LITR 4232:
American Renaissance
Student Presentation Summary
Thursday,
24 April 2003: Dickinson, introduction + selected poems (2969-2979)
Reader: Lisa Bailey
Discussion notes:
Corrie Lawrence
Emily Dickinson
In my presentation I will be focusing on Objectives 2 and 3 in Dickinson’s poetry. I will mainly be concentrating on only a few of the poems selected for reading today.
Objective 2: “Romanticism”, “Gothic” and “The Sublime”
Emily Dickinson uses many romantic, gothic and sublime images throughout her poetry. Possibly because she secluded herself, she saw society mainly through the newspaper and her bedroom window. She made what she wanted out of the pieces of society she saw, rather than writing what she experienced, thereby romanticizing society.
We get sublime images in her poem, “These are the days when Birds come back”. In this poem, Dickinson compares the end of summer with the Last Supper of Christ.
2976 – Oh
Sacrament of summer days,
Oh Last Communion in the Haze
Through
this comparison Dickinson equates winter with Christ’s death.
In “There’s a certain Slant of light” we get darker, more gothic
imagery.
2978 – That oppresses, like the Heft
Of
Cathedral Tunes –
“imperial affliction”
“Shadows
– hold their breath”
“On the look of Death”
Both
of these poems use death as a subject, the death of summer in one and human
death in the other. However, both
address it differently. The first
uses religious symbols such as the sacrament of Communion while the other uses
darker symbols of death such as “shadows” and “affliction”.
Question 1: Dickinson never gives a direct answer as to what her beliefs are about religion. Why do you suppose Dickinson uses such ambiguity in her poems when concerning death and religion?
Question One Response
Deterrean:
Schizophrenia.
Sandra: Had
some Christian beliefs, or wanted to…she was clearly no atheist.
Doug: She was against the philosophy of organized religion.
She didn’t feel that religion was the answer, but rather spirituality.
Deterrean: The
example she uses of the flower being decapitated is a challenge to religious
texts. It would be
interesting to know how familiar she was with Darwin’s naturalist philosophy;
was she familiar with the texts?
Dr. White:
Melville knows religion very well, and he uses it for the symbolism and
background – just framework of mythology.
We frequently see a cooling of religion with people of this class. Her
religion could be said to be unique to herself.
Objective 3: Representative problems/ subjects in American culture
In
her poem, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Dickinson seems to be writing as a
woman in the nineteenth century. Women were not encouraged to be intellectual people during
this time. Her father encouraged
and discouraged her education at the same time, buying her books but begging her
not to read them. In the first
stanza she seems almost afraid of being discovered as an intellectual woman:
2979 – “Don’t tell! they’d banish us – you know!”
Question
2:
Dickinson had no problem remaining on the “no hope” (for receiving
God’s grace) list at Mount Holyoke, and had no problem with continually
reading and improving her writing despite her father’s protests.
Why then, do you suppose, she felt she must retreat from society to
complete her immense collection of poems?
Question Two Response
Deterrean:
To be a woman in this time period, if she is going to take up writing and
thinking, she almost had to cloister herself and sacrifice.
She had to immerse herself in this sort of lifestyle.
Doug: She was not completely isolated. She did regularly correspond
– she had a social life, though no public personality. This is not uncommon
for writers; Whitman was an exception to this.
Deterrean: Well, she still really was
considered the ‘crazy lady in the attic,’ wearing all white, and so on.
But again, there comes the idea that with self-denial, there is
self-improvement.
Sandra: She was unconventional, but her strength came from her poetry
and she used it to deal with her problems.
She did not cloister herself for the cause of poetry, but most likely for
other causes.
Dr. White:
There can be an imbalance in life – genius goes off with an
intellectual peak, and we have the idea of ‘splinter skills,’ again, or
genius.
Sandra: Without here solitude, she would not have been the poet she
was.
Dr. W: What can
we say? Good poets don’t drive Firebirds; there has to be some sense of
alienation from society. Consider
Melville and Hawthorne…considered crazy at times.
And even Lincoln was noted for experiencing extreme melancholy.
Alienation and art go hand in hand.
Dawn: Genius
needs to find a way to have an outlet, a place in society to contribute to. And it seems like it could be to everyone’s benefit – we
could benefit from the genius, and they could express themselves – if we would
not give the unconventional such a hard time.
Deterrean:
Now we have to be consumers. Dickinson
was in a class where she could behave like this.
We cannot become hermits today.
Speaker: The
testing movement now wants to normalize everyone, and drives off those kinds of
genius.
Dawn: There are some organizations like the Alpha program that they
look for the kids with the unusual answer or the quirky ways of seeing things.
*The class discussion continued for a
short time on the topic of testing. The
overriding sentiment remained that it is a disservice to dismiss the
unconventional without giving due attention to the benefits brought to society
by unusual development in one area, even if a deficit results in another area.
Conclusion:
The class discussion went very well. Students were responsive, and had insight into Dickinson’s life as well as her poetry, particularly the ones assigned for this discussion. All in all it was a very productive discussion.