Emily Dickinson is endlessly fascinating, both as a poet and as a human being. Her unique style of poetry and her reclusive behavior have spawned controversy after controversy for the past hundred years. One thing I find interesting to note is that her poems were barely published while she was alive; in fact, she wished all her papers burned after her death, and it is only because her sister went against her wishes that we are lucky enough to know of Emily Dickinson’s talent.
Dickinson seems obsessed with the dangerously narrow lines between life and death, existence and oblivion, heaven and earth, mortality and eternity. Ironically, since they are so closely associated now, her poems give the reader almost the exact opposite feeling than does the poetry of Walt Whitman—her hymn-like words echo with thoughts that are dark, lonely, enclosed, oppressive, and introspective, as opposed to his bright, exuberant, lively, and almost bawdy verses. Reading their poems one after another is nearly an experience of night versus day, or even simply loud versus quiet.
Dickinson often meditates on the interconnectedness of life, death, nature, and religion (and all combinations of these themes) in her poems, and she presents these ideas beautifully by taking a moment in life and then describing a tiny detail or a unique view of the scene, giving the reader a strange perspective, and perhaps, in this way, inviting one to look closer, with fresh eyes and open minds, at everyday life and experiences.
She certainly seems to have done this herself: in her work, she will take note of and describe the smallest essentials of existence—a dust mote, a fly, a shaft of light, frost on a flower—and then use these minutiae to open up the idea of far greater truths; of the fundamental questions of life (and death) itself. For example, in “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” Dickinson relates death, the greatest unknown, the last true mystery, to the most negligible everyday occurrence in the room. In the instance of death, the tiniest sound or movement is amplified and brought to the forefront of awareness as being of the utmost importance. Everything is portrayed as interconnected in the most vital of ways—everything is part of the web of life.
To me, the most significant aspect of Dickinson’s poetry is her ability to write on such a deep and personal level that it touches a part of the soul that is shared by all of us. The raw emotions that she is able to portray so vividly—so eloquently—are those with which everyone can relate, which everyone has felt at some time before, and are, therefore, those which possess us and grip our imagination in such a way that only experience and remembrance can. When Dickinson writes, “Pain—has an Element of Blank— / It cannot recollect / When it begun—or if there were / A time when it was not—” who is not able to relate to those words? Who is not torn apart by those feelings, by the memory of such a pain that overwhelms all else? The poem is so simple, and yet so deeply, fundamentally true—it works its way to the very core of the soul, only to find itself already there.