Emily Dickinson—A Poet of her own World Part Ⅰ Introduction.doc

Emily Dickinson—A Poet of her own World Part Ⅰ. Introduction Emily Dickinson (1830—1886) was a legendary figure in the American literary history. She made a great contribution to the development of American poetry. She wrote altogether 1775 poems, of which only seven appeared in print in her lifetime. Dickinson withdrew from social contact at the age of 23 and devoted herself to secret writing. After her death, her sister “discovered” her poems accidentally and requested Mrs. Mabel L, Todd, one of Emily’s friends and Thomas W. Higginson, her literary tutor to edit them. In 1890, they published the first volume of Dickinson’s poetry. From then on, her poems were published in succession. Until 1955, the complete works of the poetess, including three volumes of poems and three volumes of letters, were published. A genius was “rediscovered” after half a century of her death. People began to study the poetess and her works. Different editions of her biographies appeared, accompanied with a large quantity of reviews. From many lyrics, we can see a thoughtful and passionate poetess. She had her own understanding of life and art and expressed her ideas in a unique and original way. But her originality has not always been understood by the public. Dickinson was noted as “the most paradoxical of poetess: the very poetess of paradox” (Johnson, 1997: 26). With the passage of time, more and more people have become interested in and tried to understand Dickinson. Conrad Aiken1 considers hers as “perhaps the finest poetry by a woman in the English language” (1924:8). She has been claimed by Williams as his “patron saint” and acclaimed in verse and prose by such fellow poets as Hart Crane2, Allen Tate3, Archibald Macleish4, Richard Wilbur5, and Adrienne Rich6 (Gottesman, 1980:939). And her best critic, Charles Anderson, treats her as a kind of eighteenth-century wit, seeing her language as more adequate to the demands of her subject matter than it is or ever could be (1960:3). All