EMILY DICKINSON S L BERRY I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y DUGALD STERMER CREATIVE DIGITAL Creative Digital
4 Emily Dickinson as a child with siblings left to right Emily Austin Lavinia
FOREWORD FOREWORD Perhaps no poet has ever penned as many memorable lines as Emily Dickinson 1830 86 It is shocking but true that only a handful of her poems were published in her lifetime Fame came posthumously to this reclusive New England poet so that her well-known line I’m Nobody Who are you may have reflected how she truly felt about her work What is unique about The Belle of Amherst are her unorthodox broken meter and slant rhymes that famous use of dashes a richness of metaphor seldom found in poetry old or new and dazzling originality Dickinson’s themes were universal eter nity immortality heaven hell and nature and her manner direct emotional and ruthlessly honest Raised in a strict Puritanical household young Emily’s parents believed a classi cal education indispensable She was never comfortable with orthodox religion The soul should stand ajar she wrote ready to welcome the ecstatic experience This experience she found most often not in intellectual pursuits or personal relationships but in the beauty of nature and through inner reflection Dickinson also sought spirituality in the poems of much-admired poets such as John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and in the deeply personal verses she wrote alternately brooding and joyous Dickinson’s poems speak volumes in just a few words about the emotional condition of the poet the poem’s speaker or the reader sometimes in meanings initially obscure Although she never wrote a long poem her readers may need to devote more time and attention to her brief lines than they would to a longer work of literature Perhaps Dickinson’s exaggerated use of dashes was her way of telling the reader to slow down and pay close attention After Emily’s death her beloved sister Lavinia was instructed to burn her letters which are poetry in themselves Lavinia or Vinnie discovered hundreds of her sister’s verses stitched together by the poet herself and subsequently published in various versions Of Emily Dickinson’s poetry let Australian-born essayist Clive James have the last word She could enamel the inside of a raindrop J Patrick Lewis United States Children’s Poet Laureate 2011-13 5
