The Emily Dickinson Project

Emily Dickinson wrote over 1,700 poems during her lifetime, which are all recognized for their content and their unique formatting and stylistic choices.  Content-wise , Dickinson's poetry covers a wide range of subjects. She writes about everything from love to loneliness, nature to religion, and even death. She frequently utilized some of the same symbols within her poetry as well; flowers are regulars in her work, as well as bees. In addition to this, many of her poems often approach difficult subjects that many people tend to feel uncomfortable discussing, such as death and loneliness. Her life experiences likely had something to do with this, but it is important to note that Dickinson never intended for her poetry to be read as one would a memoir (Wineapple 42); poetry can be affected by the poet's life and experiences, but we must be careful to remember that the implied 'I' in poetry should be read as a persona unless otherwise stated by the author. Regardless of

"Who was Emily Dickinson?" is a question that scholars and fans have been asking for years. It's difficult to put her in a box because, in a way, Emily Dickinson was many people at once. She was a woman. She was a passionate poet. She was a flower-lover and gardener. She was fond of children. She was mysterious. She was unusual. She was reclusive. She was a quiet rebel. She was witty. She was a reader and a letter-writer. She was a daughter, a sister, and a friend. She saw the world in a unique fashion, expressing her private thoughts in letters and poems throughout her life. In her work, she approached heavy subjects such as religion and mortality, along with more lighthearted, traditional subjects like love and nature.  However, beneath it all, Emily Dickinson was human. She was a human who had childhood experiences that shaped her as she grew up and thoughts and feelings that needed to be expressed. That's exactly what Emily Dickinson did––she expressed the human e

Over the course of her lifetime, Dickinson wrote hundreds of letters to many different recipients. While she is known for her poetry, Emily Dickinson's letters were also forms of art, the prose just as beautiful and poetic as her official poetry. In fact, these two often coincided because she frequently included poems with her letters or simply wove them into the prose itself to create letter-poems or prose poetry. In this post, I will examine a few of the recipients of Dickinson's letters, their relationships, and the contents of some of the letters themselves.  SUSAN DICKINSON ("SUSIE") Arguably one of the most influential friendships Dickinson had during her lifetime, Dickinson's relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, not only produced beautiful letters, but it also produced a great deal of poetry as well. Emily frequently shared her poetry with Susan, in which turn, Susan would read and provide feedback on it. Together, in this manner

  Emily Dickinson had a fascination with bees, and she wrote numerous poems about them. In the poems about bees (and in poems where they are briefly mentioned), Dickinson uses them to represent experience, wisdom, and poetry.  For example, in stanza 4 of "It will be summer – eventually" (F374) she uses Bees as an illustration for poetry, wisdom, and shared experiences. Dickinson introduces this illusion by stating that the Bees choose to “not despise the tune— / Their Forefathers—have hummed” (Dickinson, lines 11-12). The reference to the tune hummed by the Bees’ ancestors can be seen as a parallel to the way older generations often have an understanding of the difficulties younger people go through, and they seek to share the wisdom they gleaned from the experience. Oftentimes, younger generations tend to ignore the wisdom from the older generations, but Dickinson’s Bees do not do this. Instead, the Bees choose to embrace the shared tune of their Forefathers, indicating that

Dickinson had a deep love for flowers which is clearly indicated in her poetry, her pressed flower book, and her flower garden. Because she repeatedly uses flowers to represent and interpret such a vast number of subjects, this post will only focus on a few of the ways she uses them. In many cases, Dickinson uses flowers to simply represent joy and beauty .  For instance, in "It will be summer – eventually" (F374), the concept of joy is introduced to the reader with scenes of Lilacs that “[represent] the beginning of lasting love in the nineteenth-century floral books” (Farr 204). They are described as being heavy with their “purple load” (Dickinson, line 10), indicating that these flowers are in full bloom. Meanwhile, the Wild Roses, which are traditionally associated with passion, romance, and love, are bringing vibrant color to “redden” (Dickinson, line 13) the Bog, where one would not expect to find beauty. Both of these plants, which bloom in late spring through early s

Whether by the simple spread of misinformation or through a series of misguided readings, Emily Dickinson has frequently been mistakenly branded as a "death-obsessed hermit," but this dismisses the importance of how the context of her life impacted her work and encloses her in a box she was never meant to fit in. Granted, it is easy for we modern-day readers to inadvertently condense artists and poets to mere archetypes that cause them to fit into easy-to-explain blurbs. However, this cannot be the case for Emily Dickinson because there was so much more to her than how often she stayed at home or the heavier topics she chose to write about––she was an intelligent and creative woman living in a time where women were not viewed as intellectual equals to men. Dickinson’s cultural, family, and emotional history reflects this fact and offers insight that shows modern day readers a side of her that is completely missed when she is reduced to the ill-fitting labels of ‘hermit’ and ‘