By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Much Madness Is Divinest Sense’ is the unofficial title of one of Emily Dickinson’s poems (she tended not to give her poems titles: they’re simply numbered in her Complete Poems, and this one is number 620).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘They Shut Me up in Prose’, whilst not one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known poems – it certainly isn’t up there with ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’, or ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ – is nevertheless sometimes anthologised, and occasionally quoted for its suggestive opening line.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Wild nights – Wild nights!’ The energy and exultation with which Emily Dickinson opens this, one of her most passionately felt poems, encourages us to share the excitement and passion, or at least dares us to try to resist it.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Clock stopped’ is not one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known poems, but it uses its central metaphor to explore one of the most salient themes of her poetry: death. Dickinson uses the image of the stopped clock to reflect on the ending of a life and what this means.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is one of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century: the critic Martin Seymour-Smith, in his Guide to Modern World Literature, calls her one of only two great nineteenth-century American poets (the other being Walt Whitman).
Dickinson wrote a great deal of poetry. Her Complete Poems includes almost 2,000 poems, most of them short lyrics about everything from death to religion, nature to love. And love, indeed, is a great theme of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.