Once she assumed her true form, the monster regretted having chained Emily Dickinson to his rock.
Early on, Dickinson attended a school called Amherst Academy, a girl's school where she learned things in all subjects, including, you guessed it, English and classical literature. She read Virgil's Aeneid and other Latin and got the idea that she was some sort of poetwoman. (What kind of name is "Aeneid" for anything?) When she turned thirteen, Emily and a...girl named Abiah Palmer Root hit it off real nice-like. When he left two years later, they wrote each other letters. (How sweet.) Emily broke up their old-timey, long-distance relationship when Abiah got some o' dat old time religion in the Second Great Awakening. Emily said she thought that was silly. Personally, I think her first name was reason enough to end it. "Abiah"? Name her "Aeneid", why don't you!
After an excursion to a seminary at the age of seventeen, she went home because she was "really sick." A ploy to skip school, no doubt, but the truant officers looked the other way. What they saw when they turned their heads was a tree and some bushes. A squirrel scurried away. Anyhow, following her return to Amhert she became a recluse, leaving her home about as often as Ethan Frome's wife. Somehow, scholars say she managed to carry on love affairs by correspondence. This was apparently the 1850s version of dating websites. They (the scholars) also point to two people as her significant others: newspaper publisher Samual Bowles and her father's friend Judge Otis Lord. Lord was eighteen years her elder. She was fifty. Gross.
I've said a lot about her life, and not much about her poetry. Well, I must admit, after diving into this article ready to rip apart some emo rantings, I read some of her poetry in a collection I bought at the thrift store. It really isn't that bad, sometimes. At least she rhymes words together instead of stringing them however she likes. However, a lot of it is sort of pathetic. Here's a classic:
First of all, you can't put a flood in a drawer because a flood is a idea which means water engulfing a land mass. And even if you mean just the water itself and not the flooding part, it'd have to be one small flood to fit in a drawer. Or maybe a really big drawer. Second, if you think you hear the wind talking to your floor, it may be time to get your brain serviced.
Did anyone notice the random dash put after the comma in the second line? Dickinson loved dashes. A friend of mine recently quipped that the reason is the symbol best describes how boring her life was. She died of nephritis, an inflammation of the kidney. No one remembers this, because it's embarrassing. Her last words were "I must go in, for the fog is rising." She was already inside, so that quote makes little sense. What she should have said was, "Oh, I'm already inside. How the heck can I discern the movements of creeping clouds of condensation?" (alliteration attacks!) What's even sadder than the fact that she wrote poetry was the fact that she couldn't capitalize on all that spent time by selling her works at exhorbitant prices to the unsuspecting consumers of her day. Not until she was dead, buried, and somewhere in the Coffee Shop of Purgatory reading T.S. Eliot with Sylvia Plath did her stuff even get published. Unlike e.e. cummings, however, she could capitalize on the first letter of some words.
Back to what I said before about dashes. When her poetry was posthumously printed (alliteration attacks again!), editors standardized 'em all. Dickinson fans (the girls I mentioned at the beginning, plus some random professors who somehow make a living by "analyzing" this stuff) are in an uproar, claiming that the poet's dashes were so varied in angle and length that they actually had meaning in the context of the poems. Well, I think I found out what the meaning is: Dickinson had poor handwriting and therefore couldn't draw a good ol' standard run-o'-the-mill everyman's kinda dash if the very future of dashes depended on it. Now you know why dashes are no longer popular.