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Essay on Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson has emerged as a powerful and persistent figure in American culture. As a woman poet, Dickinson has been portrayed as singular and enigmatic and even eccentric. Often, Dickinson is painted as a young woman in white, closeted in the upper rooms of her home, isolated not only from her neighbors and friends, but also from the historical and cultural events taking place outside her door. Her poems speak most noticeably of “the Heaven of God,” “the starkest Madness,” or the “Infinite” rather than of worldly events. She has been perceived as agoraphobic, deeply afraid of her surroundings, and as an eccentric spinster. At the same time, Dickinson is widely acknowledged as one of the founders of American poetry, an innovative pre-modernist poet as well as a rebellious and courageous woman. (Davis, Thomas M, 1964)
Since her poems were first published posthumously in 1890, critical responses to Emily Dickinson's work have been both abundant and unceasing, steadily gathering force with every new version of her collected poems and each poem newly discovered in her letters and manuscripts. Continuous publication of Dickinson's poems and manuscripts has been spurred by vigorous scholarly inquiry and by public interest in her poetry and her life. Emily Dickinson's vast appeal lies not only in her writings but also in her literary persona, one that has become extraordinarily resonant in the popular imagination.
An exhibition at the Mead Art Museum in Amherst, 1997, demonstrates the poet's palpable presence in today's culture in images of the white dress she famously wore, in various versions of the solitary woman and her “letter to the world,” and in the incorporation of words from her poems in contemporary art. One of the most persistent images of the poet in both public perception and literary scholarship has been that of Dickinson as a private woman who remained isolated within her New England home...
