High Plains Chautauqua
August 7-11, 2012
Courage and Conviction in America
EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)
by Debra Conner
She’s been called the first modern poet, an eccentric, and a visionary who changed the landscape of poetry. More than 125 years after her death, Emily Dickinson’s poetry and her odd life of seclusion continue to fascinate readers and provoke discussion. Her place in the pantheon of literary greats is secure. Yet when she died, leaving behind 1,789 unpublished poems, she died in obscurity. The story of Dickinson’s path to fame is one of the most fascinating stories in all of literature.
In an age when women writers were ridiculed as “damned scribbling women,” Dickinson was a renegade. As scholar Cynthia Griffin Wolff says, “She approached language like an explorer in new lands.” In addition, she approached timeless subjects in new ways.
Dickinson’s unique departure from traditional form earned her ridicule for her “spasmodic” meter and clumsy rhyme. In truth, Dickinson’s skills with meter and rhyme were so extraordinary that the critic she trusted to evaluate her work, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, like the handful of others who read her work, simply failed to appreciate her genius.
Dickinson’s treatment of familiar poetic subjects – death, nature and the anguish of loss – were radically unconventional. Unlike the poetry of her time, Dickinson’s poetry acknowledges doubt over certainty. Nature does not necessarily bring comfort: “There’s a certain slant of light/Winter afternoons/That oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes.” What happens after we die, she wonders. Instead of recasting the accepted wisdom of a secure afterlife, Dickinson admits uncertainty: “Faith is a fine invention/for gentlemen who see/but microscopes are prudent/in an emergency.” The popular literature of her time ennobled suffering. The departed, it was commonly believed, journeyed to a better place. But Dickinson challenges the notion that loss must be calmly accepted, arguing: “an actual suffering strengthens/As sinews do with age.”
As endlessly fascinating as Dickinson’s verse is, her personal life remains just as compelling and mysterious. Around age thirty or so, Dickinson experienced an emotional crisis. She began writing poems at a feverish rate. Dressing exclusively in white, she embarked on a life of withdrawal, eventually secluding herself inside her family home and devoting herself solely to writing. Scholars have many theories to explain Dickinson’s eccentricities, but none can be proven definitively.
Years after Dickinson’s death, her niece said, “Aunt Emily was not daily bread. She was stardust.” Blazing, dazzling and elusive, Dickinson and her poetry light up our world.
DEBRA CONNER
Debra Conner began portraying Emily Dickinson in 1997, thanks to a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Since then, she has added in-character portrayals of five other notable women to her program offerings, including Zelda Fitzgerald and Margaret Mitchell. “It’s my best chance to be a famous writer,” she claims. In addition to portraying famous women from the past, Debra also conducts workshops and residencies in creative writing. She has published essays and poetry in a variety of publications.
Conner holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Virginia and a MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Parkersburg, West Virginia. To learn more about Debra Conner, go to www.debraconner.com
EMILY DICKINSON
- Nicknamed “The Myth” for her reclusive nature and eccentric habits, Emily Dickinson’s innovative verse defied the conventions of her time.
- Emily Dickinson’s poetry was so radical and innovative that it remained largely unpublished and unappreciated during her lifetime.
- Only after her death, when nearly 1800 of her poems were discovered and published, did she attain her reputation as one of America’s greatest poets.
QUOTES BY EMILY DICKINSON
(offered in their original form, with Dickinson’s spelling, capitalization & punctuation)
“How lovely are the wiles of Words!”
“Travel why to Nature, when she dwells with us? Those who lift their hats shall see her, as devout do God.”
“If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her – if she did not, the longest day would pass me. My Barefoot Rank is better.”
“I was thinking today . . . that the ‘Supernatural’ is only the Natural, disclosed.
“Unless we become as Rogues, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“My friends are a very few. I can count them on my fingers – and besides, have fingers to spare.”
“Myself – the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.”
“Truth is such a rare thing. It is delightful to tell it.”
“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
“How deep this Lifetime is---One guess at the Waters, and we are plunged beneath!”
“Life is death we’re lengthy at, death the hinge to life.”
“How do most people live without any thoughts. There are many people in the world (you must have noticed them in the street.) How do they live. How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning.”
“Life is a Miracle, and Death, as harmless as a Bee, except to those who run –”
“Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.”
“Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tried to be haunted.”
TIMELINE |
|
1830 |
|
1840 |
|
1847 – 1848 |
|
1856 |
|
Early1860s |
|
1862 |
|
1870 |
|
Late 1870s |
|
1881 |
|
1886 |
|
1890 |
|
1894 |
|
RECOMMENDED READING
- Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R.W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1999.
- Dickinson, Emily. Selected Letters. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1994.
- Gordon, Lyndall. Lives Like Loaded Guns. Viking, 2010.
- Habegger, Alfred. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: the Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Random House, 2001.
- Sewell, Richard. The Life of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.