Water, is taught by thirst.Land—by the Oceans passed.Transport—by throe—Peace—by its battles told—Love, by Memorial Mould—Birds, by the snow.
J135, F93
Emily Dickinson
Feature Date
- April 22, 2019
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
Selected By
- Sandra Lim
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Known as “The Myth of Amherst” for her withdrawal from society while still a young woman, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) had an inner life that was deeply emotional and intense. She knew rapture and despair, pondered the wonder of God and the meaning of death. She broke tradition and was criticized for her seminal experiments with unorthodox phrasing, rhyme and broken meter, within concise verse forms, thus becoming an innovator and forerunner of modern poets.
"Between them, our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, have come to represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche....
"Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private; like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all alone."
—Joyce Carol Oates
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