Scholars have speculated about Dickinson’s romantic and sexual life for at least half a century. We know that between 1858 and 1862 she wrote a number of letters to someone she called “Master,” but who this was we do not know. Some scholars even believe he is more an imaginative construct than a real man in Dickinson’s life. She wrote passionate letters to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, her sister-in-law, and some scholars have interpreted those letters as overtly homoerotic (though virtually none suggest a physical relationship between the two women). But the conventions of emotional expression between women were different then. In any case, it seems unlikely that any definitive evidence that could provide clear biographical context for her poems will ever be discovered. What we are left with, then, is the poems themselves. Discuss Dickinson’s depiction of love and sexuality in one or more poems, not in an attempt to figure out the reality of her experience, but as expressions of her thought.
Few
other poets write about the brain as much as Dickinson does. Why does she prefer “Brain”
to the more standard “mind” (at least most of the time)? How might Emerson’s concept of the Oversoul
have influenced Dickinson’s conception of the Brain?
Dickinson writes about madness often. As we discussed, her life by most standards was comparatively uneventful, but she felt common griefs deeply, and apparently questioned her own sanity at times. Where do you see evidence of this in her poems, and how does she conceptualize insanity?
Explication time: Choose
any one of these poems, and perform a line-by-line reading in which
you explain what you think the key words, phrases, and images are.