Emily Dickinson: Intimacy in Alienation?

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Of all the poets who have been the public consciousness over the years, one of the most controversial continues to be Emily Dickinson. Many have been baffled by the construction of her poems, or what her goal she wanted to accomplish. The simple words, or rather the placement and structure, are never clear cut for any reader. Like a Rorschach test, any interpretation may even say more about the reader than the author itself. That is why one must not judge a particular line or verse of a poem, which by itself would surely be abstract. Rather, it should be viewed as a complete entity unto itself, as Dickinson surely intended. When this is accomplished, one can see that Dickinson intends to promote the purest intimacy – a window to her soul that can only be reached by the audience’s eventual sacrifices (in terms of “standard” literary structures). Emily Dickinson might have been a complex person in her prose, but she made sure her reality was simplistic. The best way this was done was by her describing the smallest intimate details, like a flower or a blade of grass for example. Perhaps her documented sense of agoraphobia cleared her psyche for what she was able to produce (or vice versa), but as examined in one of her works like Poem #242, it might have been necessary for her well-being to detach herself from ‘normal’ constraints. When the poem starts out as “When we stand on top of Things – and like Trees, look down –“, one can say that there is a desire for perspective, in an overpowering and commanding sense. Especially in the mention of Trees, the person may have grown of old age and as such grown in wisdom. Yet by including the phrase ‘look down’, it might be in an apathetic connotation. Anyone with such a perspective can feel disconnected with the world, specifically with any kind of similar relations to fall back on with the “common people” being
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