Because I could not stop for Death, takes the speaker on a carriage ride to the afterlife and discusses how death is inevitable but that there are many uncertainties about what happens after death. The motivations behind this poem are still uncertain, but there are two strong theories: either the poem is about a failed romantic relationship or a reconciliation with Christian faith. Since all of her poems were published after her death, the inspiration behind the works is just speculation, and the majority of her creative process is lost. But we know that she is intrinsically driven, that she focuses a lot on death and life, and that the majority of her creative process is isolated. Isolation within her own mind, confronting and encountering the scariest and truest form of ourselves, along with pondering all of the other possibilities in life and death.


https://poets.org/poem/because-i-could-not-stop-death-479

https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/emily-dickinson/poetry/tips-for-reading/major-characteristics-of-dickinsons-poetry/

https://psyche.co/ideas/emily-dickinson-and-the-creativity-of-a-solitude-of-space

1 comment:

  1. I think it's interesting that Dickinson wrote her poems in isolation and did not gain fame until after her death. I feel like the fact that she wrote them without the intention of publishing them or even showing them to her family shows an incredible amount of intrinsic motivation. I wonder how many poems are out there that weren't published after someone's death, or if there's someone out there today who will only be famous after their death.

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