Emily Dickinson as a poetess

         Almost unknown as a poet in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson is now recognised as one of America's greatest poets and, in the view of some, as one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. The past fifty years or so have seen an outpouring of books and essays attempting to explain her poetry and her life. Some critics have used her life to try to explain her poetry, and others have tried to explain her life by referring to her poems, which they assume are autobiographical. The large number of poems she wrote (over 1700) makes it easy for critics to find support for their theories. And the fact that her life, her poems, and her letters are often difficult, if not impossible to understand, invites speculation.

Emily Dickinson's poetry speaks powerfully to us. It captures her insights and recreates meaningful events in living; it helps us to understand and even to re-live our own experiences through her intensity and with her emotional and intellectual clarity. Like John Keats, Emily Dickinson is a passionate poet. Though she lived in seclusion, she lived a passionate life. Within the confines of the family home, the garden, and her circle of family and friends, she felt with her whole heart, thought with intensity, and imagined with ardour, and she shared herself in her poetry and in her letters. She wrote of her life, "I find ecstasy in living, the mere sense of living is joy enough"

Writing poetry may have served Dickinson as a way of releasing or escaping from pain--from the deaths of loved ones, from her inability to resolve her doubts about God, from the terrors, however faint, which she saw within herself, in others, and in the world outside yet nearby. To say that she may have sublimated her pain into poetry does not invalidate her view of the power of poetry; both may be true and exist at the same time. 

In her poems, Dickinson adopts a variety of personas, including a little girl, a queen, a bride, a bridegroom, a wife, a dying woman, a nun, a boy, and a bee. Though nearly 150 of her poems begin with "I," the speaker is probably fictional, and the poem should not automatically be read as autobiography. Dickinson insisted on the distinction between her poetry and her life: "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse, it does not mean me--but a supposed person."

His poems are not easy: there is no logical thought that binds them, some construct or system; crowded with images that are often private conventions of the artist — such as the Circumference -, or seem to be thrown into the void, about elements of his everyday life, almost impossible to clarify. In her, everything is a metaphor, never usual; it is not possible to resort to a tradition to interpret and understand them. Emily was referring only to herself, and her attention is directed more and more towards herself as the years go by.

To penetrate the meaning of her poetry, it is necessary to purify oneself from the layers of linguistic, social, personal and cultural prejudices and customs, to renounce the usual ways of thinking, to open up to the possible and immerse oneself with the being in what she says. Suddenly, an image takes shape and illustrates the meaning. It is often destabilising, it is necessary to go back to the origins of thought, proceed by associations, and rely on intuition to understand it; at the same time, one is overwhelmed by strong feelings, by recognitions and similarities that seem to echo in the infinity of the collective and archetypal subconscious.

Emily indirectly expresses the mystery that she sees and hears, but that human language is unable to express. She has no other way; she faces it by getting as close as possible to the truth, and, like Icarus, she burns the wings of inspiration, yielding to the mystical vision. Proceeding over the years, her compositions become more and more elliptical, sparse, and little remains to be said about the ineffable. Punctuation is also at the service of this language of the unspeakable, like the hyphen that replaces a meaning that cannot be said, or pauses, asks for silence, to put words and images in order, place them and better understand their meaning.