Notes on Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Emily Dickinson led one of the most prosaic lives of any great poet. At a time when fellow poet Walt Whitman was ministering to the Civil War wounded and traveling across America--a time when America itself was reeling in the chaos of war, the tragedy of the Lincoln assassination, and the turmoil of Reconstruction--Dickinson lived a relatively untroubled life in her father's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born in 1830 and where she died …showed first 75 words of 776 total…

…showed last 75 words of 776 total…intensely and unforgettably clear. Other poems--many of her most famous, in fact--are much less difficult to understand, and they exhibit her extraordinary powers of observation and description. Dickinson's imagination can lead her into very peculiar territory--some of her most famous poems are bizarre death-fantasies and astonishing metaphorical conceits--but she is equally deft in her navigation of the domestic, writing beautiful nature-lyrics alongside her wild flights of imagination and often combining the two with great facility.