Lecture 28. Emily Dickinson, II: major themes
Here is a somewhat arbitrary scheme for approaching Dickinson’s major themes—arbitrary because many poems involve all three of the categories below.
I. Poems of the self: private life, emotional response, consciousness, the soul.
A. Poet doesn't care if she’s understood. If people “live” through their individual consciousnesses, then perhaps nobody can really understand another human being.
B. Focus on loss, suffering, deprivation, etc., refusing to be comforted
C. to sum up: anti-sentimental (poems 49, 67, 241, 280, 241, 1732, etc.)
II. Poems of Nature.
A. Nature's destructive power, nature’s otherness.
B. to sum up: anti-Transcendental (poems 130, 258, 314, 328, 986, 1397, 1593, etc.)
III. Poems of God and Mortality
A. destructive power and otherness characterize God himself (if he exists).
B. human loss is evidence of Divine indifference.
C. Refusal to take it on faith that all will be made up in the future; insistence that real faith does not ask for evidence; refusal to pretend to a faith she doesn’t have.
D. Refusal to say she loves God when/if she doesn't
E. to sum up: anti-Calvinist (poems 185, 287, 465, 501, 547, 1624, etc.)
IV. BUT not all is defiance and resistance; there are also poems of intense happiness: 664, 249, 326