Notes on Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Emily Dickinson led one of the most prosaic lives of any great poet. At a time when fellow poet Walt Whitman was ministering to the Civil War wounded and traveling across America--a time when America itself was reeling in the chaos of war, the tragedy of the Lincoln assassination, and the turmoil of Reconstruction--Dickinson lived a relatively untroubled life in her father's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born in 1830 and where she died …

…intensely and unforgettably clear. Other poems--many of her most famous, in fact--are much less difficult to understand, and they exhibit her extraordinary powers of observation and description. Dickinson's imagination can lead her into very peculiar territory--some of her most famous poems are bizarre death-fantasies and astonishing metaphorical conceits--but she is equally deft in her navigation of the domestic, writing beautiful nature-lyrics alongside her wild flights of imagination and often combining the two with great facility.