Not only war poetry, but also romantic poetry as a whole, previously constrained by prose genres, was in its heyday. The Romanticists united under the banners of poetry were not a group, many of them knew nothing about each other and lived in different cities and towns in the United States. It is noteworthy, however, that all of them (with the exception of W. Whitman, born on Long Island and in New York, respectively, and H. Melville, the novelist and “dissenter”) were natives of New England or the Southern states.
In terms of this discussion, the development of New England Romantic lyricism, rooted in the tradition of spiritual quests of Puritan poetry by A. Bradstreet and E. Taylor. An example of innovative development and reinterpretation of this tradition and at the same time a clear indication of the late high rise of American Romanticism is the work of Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830-1886).
Emily Dickinson is one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of world literature, both humanly and creatively. Her creative destiny is extraordinary: all her life even her closest neighbors had no idea that she wrote poetry. Nor did her relatives, who lived in the same house with her – her mother, her father, her brother Austin, and her sister Lavinia – know about it for a long time. During Dickinson’s life in print only eight of her poems appeared – all unsigned. Her first collection, published posthumously in 1890, attracted almost no attention.
Her fame began in the twentieth century. In 1955 appeared a complete collection of E. Dickinson’s poems, which consisted of three volumes and included more than 1,700 poems, and a year later – a three-volume collection of letters – a kind of “poet’s prose”. Here is a sample of it: “You ask me, who are my friends? The hills, sir, and the sunset. And a brown dog as tall as me…”
The literature on Dickinson now numbers dozens of monographs, and yet the controversy continues. What sometimes happens to poets happened to Emily Dickinson – she was ahead of her time. In the nineteenth century her verse, too original, too individual, too unlike anyone else’s, obviously could not be understood. When it was understood, it was recognized that she was an inspired poet, deeper than anyone before her, who had penetrated uncharted realms of the spirit and paved the way for twentieth-century poetry.
The daughter of a lawyer, Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, a small provincial town in Massachusetts, and here, apart from brief trips to Boston, Philadelphia and Washington in her youth, has spent her life. In the last twenty-five years she did not leave home at all, and to the indignation of her family stopped attending even church meetings. Emily Dickinson, however, was a deeply religious person. “When the family went to church,” she explained, “I was never alone. God sat beside me and looked right into my soul.”
Dickinson was neither a nun, nor a mystic, nor simply an eccentric. All her “oddities” had reasons both in her personal, intimate life and in the spiritual situation that America and New England were experiencing at the time. In fact, all the reasons boiled down to one, the name of which is romanticism. Romanticism as a protest against the soullessness and baseness of the existence around her, with all its wars, the struggle for position in society, for influence and literary recognition.
Her refusal to publish was also a protest. She did not want to dirty the pure banner of poetry relations with booksellers, did not want to please the then literary tastes “smooth” their poems to be published: “Let my poems remain barefoot,” – she said. E. Dickinson was a romantic and a rebel by nature, though her rebellion had a special quality and manifested itself in a stoic rejection of what she considered alien to herself.
When Charles Wordsworth moved to another state in 1861, and began for Emily Dickinson the time of her “white election” (she dressed in white and confined herself to the walls of her home for the rest of her life). Biographers have wondered what this meant-the color of “royal mourning” (as we know, mourning kings are white) or the “bride’s white color” of waiting (a new meeting did take place, but only twenty years later)? It is more likely that Wordsworth’s departure was only the impetus. The reclusion in which Emily Dickinson cherished her unfulfilled love was an attempt to build some kind of alternative universe in this mundane, down-to-earth and ordinary world. The poetess’s reference to the “country” that “a friend has left” is not coincidental. It must be said that she managed to build her own, self-sufficient world: this is her poetry.
As in the poems of her direct predecessors, the Puritan poets of 17th and 18th century New England, an exceptional place in the lyrics of E. Dickinson’s lyricism occupies an exceptional place with the Bible. Researchers who have undertaken to identify the poetess’s “biblical” poems have found that this is virtually her entire body of work; even texts that do not mention events and characters from the Bible touch with it in one way or another.
A great many of E. Dickinson’s poems are directly based on Scripture. She is in constant conversation with God, discussing episodes in the history of Israel, the characters of heroes, kings, and prophets, while demonstrating a not at all puritanical independence of judgment. For example, it “seems unfair to her how Moses was treated” when he was given to see the Promised Land, but was not allowed to enter it. God is her Father, loving but sometimes overly strict, while she is not always the submissive daughter, eager to understand everything on her own and to get to the bottom of it.
The themes of Emily Dickinson’s other, not so numerous, poems are eternal themes of poetry: nature, love, life, death, immortality. Distinctive features of her lyrics – the peculiarity of interpretation, which lies in the organic interaction of the ordinary and philosophical plans; the dominant place taken by the question of immortality; and unusual in the literature of the XIX century form of expression.
Dickinson’s immortality is not the posthumous fame that poets usually have in mind and for which she, who did not even publish her poems, clearly did not count, just as death for her is not the end of everything or complete hopelessness, for faith in a Savior provides “eternal life. Her understanding of love is also peculiar: it is not a purely spiritual union, as in the poetry of most romantics, but not simply a carnal connection, but both, and something else – a heavenly revelation. In fact, this is a deeply Christian interpretation of love, which includes various shades, comprehensive and self-sufficient, like the love of God.
All of Emily Dickinson’s indigenous poetic concepts take on their original, religious-philosophical meaning. At the same time, these concepts are not abstractions for her, but something quite real and concrete. In her poems, usually very short, devoted to the everyday phenomena of life (morning, a clover flower, a well in the garden), there is necessarily a second, philosophical plane.
Such is the lyrics of Emily Dickinson, a phenomenon, at the same time, and contradictory, and in its own way whole. It is indicative that, for all the breadth of spiritual interests, the nature of the problems that concerned the poetess, almost unchanged. In her case it is not necessary to talk about the evolution of creativity: it is a growing deepening of motives outlined in her very first texts, the evidence of the ever deepening life of the spirit.
Emily Dickinson’s innovative and original verse seemed “too elusive” or “shapeless” to her contemporaries. Higginson, the publisher of eight poems published in her lifetime, wrote that they “resemble vegetables dug out of a vegetable garden at a moment’s notice, with rain and dew and bits of earth clinging clearly to them.” This definition seems quite correct, especially if by “earth” we mean not dirt, but soil as the primary basis of all that is and is essential. E. Dickinson’s lyrics really lack the euphony and smoothness that readers of her time appreciated so much. It is a poetry of dissonance, whose author has not experienced the polishing and standardizing influence of any “circle” or “school,” and has therefore retained a distinctive style, clarity, precision, and sharpness of thought.
Her poetic technique is only Emily Dickinson’s technique. What, then, is her specificity? First of all, in the laconicism that dictates the omission of conjunctions, truncated rhymes, truncated sentences. The peculiarity is also evident in the system of punctuation invented by the poetess – the extensive use of dashes, emphasizing the rhythm, and capital letters, emphasizing key words and emphasizing the meaning. This form was born not of an inability to write smoothly (Dickinson also has quite traditional poems) and not of a desire to stand out (she wrote exclusively for herself and for God), but of a desire to highlight the very grain of thought – without a husk, without a shiny shell. This, too, is a kind of rebellion against the then fashionable verbal “curls.
The form of Dickinson’s poems is natural to her and determined by thought. Moreover, her incomplete rhymes, irregularities of style, convulsive changes of rhythm, the very unevenness of her poetry is now perceived as a metaphor for the surrounding life and is becoming increasingly relevant. Actually, Emily Dickinson’s time came only in the 50-70s of the XX century, when one of the most important trends in American poetry was the philosophical lyric, filled with complex spiritual and moral collisions, and when the author’s innovative and free style stopped shocking compatriots already accustomed to dissonance.
