Emily Dickinson And Her Poetic Philosophy
Emily Dickinson and Her Poetic Philosophy
The great American poet Emily Dickinson has long been seen as a figure isolated from her contemporaries and insulated from her surrounding culture. Her attitude towards death, romance, the afterlife, God, nature and art reflects a contrast between the world as it is and a more peaceful alternative, variously eternity or in a since, a serene imaginative order, generally leaving the reader in a state of want. Although we know very little about Dickinson's true philosophy, she displays a variation of thought in her poems that could place her with the American transcendentalist of her time. Who for the most part taught that the world was to be apprehended mainly through the intellect, not through faith, as one would in religion or through the senses, as one would through science, but rather like her counterparts Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne believed that to grasp the world one had to understand it. In her poem "I measure every grief I meet" she displays an obsession with pain and suffering, as she engages an eagerness to examine to not only her pain but the indiscriminate pain of the world, to measure it, to calculate it, to intellectualize it as fully as possible. She seems to be saying that the way to apprehend the world is to see it, to feel it, to taste it, and to be in the moment, merely suggesting that a purely reason based approach to knowledge is a kind of numbness, a sort of death while grieving. The poem reveals a type of strength that those who grieve must possess in order to overcome the bleak, oppressive nature of it. Dickinson uses diction, syntax, imagery, denotation, and tone effectively to convey the kind of strength needed to overcome such grief.
Dickinson approaches the poem upon a point of view of the self with a heightened examination of human personality. In the first stanza she intrigues the reader as she probes the fact of a type of human suffer, as she looks at the grief of others...
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