About the author:
Emily Dickinson (18301210-18may15) is a legendary American poet. Born into a lawyer's family. Life as a teenager was monotonous and quiet, and he received a formal religious education. From the age of twenty-five, he gave up socializing and spent thirty years writing poems in solitude, leaving more than 1,700 poems. Only seven songs were published before her death, and the rest were published after her death, which was known by the world and became very famous. Dickinson's poems mainly focus on life interest, nature, life, faith, friendship and love. The poetic style is concise and graceful, with fresh conception, vivid and exquisite description, profound thought, strong cohesion and great originality.
She is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist poetry in the twentieth century. The most famous American poets are Irving, Whitman and Dickinson, the fathers of American literature. She locked a lot of poems in a box, which is her greatest gift to the world. Before her death, her works failed to win favor, but the incomprehension and misunderstanding of people around her did not diminish her rich creative talent at all. According to statistics, Emily's amazing creativity left over 1800 poems for the world, including the final version of 1775 poems and 25 newly discovered poems.
Dickinson's grandfather was the founder of Amherst State College. My father is the chief lawyer in the town and has a conservative mind. Dickinson received orthodox religious education from childhood, so her life as a teenager was calm and monotonous. She seldom goes out; she has only traveled once.
Dickinson studied at Mount Holyoke College, a famous top women's college. She is a girl with quick response, humorous words and open mind. After leaving school and returning home, Dickinson still lives in the house where she was born. Emily Dickinson spent most of her life in the house where she was born. This brick house was built by her grandfather on the main street. Because of financial difficulties, Dickinson's family sold their house in 1840 and moved to the house in North Happiness Street for fifteen years. Later, Edward Dickinson bought the house back at 1855. Emily's favorite place in this house is the greenhouse in the east, where she planted many plants that can bloom in winter. On the small book table by the window, she wrote many poems and lived a lonely and quiet life. She thinks the world is so noisy and uneasy that she wants to get away from it and return to Xiaotian, a land built with her own soul. In Dickinson's youth, two people had an influence on her life. One is Nader Humphrey, dean of Amherst College, a top liberal arts college, and the other is Ben Ming Jie Newton, a young lawyer who works in her father's law firm. They gave her great help in her study, especially Newton often instructed her what books to read and how to read them, which inspired her to know the beauty contained in a harmonious and complete nature. Newton often preached Calvinist religious thoughts to her, which made her accept Calvinist introspective thoughts and ideas about natural beauty and cold world. These ideas became the creed of her life, and later they were vividly reflected in all her poems.
Creation period
There are more than 65,438+0,700 poems by Dickinson, but it is difficult to determine the actual number, because Dickinson's letters began to be "poetic" in the 1960s, and it is sometimes difficult to define whether she wrote prose or poetry (Susan called it "believing poetry"). Dickinson is not a published poet, so most of her poems can only be regarded as manuscripts, and few of them have been completed, most of which are without sentences.
Dickinson's poems are divided into three distinct periods, and the works of each period have some similarities:
The first issue was 186 1 years ago. During this period, Dickinson's works were traditional in style, and her feelings naturally flowed in. After Dickinson's death, Thomas H. Johnson, who published her works, could only identify five works written by Dickinson before 1858.
The second period is 186 1 year ~ 1865, which is the most creative period of Dickinson, and her poems are more energetic and passionate during this period. According to Johnson's estimation, Dickinson wrote 86 poems in 186 1, 1862 366, 1863 1,174. At the same time, he believes that during this period, Dickinson fully expressed the theme of immortality and death.
The third period was after 1866. It is estimated that two thirds of all Dickinson's poems were written before that year.
Emotional experience
Emily once had an ambiguous romantic relationship with several men. Richard Swire, Dickinson's most authoritative biographer, recorded the more important love experiences in her life: first, the love with Samuel Bowles without ending; The second is the relationship with Judge Lord, who is 18 years older than her.
Bowles is the editor of a local newspaper. Because he got married, their love ended before it started. Under this influence, Emily stayed indoors for many years from the age of 25 and abandoned all social life. After the frustration of love, strong and brave, she did not fall down, but boldly poured out the pain of love through poetry: "Heart, we will forget him!" " You and me, tonight! You have to forget the warmth he gave, and I have to forget the light he gave. Please tell me when you forget, and then my, my thoughts will become blurred ... Come on! Lest you delay, I will remember him again! "Emily can only pin her helpless love on her poems. She can't extricate herself, suffering from love. She wants to forget the brightness and warmth of "him" in order to get rid of this pain and forget that fruitless love. But for her lonely and emotional, this little wish has become an extravagant hope. If there is a slight delay, she will think of "him" again.
Emily Dickinson's love affair with her father's friend and colleague Judge Lord has been mentioned in some literatures. After the death of Judge Lord's wife, his intimate relationship with Emily two of a kind began at the beginning of 1878, when she was 47 and he was 65. Judge Lord had hoped to marry Emily, but she was rejected. At that time, Emily was no longer young. She knows that marriage means that women have to give up their independence, and she doesn't want to assume the role of a good wife and mother set by society for women. Since she was a child, she has watched her weak and opinionated mother obey her husband absolutely without any pity and tenderness, which probably gradually suppressed her idea of getting married, but it can't hide her desire for marriage. 1884, Emily wrote an unusual poem "Surround the bride you fear", in which she claimed to be the bride, involving "owning" and "being possessed". This is written for God. She expressed her love for being your bride in the form of ancient poems, including "you" and "love you".
Classic center
Dickinson wrote more than 1700 poems in her life, and only 7 poems were published before her death. Although her poems mainly describe ordinary things in daily life, they are profound and unique. Because the themes she often discussed about death, love, nature, eternity, human self-nature and religious belief were the concerns of poets in the 20th century, she had a great influence on modernist poetry and was regarded as the pioneer of American new poetry in the 20th century. Bloom listed her as the center of English literary classics with Whitman, which established her status as a great writer alongside Shakespeare and Tolstoy and was admired by the world literary world.
Publication of works
The work was discovered.
Dickinson's sister lavinia knows Dickinson's handwriting, but she doesn't understand that these words represent Dickinson's passion all his life. She was really shocked when she found this box containing more than 1000 poems.
Works have been published one after another.
Viniya firmly believes that these poems must be published. Through her vigorous running and the help of editor Mabel loomis Todd, the first edition of Dickinson's poems was finally published in Fu Zi in 1890, and the poems included in the book were only a small part of Dickinson's life-long creation. The first album printed 1 15 songs, and the second and third albums were successfully published in 189 1 and 1896 respectively.
The general public and most critics spoke highly of these poems. By 1896, Emily Dickinson had become a famous poet. Later, more works, including poems collected from many other sources, appeared in large numbers in the next 50 years, but it was not until 1955 that the final version of all three volumes was approved and published by Thomas H. Johnson. This book * * * collected 1775 poems and some abridged fragments, edited and arranged in chronological order by Harvard University Press.
Style of works
Dickinson's poems adopt the metrical pattern of the general church hymns: four sentences per section, the first and third eight syllables, the second and fourth six syllables, the pace is the simplest "light and heavy", and the second and fourth sentences rhyme. For example:
Because I can't stop to die-
He kindly stopped for me-
We're the only people in the car-
And immortality.
Poems are short, mostly only two to five sentences, and often informal, often referring to the so-called "half rhyme"; Give up traditional punctuation, use dashes and capitalize nouns (but this habit was common at that time); Sentence components are often omitted, and sometimes even verbs are omitted; Syntactic inversion is very common, and some scholars point out that it is influenced by Latin word order.
Dickinson's poems are full of wisdom, and novel metaphors are thrown out at will, which drives the vocabulary in various fields (domestic or literature, science or religion), and makes new use of old words, thus achieving his great vocabulary. I like to play different roles in poetry, sometimes the bride, sometimes the little boy, especially the dead. Dickinson's poems describing nature are very famous in America and are often selected into children's textbooks. Pain and ecstasy, death and eternal life are all important themes in Dickinson's poems.
The musicality and iconicity of Dickinson's poems have become the focus of critics' attention. The dashes used in his poems last for a short time, sometimes up and sometimes down. Some critics pointed out that these are music notation, representing the high and low rhythm when reciting or singing this poem. The lines of his poems are often not written from beginning to end. Sometimes a poem is written in two or three lines (that is, there are only two or three words in each line). Some scholars believe that this arrangement is deliberate and has a lot to do with poetry (in addition, Dickinson sometimes attaches "illustrations" to poems and songs sent to friends). Therefore, some people argue that the study of Dickinson's poems must take her manuscript (or a copy of it) as the text, so as not to distort the poems.
Anecdotes of characters
Dickinson is proficient in gardening and likes to grow exotic flowers and grasses. Scholar Judy Farr pointed out that Dickinson was a gardener rather than a poet. When Dickinson was nine years old, she began to study botany with her sister and took care of the garden at home. She once collected embossing into a 66-page leather cover specimen collection. It contains 424 kinds of relief specimens collected by her, which are classified and marked according to Linnaeus system.
Dickinson's mansion has its own garden, and her father even built a greenhouse for her. At that time, its family garden was very famous in the local area and was appreciated by people. The specimen collection has not been preserved, and Dickinson has not kept any gardening notes or plant lists, but people can clearly understand this situation from the letters and memories of her friends and family. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Dickinson's niece, recalled that lilies and pansies in the valley were carpeted, and rows of sweet peas and hyacinthus orientalis were only in March, but honey collected by bees could not be eaten up in summer. It coincides with the flowering period, and the peony on the fence is like a continuous ribbon, with large daffodils and large clusters of marigolds, which makes people fascinated. This is a paradise for butterflies.
In particular, Dickinson cultivated exotic flowers and herbs with fragrance. She wrote that she could grow spices from the spice islands in restaurants and warm rooms with plant baskets. Dickinson often sends flowers to her friends with poems, but they value flowers more than poems.
Dickinson is also good at cooking. She often hangs baked bread and biscuits on the window of her room, puts them in baskets and gives them to her neighbors and relatives. 1856, her bread won the second prize at the local agricultural fair. Here is her recipe for making gingerbread: one quart of flour, two cups of butter, two cups of cream, one tablespoon of ginger, one tablespoon of soda, one tablespoon of salt and syrup.
Social assessment
Emily Dickinson is a famous American poetess. After her poems were published, they got higher and higher evaluation. Her position and influence in the history of American poetry is second only to Whitman. 1984, when the American literary world commemorated the bicentennial of the birth of washington irving, the father of American literature, a "Poet's Corner" was opened in St. John's Church in new york, and only Whitman and Dickinson were selected.
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