Critical Overview
Emily Dickinson's poems are fascinating to critics as well as readers. Deceptively brief, Dickinson's work is anything but simple. Her ability to write such compressed poems and the profoundly personal and highly evocative way in which she uses language make her work especially rich for those who choose closer study.
- Formalist Criticism:
- The first feature that any reader notices about Emily Dickinson's poetry is the
uniqueness of its style and the surface oddities of her syntax and punctuation. Because of these
features, and because of the fact that they make her a frequently difficult and
at times an obscure writer, much of the commentary on her work has taken a
formalist approach, seeking to explicate the meanings of her texts, as well as
to analyze the ways in which her stylistic strategies contain and communicate
those meanings. Recent critics have also been interested in Dickinson's own
arrangement of her poems into separate groupings or "fascicles," seeking to
discover the connections that she presumably perceived among the poems in each
group.
- Biographical Criticim:
- The elements of Dickinson's personal life—both what is known and what is
unknown—are fascinating, and there has of course been a good deal of
biographical emphasis, especially in the effort to unlock the mysteries of her
supposed love relationship. Such inquiries are undertaken not only for their
own intrinsic interest, but also for the light that such information, if it
exists, might throw on the poems themselves.
- Historical Criticism:
- Historical criticism has sought to
understand her work in the context out of which it proceeded, the social,
cultural, and spiritual life of nineteenth-century western New England, as well
as to untangle the complexities of her publication history and the effects of
her work on its earliest readers.
- Gender Criticism:
- Dickinson is indisputably the best-known woman poet, perhaps the greatest woman
writer, in the history of American literature, a fact that has stimulated a
great deal of feminist interest in her work. Gender critics have sought to
explore what is uniquely female in her poetic sensibility, and to consider her
life and its choices for what they reveal about the options available or
unavailable to women in her culture (and in American culture generally), and
for the degree to which the choices that she made and the choices that she
renounced can be seen as the manifestations of a specifically feminine
sensibility.
Additional Resources: The eighth edition of Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama includes in-depth critical analysis of Dickinson's work by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Thomas H. Johnson, Richard Wilbur, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, and Judith Farr. Please refer to your textbook.The Bibliography includes an extended list of writings about Emily Dickinson. Continue your Web Explorations by visiting Dickinson Links.
