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
Many of the most quoted, and quotable, lines in Emily Dickinson’s poetry are her opening lines. Perhaps no other poet has produced so many memorable first lines to poems in all of their oeuvre.
And it’s worth remembering that Dickinson (1830-86), an American poet who lived much of her life as a virtual hermit in Amherst, Massachusetts, published hardly any poems during her lifetime. Most were published posthumously; she was better-known for her gardening than her writing while she was alive.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Success Is Counted Sweetest’ is not as famous as some of Emily Dickinson’s other poems, but she was a prolific poet, and this one is well worth reading. Indeed, it has a peculiar place in Dickinson’s oeuvre, being one of just seven poems which were published during her lifetime. (It’s not quite true that Dickinson was entirely unknown as a poet while she was alive, although it’s certainly true that she was better known as a gardener than as a poet during her own lifetime.)
As is often the case with an Emily Dickinson poem, the language and imagery require a bit of careful analysis and unpicking.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
This is the second version of a poem which Dickinson wrote in two different drafts in 1864. This version opens, ‘The wind begun to rock the Grass’, and describes the chaos that a storm wreaks upon the world. Worth reading for the following two lines alone: ‘The Dust did scoop itself like Hands / And threw away the Road.’
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. (And few poets have known how to write a suggestive opening line better than Emily Dickinson.) Before we proceed to an analysis of the poem, here’s the text of ‘They shut me up in Prose’.