[Hope is a strange invention—]

Emily Dickinson

Hope is a strange invention—
A Patent of the Heart—
In unremitting action
Yet never wearing out—

Of this electric Adjunct
Not anything is known
But its unique momentum
Embellish all we own—

In light of the Coronavirus crisis, Poetry Daily has started an impromptu series, What Keeps Us.
Until further notice, we will devote Wednesdays to posting poems that sustain and uplift through trying times. Each poem is accompanied with an image by author-illustrator Juana Medina http://www.juanamedina.com. We thank you for reading and hope that you will share poems with your friends and neighbors. Please be well.

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May 13, 2020

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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.

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INDIEBOUND

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The Essential Emily Dickinson

Ecco

New York, New York

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"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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