Reading Response Prompts
 

These prompts are meant to get you thinking about what you have read, and to help focus your thoughts for your reading responses. You can respond to any one of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore, you are free to write about that instead. Do not, however, attempt to answer multiple prompts for any assignment. If you choose to pursue an idea of your own or are not writing a response that day, you should still spend at least a few minutes thinking about each of the prompts in preparation for class. For more information, review the listserv assignment.
Emily Dickinson: Poems on Nature, Poems on Poetry and Fame (22, 70, 207, 236, 260, 320, 359, 409, 448, 465, 519, 536, 569, 675, 721, 788, 930, 962, 1096, 1263, 1268, 1702, 1779 — all Franklin numbering)

Emily Dickinson has been described as one of the most original and complex thinkers of all poets. Her poems may not look, at first glance, to be particularly complex, and in some ways they aren’t. For example, in terms of meter, she doesn’t vary much.  A large percentage of her roughly 1800 poems are written in ballad measure, which as you might guess can be heard frequently in popular ballads — and she would have heard common measure, which is the same meter as ballad measure but with a slightly tighter rhyme scheme of abab instead of most commonly abcb, in hymns. “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic,“ “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” House of the Rising Son,” or even (pretty close, but not exact) “The Theme from Gilligan’s Island”— try it, and you will find you can sing many of these poems to those tunes.  Okay then, where does the complexity come in?

With a handful of exceptions, Dickinson’s poems were not published before her death. When she died, she left her manuscripts behind, and editors have been trying to deal with them ever since. Two particular problems are her capitalization and her dashes. Early editors had no clue what to make of them, so they generally regularized the capitalization (in other words, took the capital letter out of any word that wasn’t normally capitalized or didn’t start a line) and removed most of the dashes, turning the rest into commas or periods depending on where they occur.  More recent editions of Dickinson’s poems, like the one you have, have restored the capitals and the dashes because editors have decided they are important.  Do you think they are?  If so, what do you think they mean, or what purpose do they serve?

Consider Dickinson’s view of nature. In what ways is it similar to Emerson’s or that of other authors we have read this semester? Would you call Dickinson a Romantic in the sense we have discussed?

How does Dickinson view poetry and poets? How do these poems suggest she sees herself as a poet? She made no effort to publish her work during her lifetime; do you see any evidence that at any point she thought her work would be widely read?

 
 
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