Customer Reviews

Emily Dickinson's Poetry

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is not a collection of Emily Dickinson's poetry, but a study of her poems. The author made the following statement describing his book: My search has been for the underlying characteristics which unite the poems. But I isolate these characteristics only with the hope of achieving an integration, which will not falsify the poems' variety. This method evolves from a strong belief that Dickinson's stylistic and thematic characteristics are nothing if not dynamic. It is misleading to consider this poet's attitudes as if they were little kernels of hardened belief. The problem with saying where Dickinson stands (say, on the question of a Protestant God) is that she can be found in two or five places at once. Her concerns manifest themselves as continuing self-debates, as varied and often conflicting dramatizations rather than as static position-papers. The individual moment, linguistically translated into the nuances of chosen words, will determine a particular resolution. Inevitably, that resolution will be challenged by another poem. Only by taking account of the full range of Dickinson's answers to her self-posed questions can we hope to discover the silent assumptions that shape the questions.