Abstract: Emily Dickinson is famous for her extraordinary perception of life，which makes her unique in American literature. And her works have left a great impact upon the development of poetry all over the world. By analyzing Dickinson’s life experiences and the artistic features in her poems, this thesis will mainly probe into her three striking artistic features presented in her poems: broad subjects, vivid images and untraditional form, aiming to deeply understand the revolutionary qualities of her poems. Dickinson’s opinions on religion, death, love and nature are reflected in her broad subjects；her images are vivid and present a striking picture to the readers; her form is unique and has never confined within the traditional ones. Based on the discussion about the three artistic features, this thesis will lay a good foundation for a better understanding of her poetry.

Key Words: Emily Dickinson; Subjects; Images; Untraditional Form

艾米莉·狄更森诗歌的艺术特征

摘要：艾米莉·狄更森是美国文学史上一朵奇葩, 因其对生活超然的感悟和领受力而闻名于世。她的作品对世界诗歌的发展产生了深远的影响。本文通过分析艾米莉·狄更森的生平及主要的诗歌特点，旨在探究艾米莉·狄更森诗歌的三个艺术特征：广泛的主题，生动的意象及反传统的形式，以便更为深刻地理解艾米莉·狄更森诗歌的颠覆性。艾米莉·狄更森对于宗教、死亡、爱情和自然的观点都在她广泛的主题中得以体现; 她的意象生动，为读者展示了一幅独特的图画; 她的形式独一无二，从不为传统所束缚。本文通过对其诗歌三个艺术特征的讨论，旨在为更好地理解艾米莉·狄更森诗歌奠定良好基础。

关键词：艾米莉·狄更森; 主题; 意象; 反传统形式

1. Introduction

Emily Dickinson is American most admired woman poet, and she is regarded as the poet true to her soul, yet she has only a small number of poems published in her lifetime. However, Dickinson’s works are recognized as great influence on literary fields. Based on a great number of Emily Dickinson’s poems as well as the analysis and criticism, this thesis will probe into Dickinson’s broad subjects, vivid images and untraditional form, which are omnipresent in her works. Although her poems are quite short and simple, they have deep connotations. Dickinson has concerned about the all human beings in her poems. The aim of the paper is to help the reader to get a clearer conception of her subjects, images and untraditional form in her poems. Thus, we can have a good appreciation for the art of her poems, and get a general comprehension about her influence on the literary world..

2. Emily Dickinson’s Personal Experiences

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is an American lyrical poet, and an obsessively private writer—only seven of her some 1800 poems were published during her lifetime.

Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a family well known for educational and political activity. Her father, an orthodox Calvinist, was a lawyer and treasurer of Amherst College, and also served in Congress. “His heart” Dickinson wrote in a letter, “was pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists”(Thomas Higginson, 1889:223). He was strictly religious, leading the family prayers every day and often censoring her reading. Dickinson has been influenced by her religious family: she has written a lot of poems referring to religion and she usually writes in hymn-like poems; But her father also ensured that Dickinson grew up in a household surrounded by books and heated intellectual debates, so Dickinson is an independent-minded and free-spirited girl, which can be reflected in her using untraditional form and confessing her ideas about God.  

Dickinson was educated at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.  She blossomed there into a social and spirited young woman. The most significant event of her stay occurred at a fundamentalist Calvinist revival meeting, when she was asked to stand and declare herself a Christian and refused. After one year at Mount Holyoke she returned in 1848 to Amherst, where she remained, apart from brief trips to Boston, Cambridge, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., for the rest of her life.

At school and at home, Dickinson received an excellent education. At the Amherst Academy alone she studied the arts, English literature, rhetoric, philosophy, Latin, French, German, history, classics and the Bible; she also received a firm grounding in the sciences, geology, botany and mathematics. Such knowledge widened Dickinson’s scope, having given her a good chance to learn much more broadly. At home the Dickinsons’ large and varied library included books by Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Shakespeare, Keats, the Brownings, the Brontes, and George Eliot, along with Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language —which for Dickinson would prove one of the most important books of all—and a healthy dose of newspapers and romance novels.

During her early twenties, Dickinson began to dress in white, to leave her house only on rare occasions, and to restrict the circle of her acquaintances until it numbered just a few people. The young Mabel Loomis Todd, having moved to Amherst with her husband, remarked in a letter to her parents about a strange resident:“I must tell you about the character of Amherst. It is a lady whom all the people call the Myth. She has not been outside her house in fifteen years. She dresses wholly in white, and her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful. She writes finely, but no one ever sees her.”(Farr, 1992:20)

Despite her seclusion, a large number of prominent figures came and went through her house. She also developed deep friendships with several people: the clergyman Charles Wadsworth, whom she met in Philadelphia and described as her dearest earthly friend; Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican; and Judge Otis Philips of Salem, Massachusetts. During this time, Dickinson also began to write poetry. Dickinson sent Thomas Higginson four poems and their correspondence lasted until the last month of her life.

Dickinson experienced her most tumultuous decade during the 1860s, when several events took their toll on her: the outbreak of the Civil War, the changed circumstances of several friends, and her own severe eye trouble in 1864 and 1865. In 1862 she wrote mysteriously to Higginson, “I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Buying Ground—because I am afraid—”(Thomas Higginson, 1889:172). These lines certainly confirm Dickinson’s difficulties during this time. This period, however, proved to be the most productive of Dickinson’s life; between 1860 and 1865 she wrote an average of three hundred poems each year.

Although Dickinson has never married, her passionate poems, as well as a series of letters that have come to be called “The Master Letters,”suggests that she may have been deeply in love at least once. There is still some doubt as to the object of her affection. Probably, she has not stayed together with her beloved that makes her long for the shared moment in her love poems. In all her lifetime she lived a still life, which gave her clearer mind about life, somber observation about nature and more passions about love. The still life has given Dickinson more than what she can get in the bustling world.

The last years of Dickinson’s life were sad ones, due to the numerous deaths she experienced. Her father died in 1874, Samuel Bowles in 1878, her nephew Gilbert in 1883, and both Wadsworth and her mother in 1882. Among her broad subjects, death is a significant one, for the frequent losses of her friends and relatives. Dickinson herself has suffered the first attack of an illness that would prove fatal; she died on May 15, 1886.

Dickinson’s personal experiences have left great impact on her works. Her free spirit, her sadness for death, her longing for the beloved one and her ideas about religion are all reflected in her poems and often being considered as the essence of Dickinson’s poetry.

. Striking Artistic Features of Emily Dickinson’s Poems

    Dickinson’s poetry, remarkable for her resonant observations about religion, love and nature, and death and truth, along with her beautiful images and the untraditional characteristics of her poems, has firmly established her as one of American true poetic geniuses. The following is the illustration about Emily Dickinson’s most striking artistic features.    

3.1 Subjects:

Dickinson’s poems are usually based on her own experience, her sorrows and joys. Through these personal experiences, Dickinson depicts those issues that concern all human beings. The subjects of her poems include religion, death, love, nature and truth. In the following, this paper will mainly discuss the subjects of religion, death, love and nature in detail.

3.1.1 Religion

Among Dickinson’s poems, religion is an obvious subject and is a clear illustration of her religious ideas. Calvinism with its doctrine of predestination and pessimism pressured her during her childhood and adolescence and colored her work. In her explicitly religious poems, she violently overturns traditional Christian beliefs in order to create her own made theology. Despite her revisionary zeal, Dickinson never completely abandons her faith in God. In the poem I know that he exists:“I know that he exists,”she writes,“Somewhere, in silence.”Rather, she is determined to explore new forms that God’s existence might take. She is anxious to know what God is really like:

The look of Thee, what is it like?

Hast thou a hand or foot,

Or mansion of Identity,

And what is thy Pursuit?

(The look of Thee, what is it like?)

She is also capable of considerable anger about the rift between humans and God:

Is Heaven a physician?

They say that He can heal;

But medicine posthumous

Is unavailable.

(Is Heaven a physician?)

Still, faced with this “unavailable” comfort, Dickinson responds not by giving up faith, but rather by constructing new versions of it. In several poems she asserts that the self’s depths bring us as close to God as we can hope to come, and allow us a glimpse of what she calls“Finite Infinity”in her poem There is a solitude of space.

Other poems focus on the divinity in nature:

In the name of bee

And of the butterfly

And of the breeze, amen!

(The gentian weaves her fringes)

Whether looking inward or out of her window, Dickinson radically replaces the traditional images of a distant, all-powerful God with a local divinity existing by her very side. In the poem Some keep the Sabbath going to church, although“Some keep the Sabbath going to church,”she writes,“I keep it staying at home/ So instead of getting to heaven at last/ I’m going all along!” Dickinson never becomes complacent—she remains one of the greatest poets of loss—but she does find great solace in her domestic cosmology:

Who has not found the heaven below

Will fail of it above.

God’s residence is next to mine

His furniture is love.

(Who has not found the heaven below)

Religion, the obvious and distinct subject in Dickinson’s poems, on one hand, is the reflection of the contemporary religious thought, on the other hand, is the outcry of the poet’s seeking of the omniscient God’s existence.