Emily Dickinson Her poems and her life

1. Emily Dickinson Her poems and her life

6. Why bother to introduce Emily Dickinson to you? • You • Me • She is one of the greatest American female poets in the late 19th century.

7. The literary thinking in 19th century America • Romanticism: rebel the neoclassicism • The American romanticism • American-lize / Taiwanese-lize: American style, Taiwanese style American self, Taiwanese self

8. rebel • Truth and beauty are identified with a procedure of constant metamorphosis….. …. Whitman • The only way to acknowledge your participation in (American) culture is to behave as a supreme individual, to rebel the past. ………Whitman • Make it new ! ……….Ezra Pound

9. Anti-tradition • The familiar theme and story will be lost to the American poets.

10. self • Poetry is as a drama of self • Epistemology: the process of the interaction between Perception and communication. • Be experimental, be solitude, eccentric, innovative, and most important of all be an unique individual.

11. So she describes pleasure, melancholy, despair. • To her, the eruption of pain is an apocalyptic event and exultation seems to irradiate (light up) all existence. • She is aware her world is no way coexistence with reality, this shadows all her work, but it comes with particular force in those poems about one experience that makes a definite conclusion to her poems.

12. Dickinson’s self • For her, self is not so much a circumscribed Eden as a prison-house form which it seems impossible to escape • Her world is her feeling, her self.

13. Nature is a stranger yet. • The one that cite her most have never passed her haunted house …. • To pity those that know her not is helped by the regret . • That those who know her, know her less, the nearer her they get.

14. Free Verse • A perfect medium for American poetry • It has a dynamic and provisional quality • It runs poems into open field, a area of vital possibility where reader can allow his imagination to play • It seems to ask his reader to resolve doubts about such things as pace, rhythm, intonation, and in the process rewrite the poem in his own terms. .

15. America’s poet: Robert Frost

17. The road not taken • Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth.Then took the other, as just as fair,And having perhaps the better claim,Because it was grassy and wanted wear;Though as for that the passing thereHad worn them really about the same.

18. And both that morning equally layIn leaves no step had trodden black.Oh, I kept the first for another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back.I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.

19. Dickinson’s poems • Emily Dickinson - Success is counted sweetest (67) Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need.

20. Not one of all the purple Host Who took the Flag today Can tell the definition So clear of Victory As he defeated -- dying – On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Burst agonized and clear! Agonize:feel sorrow, painful

21. Emily Dickinson’s words illustrate a highly disruptive use of traditional matters, and that produce a feeling of surprise, a series of stimulating discords out of which each one of us must evolve our own harmonies. evolve: develop, make progress

22. Disruptive use of rhythm • Arbitrariness, dislocated, disjunctive nature

23. The form of poetry • Stanza (詩節): paragraph • Rhyme (押韻) • Rhythm (節奏) • The meaning of poetry:

24. The meaning of poetry • Tone (語調): irony (反諷) overstatement (誇大) understatement (低估) (see text book p. 158) • Word order (字序) • Imagery (意像) • Figures of speech (言談風格) • Symbol (象徵): rose-love, cross-Jesus • Theme (主旨)

25. Dickinson’s life