Emily Dickinson as a Second Language: Demystifying the Poetry

by Greg Mattingly

“The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being, at will, both himself and other people. Like a wandering soul seeking a body, he can enter, whenever he wishes, into anyone’s personality. He takes as his own all the professions, rejoicings and miseries that circumstance brings to him.”

Emily Dickinson acknowledged as much in a letter to a friend. “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse - it does not mean - me -but a supposed person” (L268).

The Emily Dickinson Collection at Amherst College

’Tis not that Dying hurts us so

“We used to think, Joseph, when I was an unsifted girl and you so scholarly that words were cheap & weak. Now I don’t know of anything so mighty. There are those to which I lift my hat when I see them sitting princelike among their peers on the page. Sometimes I write one, and look at his outlines till he glows as no sapphire.”—Letter

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away

One may travel via a book without the oppression of a toll!

The proper use of the dash is to express a sudden stop, or a change of subject; but, by modern writers, it is employed as a substitute for almost all the other marks.; being used sometimes for a comma, semicolon, colon, or period; sometimes for a question or an exclamation crotchets and brackets to enclose a parenthesis.

“Any words, when remarkably emphatical [sic], or when they are the principal subject of the composition, may begin with capitals.”