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About this – site

This website was created by Hannah Wilson, a graduating senior in the English program at the University of Texas at Tyler in the fall 2020 term.

Specifically, this site is dedicated to a final digital portfolio-project for ENGL 4399, an independent study on the life and works of Emily Dickinson.

During this course, Hannah Wilson read two biographies on Dickinson, including My Wars Are Laid Away in Books by Alfred Habegger and White Heat: the Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple. She additionally read Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, edited by Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart, as well as The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin.

For this class, Hannah wrote weekly responses to her reading in order to begin sharing her findings and to start analyzing Dickinson at a smaller level. Building up from that, she wrote two papers over the course of the semester to make larger scholarly claims, utilizing the information she gathered from the readings and the shorter weekly response assignments.

This website serves as a portfolio of sorts, including content and research from these papers and responses in the different posts in order to show what was done over the semester so that the knowledge gained and writing done from the whole semester comes together with new content to create one giant project.

(A special thank you Dr. Ann Beebe for sponsoring this independent study! Your guidance and mentorship has meant the world to me, and I appreciate how you have always challenged me to strive for improvement no matter what. I hope that we have the chance to work together again soon.) 

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Dickinson's Letters

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...
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Dickinson's Flowers

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...
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Dickinson, Religion, and Death

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 ‘...
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