Preparation for Literature Essay

Title: Examine the interplay between ideas and experience in Emily Dickinson's poetry.

‘Dickinson’s poetry expresses her struggles with her faith, with her father, with mortality, and with the challenges of being a woman and a poet.’ (Wendy Martin, The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (2002), p. 1) = Conclusion

Thematic nature of Dickinson's poetry:

• poetic style and significance of Christianity 
• books, women writers and Feminism
• 'sensational' literature and the theme of death
• temperance and the celebration of Nature and Life

Paragraph 1:

• Dickinson had made fun of the possibility "In Adam's fall / We sinned all" in the  New England Primer 1690 by writing a letter to Judge Lord, "because the dogma of Orginal Sin never figured strongly in her own religious consciousness and because her love for Jesus rested on a sense of shared suffering rather than belief in forensic justice" (Emily Dickinson and Philosophy)
• "Dickinson seems to have been drawn to the more literary and symbolic approaches...mytho-poetic insights offered by the century's most theologically "scientific" approach to scripture." (ibd.)
• Dickinson responded; "No Moses there can be" (Fr521) & identified Eden as a "a legend - dimly told" (Fr378)
• 1847 College Rebellion; "“They thought it queer I didn’t rise. I thought a lie would be queerer”, she is being true to herself, she isn't identifying herself as a follower, distinguishing to ideals and standards of the prejudice society, Christianity is a sham
• Puritanism and Transcendentalism had great influence over her poetry.
•  Lived in an age defined by the struggle to reconcile traditional Christian beliefs with newly emerging scientific concepts
• Brought up in a Calvinist household, the young Emily Dickinson attended religious services with her family at the village meetinghouse, Amherst's First Congregational Church
• #324, c. 1860 and #1545

Paragraph 2:

• ‘My mother does not care for thought, and … he [father] buys me many Books—but begs me not to read them—because he fears they joggle the Mind. They [parents and siblings] are religious, except me. (from The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Biblo & Tannen Publishers, 1971), p. 239)
• Dickinson’s definition of poetry: ‘If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.’(from ‘Emily Dickinson’s Letters’, by T.W. Higginson, Atlantic Monthly 1891) 
• ruptured traditional writing style
• introspective
• George Whicher; "Perhaps as a poet [Dickinson] could find the fulfillment she had missed as a woman" (page 45 - 1952 This was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson)
• Adrienne Rich; "she was determined to survive, to use her powers" (page 34 - Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson) 
• #199c. 1860 & #269 1861

Paragraph 3:

• #699 1863, #280 1861 & #822 1864
• Dickinson was enthralled by the grotesque and shocking details of death e.g. 'Girls kills herself, sends bullet to her head' headlines in the newspaper during this era
• For Dickinson, the crucial religious question was the survival of the soul after death. 
• ejected absolutely the idea of man's innate depravity; she favored the Emersonian partial reversal of Puritanism that conceived greatness of soul as the source of immortality.

Paragraph 4:

• #214 1860, 656 & 1732