What happened to her that was so terrible that she focuses(sp) so much on death and mortality? I'm having a hard time understanding much of her poetry. It seems to me that there was a series of events that just destroys her will to live and thusly causing her to write these beautifully depressing poems that I'm finding hard to resist right now.
But maybe she was just rebeling? Maybe since at the time she was the exception in poetry. She was a woman first, that was taboo. Then instead of writing about how wonderful everything was ala Keats she instead gets darker than Blake had ever gotten.
Thoughts?
And yes I know somehow culture made it's way to this page. I tried beating it away with a broom but to no avail.
8 comments:
Emily Dickinson lived a life of seclusion. She closed herself off from the rest of the world and she actually wrote about 1800 poems which only 7 were published. After her death her sister actually released her poetry and that's how it became famous. I think she was troubled and in her world she could only see dark thoughts. It's sad because she was clearly talented but sometimes a writer is only a writer because they are in despair. It's unfortunate isn't it?
It is. I sat there lest night reading her and thought about how clearly talented she is but why she expressed it in such a dark nature is confusing.
Does depression inspire better writing?
I'm thinking of one of my favourites by her, part of which goes "After great pain, a formal feeling comes... The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, And Yesterday, or centuries before?"
I think she was very disappointed in love, a terrible thing for a woman to be in the Victorian era, when marriage was pretty much all there was supposed to be for women. Some guy was probably going to marry her and then figured she was too smart for him.
or maybe it's a poem about a failed suicide attempt. That would work, too. Love, suicide. They're almost the same thing anyway.
Has anyone heard the theory that she was having an affair with her brothers wife?
oooh, no, but I like that theory.
^oops that was moi.
There is enough grief and despair in the world that thinking/pretending there isn't would be naive of one. She just happened to bring that aspect of life to light. Maybe she was trying to influence a movement to lure people out of apathy and make people aware of all the pain and sorrow that goes on.
Also, she might have just like writing that way because there was enough of the opposite going on at the time.
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