About the author: Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson1830.12.10-1886.5.15).
American legendary poet. Born into a lawyer's family. Life as a teenager was monotonous and quiet, and he received a formal religious education. She began to write poems at the age of 20, and most of her early poems have been lost. After 1858, she began to abandon social activities, locked indoors like a girl, and hardly left home after 70. In the history of literature, she was called "the girl of amherst".
She wrote poems alone for thirty years, leaving more than 1775 poems. Only seven poems were copied and published by friends from her letters before her death, and the rest were published after her death, which became very famous for the world. Her poems are novel in form, mostly adopting the traditional metrical form of Isaac Watts, the author of English religious hymns in the17th century. However, many changes have been made, such as using many dashes in her poems, which can not only replace punctuation marks, but also make the normal iambic foot rhythm suddenly fluctuate. Most of her poems are semi-rhymed, mainly about 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.
Work style:
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, the second poem in this translation:
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.
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