American Poetry of the 19th and

20th Centuries
Dr. Danica Čerče
Professor

danica.cerce@ff.uni-lj.si
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLeMZ5WIdrI
(the 2017 exhibition at the Morgan Library in N. Y. City)

• one of the most important 19th-century American poets

• a precursor of Modernism
• born in Amhest, Massachusets
• influenced by:
• the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century England,
• the Book of Revelation
• rigid Calvinist environment
• admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and
John Keats
• the first volume of poems - in 1890
• verse forms - suggestive of ballads
• short stanzas
• iambic trimeter or tetrameter
• simple register
• non-standard use of capital letters and stresses, appealing metaphors,
no titles
• the content of her poetry – exceptionally bold and original
• For Dickinson, "the self was a prison-house from which it seemed
impossible to escape.“ (Gray)
• "Her self is her world, but that world is not coextensive with reality.“
• Terence Davies‘s film A Quiet Passion (2017)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKJpx8FYp54
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/emily-dickinson/8

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -

The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -

And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset - when the King
Be witnessed - in the Room –

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away

What portions of me be
Assignable - and then it was
There interposed a Fly -

With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -

Between the light - and me -
And then the Windows failed - and then
I could not see to see -
My life closed twice before its close—
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive

As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/emily-dickinson/11

I'm Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don‘t tell! they'd banish us – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –
To tell your name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/emily-dickinson/18

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple host

Who took the flag to–day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,

As he, defeated, dying,

On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear!
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?

"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth - the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a-night,

We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,--
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.

Her message is committed

To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!