Literature and Culture

Dickinson perceives nature rather allegorically, but her allegory is
different from Hawthorne´s, for whom it was an attempt to attribute to
figures adequate meanings. She strives to come to terms with the materiality
of being, to “find out” what is beyond. In other poems she personifies nature
as death, sees (in a “Kantian” way) with her idea and tries, through the poem,
to physically live it. Tate characterised her as a poet who “perceives
abstraction and thinks sensation” (p. 213). This almost synaesthetic
perception of being and nature can be found in the poem “Because I could
not stop for death” or “I felt a funeral, in my brain.” But her perhaps most
ontological poem is the poem entitled “Of death I try to think like this” in
which, according to Deppman, thought attempts to control the presencing of
death through a series of images following “a pattern of earth, still water,
running water, and then, after a leap of thought through time and memory,
the sea and an image of a child leaping over a brook to clutch a flower”
(2000, p. 5).
In spite of a widely accepted idea that Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest
nineteenth century poets, was an utter individualist, a recluse who spent her
entire life in her “father´s house”, at times refusing to communicate to
almost anyone, there are several works which adopt a wider, cultural
perspective on her poetry. 7 As White suggests, “The fact that she was a
recluse, does not make her any less a product of her culture, as being
reclusive does not mean being totally sealed off from the world” (2008, p.
107); on the contrary, Emily Dickinson was a person who was deeply affected
by it. That world, however, is not easy to describe, as it is not easy to describe
any poet´s lived reality. One can only try to estimate it from her work,
because it seems that she was one of those poets for whom the work and life
are one, not willing to make any of them public.
What is traditionally considered to be unique in Dickinson´s poetry is its
form. She was born in an America which was still largely agricultural and
provincial, not very significant in the world either politically or culturally.
From the material point of view, until the outbreak of the Civil War, her
world could not have been shattered by any significant event. She spent her
life in a large country house, having all necessary means for a comfortable
7 See, for example, Karl Keller´s The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty: Emily Dickinson and
America (1979), Barton Levi St. Armand´s Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul´s Society
(1984), Fred D. White´s Approaching Emily Dickinson: Critical Currents and Crosscurrents
Since 1960 (2008), or numerous feminist studies.
25