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1、“Letter to the World”Emily Dickinson (18301886)nThis is my letter to the WorldnThat never wrote to MenThe simple News that Nature toldnWith tender MajestynHer Message is committednTo hands I cannot seenFor love of HersweetcountrymennJudge tenderlyof MenDickinson was born in her fathers house in Amhe
2、rst, Massachusetts. She attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in nearby South Hadley and visited Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia when she was young. The last time she left home was in 1864, to travel to Boston for an eye examination. As she grew older, she communicated with fewer and fewer
3、 people. She dressed all in white, and her neighbors knew there was something extraordinary about this radiant yet isolated woman. At the age of fiftysix Dickinson died in the house in which she had been born.nDickinsons poems, however, survived her. On April 15, 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a
4、kindly but undistinguished literary critic, had received a letter from Dickinson. Higginson did not know her. Dickinson enclosed four of her poems, wondering whether they were good poems, whether they “breathed.” Higginson saw that the poems had quality, but he thought they were “not for publication
5、.” They were too informal, too abrupt; even their punctuation was peculiar. Later editors of Dickinsons work were equally unperceptive. Deeming her style “not correct,” they rewrote what Dickinson had written in order to make it “proper.” It was not until 1955 that The Complete Poems were printed ex
6、actly as Dickinson had written them so that readers could discover the measure of her achievement. Dickinsons AchievementsnLike Whitmans, Dickinsons was a totally dedicated art, though a private one. Through her poetry she wrote what she called her “letter to the World,” even though she chose to liv
7、e most of her life isolated from the world. Her personality, her self the Soul she so often writes about was so strong and independent that she was able to write poems of genuine originality. She was influenced by the Bible, classical myths, Shakespeare, the English Romantic poet John Keats, and Ral
8、ph Waldo Emerson, but no influence overshadowed her own spirit.nDickinsons poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want, but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly lifegiving and suggest th
9、e possibility of happiness. nHer work was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenthcentury England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity. C
10、haracteristics of Dickinsons PoetrynDickinson presents her poems in a wry voice, with sharp, unusual images, and a highly expressive method of punctuation. nHer subjects are the great subjects life, death, nature, God and her special talent is to express her lofty thoughts using concrete images from
11、 everyday experience. nHer simplicity is deceptive: This is a poet who shows us that life is simultaneously joyful and tragic, mysterious and crystal clear.Two Poems of Dickinsonn“I heard a Fly buzzwhen I died”n“Because I could not stop for Death”“I heard a Fly buzzwhen I died”nRead it aloud and con
12、sider the following:nWhat is happening to the speaker? Who are the other people in the room?nWhat is unusual about the description of the people in lines 56? From whose point of view are they being described?nWhy is the flys appearance somewhat ironic? What basic message about death is suggested to
13、the poet by the appearance of the fly?“Because I could not stop for Death”nWhat do lines 12 suggest about human behavior?nWhat might the three things the speaker passed in stanza 3 represent?nWhat is the “House” in the ground in stanza 5? Is this the speakers final destination? Explain.nWhy does the day described seem so long to the speaker?
