There’s never enough time to cover Emily Dickinson in an AmLit survey course.
Only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime, all anonymously; publication was, as she put it, as “foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.” Not that she intended her poems to go unread—she often sent them in letters to friends, sometimes with other enclosures: dried flowers, a three-cent stamp, a dead cricket. She also tried a form of self-publishing: from around 1858 until roughly 1864, she gathered her poems into forty homemade books, known as “fascicles,” by folding single sheets of blank paper in half to form four consecutive pages, which she then wrote on and, later, bound, one folded sheet on another, with red-and-white thread strung through crudely punched holes. These books were found in Dickinson’s room after her death, in 1886, by her sister, Lavinia, along with hundreds more poems in various states of composition, plus, intriguingly, the “scraps,” a cache of lines that Dickinson wrote on scavenged paper: the flap of a manila envelope, the backs of letters, chocolate wrappers, bits of newspaper. —The New Yorker
Post was last modified on 29 Nov 2016 3:29 pm
I always enjoy my visits to the studio. This recording was a quick one!
After marking a set of bibliography exercises, I created this graphic to focus on the…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Odo walks stiffly into the infirmary, where Bashir scolds him for not taking…
Imagine a society that engineers its highways so that ordinary people who make mistakes, and…
My years of watching MacGyver definitely paid off. (Not that my GenZ students got the…
As a grad student at the University of Toronto, I picked up a bit about…