Download or read book Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination written by Linda Freedman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dickinson knew the Bible well. She was profoundly aware of Christian theology and she was writing at a time when comparative religion was extremely popular. This book is the first to consider Dickinson's religious imagery outside the dynamic of her personal faith and doubt. It argues that religious myths and symbols, from the sun-god to the open tomb, are essential to understanding the similetic movement of Dickinson's poetry - the reach for a comparable, though not identical, experience in the struggles and wrongs of Abraham, Jacob and Moses, and the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Linda Freedman situates the poet within the context of American typology, interprets her alongside contemporary and modern theology and makes important connections to Shakespeare and the British Romantics. Dickinson emerges as a deeply troubled thinker who needs to be understood within both religious and Romantic traditions.
Download or read book Religion Around Emily Dickinson written by W. Clark Gilpin and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-10 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion Around Emily Dickinson begins with a seeming paradox posed by Dickinson’s posthumously published works: while her poems and letters contain many explicitly religious themes and concepts, throughout her life she resisted joining her local church and rarely attended services. Prompted by this paradox, W. Clark Gilpin proposes, first, that understanding the religious aspect of the surrounding culture enhances our appreciation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and, second, that her poetry casts light on features of religion in nineteenth-century America that might otherwise escape our attention. Religion, especially Protestant Christianity, was “around” Emily Dickinson not only in explicitly religious practices, literature, architecture, and ideas but also as an embedded influence on normative patterns of social organization in the era, including gender roles, education, and ideals of personal intimacy and fulfillment. Through her poetry, Dickinson imaginatively reshaped this richly textured religious inheritance to create her own personal perspective on what it might mean to be religious in the nineteenth century. The artistry of her poetry and the profundity of her thought have meant that this personal perspective proved to be far more than “merely” personal. Instead, Dickinson’s creative engagement with the religion around her has stimulated and challenged successive generations of readers in the United States and around the world.
Download or read book These Fevered Days Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson written by Martha Ackmann and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, this engaging, insightful portrayal of Emily Dickinson sheds new light on one of American literature’s most enigmatic figures. On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, “All things are ready” and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely “at home” (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson’s interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was hesitant about publication, embraced seclusion, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. In These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson’s life through ten decisive episodes that distill her evolution as a poet. Ackmann follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, which prefigured her lifelong ambivalence toward organized religion and her deep, private spirituality. We see the poet through her exhilarating frenzy of composition, through which we come to understand her fiercely self-critical eye and her relationship with sister-in-law and first reader, Susan Dickinson. Contrary to her reputation as a recluse, Dickinson makes the startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, writes anguished letters to an unidentified “Master,” and keeps up a lifelong friendship with writer Helen Hunt Jackson. At the peak of her literary productivity, she is seized with despair in confronting possible blindness. Utilizing thousands of archival letters and poems as well as never-before-seen photos, These Fevered Days constructs a remarkable map of Emily Dickinson’s inner life. Together, these ten days provide new insights into her wildly original poetry and render an “enjoyable and absorbing” (Scott Bradfield, Washington Post) portrait of American literature’s most enigmatic figure.
Download or read book My Emily Dickinson written by Susan Howe and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2007-11-15 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Starts off as a manifesto but becomes richer and more suggestive as it develops."—The New York Sun For Wallace Stevens, "Poetry is the scholar's art." Susan Howe—taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides—embodies that art in her 1985 My Emily Dickinson (winner of the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award). Howe shows ways in which earlier scholarship had shortened Dickinson's intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun," Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day. "Dickinson's life was language and a lexicon her landscape. Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text...."
Download or read book The Poetry of Emily Dickinson written by Victoria N. Morgan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking readers through the various stages of criticism of Emily Dickinson's poetry, this guide identifies both the essential critical texts and the key debates within them. The texts chosen for discussion represent the canonical readings which have typically shaped the area of Dickinson studies throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first century and provide a lens through which to view current critical trends. Chapters focus on style and meaning, gender and sexuality, history and race, religion and hymn culture, and performance and popular culture. In all, this guide serves as a user-friendly reference tool to the vast body of criticism on Dickinson to date by suggesting formative starting points and underlining essential critical highlights. It provides students and scholars of Dickinson with a sense of where these critical texts can be placed in relation to one another, as well as an understanding of pivotal moments within the history of reception of Dickinson from late nineteenth-century reviews up to some of the definitive critical interventions of the twenty-first century.
Download or read book John in the Company of Poets written by Thomas Gardner and published by . This book was released on 2014-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Gardner artistically describes Jesus--"the Word made flesh"--as a poem penned by God for the world, and John--author of the Fourth Gospel--as the poem's interpreter. John's structural patterns, repetitions, and narrative interventions invite readers to experience for themselves the beauty of the divine poem. John in the Company of Poets deepens this invitation by re-imagining the biblical text through the eyes of such artists as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, and T. S. Eliot, offering a literary reading of the Gospel based upon their powerful poetic replies. Poets are our best readers, contends Gardner, and his deft analysis forges a fresh path into the issues and tensions of John's Gospel.
Download or read book Emily Dickinson and Poetics written by Melanie Hubbard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dickinson formulates her poetics in the context of popular manuscript practices, rhetoric, philosophy, and science in the American nineteenth century.
Download or read book I Told My Soul to Sing written by Kristin LeMay and published by Paraclete Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emily Dickinson is an unlikely patron saint for all who seek or wrestle with God. Looking closely at twenty-five poems, this intimate portrait and personal reflection shows how Dickinson can guide us, through belief and doubt alike, toward God. Many have thought that Dickinson, one of America's greatest poets, rejected religion. Yet the poems that unfold her soul can inspire ours, offering fresh answers to ultimate questions about life and death, faith and doubt, Jesus and God. In chapters on belief, prayer, mortality, immortality, and beauty, Kristin LeMay traces the dimensions of Dickinson's spiritual life and tells the story of her own search for God between the lines of the poems that Dickinson called "hymns." Praise for I Told My Soul to Sing “Exuberant and captivating. A shimmering jewel of a book.” –Dinty W. Moore “Through her deep engagement with Dickinson’s poems—by turn prayers, partners, revelations, songs—LeMay has written a book that is, in Dickinson’s words, ‘the Heart’s portrait – every Page a Pulse,’ every page a kind of faith.” – Sarah Sentilles, author of Breaking Up with God: A Love Story “Part spiritual autobiography, part homage to Dickinson’s inexhaustible poetic genius, and part exuberant close readings of the astonishing poems in which she wrestles with questions of faith and belief, I Told My Soul to Sing is a valuable study of the poet’s heterodox imagination. LeMay does not shackle Dickinson to a procrustean bed of doctrine and piety, dilute the poet’s astringent ironies, or flatten the provocative ambiguities. She has a gift for choosing unfamiliar poems from the canon and for judiciously quoting and interpreting them. A smart, seriously playful, winning, and readable commentary on a quintessentially elusive, thorny, and linguistically daring American poet.” – Herbert Leibowitz, editor, Parnassus: Poetry in Review “LeMay’s implied reader is someone attracted to religious faith, but even an atheist can enjoy this book’s provocative illuminations of spiritual longing, fear, and anger, in which questions cut deeper than answers.” – Mark Halliday, poet, author of Keep This Forever and Stevens and the Interpersonal “A brilliant analysis of the bond between life and poetry, written with sensitivity and talent.” – François Bovon, Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion Emeritus, Harvard Divinity School
Download or read book White Heat written by Brenda Wineapple and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-12-01 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: White Heat is the first book to portray the remarkable relationship between America's most beloved poet and the fiery abolitionist who first brought her work to the public. As the Civil War raged, an unlikely friendship was born between the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary figure who ran guns to Kansas and commanded the first Union regiment of black soldiers. When Dickinson sent Higginson four of her poems he realized he had encountered a wholly original genius; their intense correspondence continued for the next quarter century. In White Heat Brenda Wineapple tells an extraordinary story about poetry, politics, and love, one that sheds new light on her subjects and on the roiling America they shared.
Download or read book Religion Around Emily Dickinson written by W. Clark Gilpin and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-10 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion Around Emily Dickinson begins with a seeming paradox posed by Dickinson’s posthumously published works: while her poems and letters contain many explicitly religious themes and concepts, throughout her life she resisted joining her local church and rarely attended services. Prompted by this paradox, W. Clark Gilpin proposes, first, that understanding the religious aspect of the surrounding culture enhances our appreciation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and, second, that her poetry casts light on features of religion in nineteenth-century America that might otherwise escape our attention. Religion, especially Protestant Christianity, was “around” Emily Dickinson not only in explicitly religious practices, literature, architecture, and ideas but also as an embedded influence on normative patterns of social organization in the era, including gender roles, education, and ideals of personal intimacy and fulfillment. Through her poetry, Dickinson imaginatively reshaped this richly textured religious inheritance to create her own personal perspective on what it might mean to be religious in the nineteenth century. The artistry of her poetry and the profundity of her thought have meant that this personal perspective proved to be far more than “merely” personal. Instead, Dickinson’s creative engagement with the religion around her has stimulated and challenged successive generations of readers in the United States and around the world.
Download or read book Open Me Carefully written by Emily Dickinson and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 19th–century American poet’s uncensored and breathtaking letters, poems, and letter-poems to her sister-in-law and childhood friend. For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson’s thirty-six year correspondence with her childhood friend, neighbor, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson’s life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet’s life and work. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive. Praise for Open Me Carefully “With spare commentary, Smith . . . and Hart . . . let these letters speak for themselves. Most important, unlike previous editors who altered line breaks to fit their sense of what is poetry or prose, Hart and Smith offer faithful reproductions of the letters’ genre-defying form as the words unravel spectacularly down the original page.” —Renee Tursi, The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book The Blank Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens written by Henry Weinfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blank verse has been central to English poetry since the Renaissance, most famously in Shakespeare's plays and in Paradise Lost. Henry Weinfield's detailed readings of the masterpieces of English blank verse focus on Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Stevens, tracing what lies behind their choice of form.
Download or read book Mystical Prayer written by Charles M. Murphy and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2019-05-30 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Charles Murphy explores the still unfolding rediscovery of Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), our foremost American poet, as a mystic of profound depth and ambition. She declined publication of almost all of her hundreds of poems during her lifetime, describing them as a record of her wrestling with God, who, in the Puritan religious tradition she received, she found cold and remote. Murphy places Dickinson's writings within the Christian mystical tradition exemplified by St. Teresa of Avila and identifies her poems as expressions of what he terms theologically as "believing unbelief.” Dickinson's experiences of love and her confrontation with human mortality drove her poetic insights and led to her discovery of God in the beauty and mystery of the natural world.
Download or read book Emily Dickinson in Context written by Eliza Richards and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-16 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long untouched by contemporary events, ideas and environments, Emily Dickinson's writings have been the subject of intense historical research in recent years. This volume of thirty-three essays by leading scholars offers a comprehensive introduction to the contexts most important for the study of Dickinson's writings. While providing an overview of their topic, the essays also present groundbreaking research and original arguments, treating the poet's local environments, literary influences, social, cultural, political and intellectual contexts, and reception. A resource for scholars and students of American literature and poetry in English, the collection is an indispensable contribution to the study not only of Dickinson's writings but also of the contexts for poetic production and circulation more generally in the nineteenth-century United States.
Download or read book There Is No Frigate Like a Book written by Emiy Dickinson and published by . This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry by American Poet Emily Dickinson. This book contains 3 poems, the first and second poems are about the power of words and books and the final poem is about the journey of raindrops.
Download or read book Hope Is the Thing with Feathers written by Emily Dickinson and published by Gibbs Smith. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of a new collection of literary voices from Gibbs Smith, written by, and for, extraordinary women—to encourage, challenge, and inspire. One of American’s most distinctive poets, Emily Dickinson scorned the conventions of her day in her approach to writing, religion, and society. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers is a collection from her vast archive of poetry to inspire the writers, creatives, and leaders of today. Continue your journey in the Women’s Voices series with Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte and The Feminist Papers by Mary Wollstonecraft.
Download or read book The Value of Emily Dickinson written by Mary Loeffelholz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Value of Emily Dickinson is the first compact introduction to Dickinson to focus primarily on her poems and why they have held and continue to hold such significance for readers. It addresses the question of literary value in light of current controversies dividing scholars, including those surrounding the critical issue of whether her writings are best appreciated as visual works of manuscript art or as rhymed and metered poems intended for the inner ear. Mary Loeffelholz deftly incorporates Dickinson's distinctive biography and her historical, religious, and cultural contexts into close readings, tracing the evolution of Dickinson's style. This volume - which considers not only the complex history of Dickinson's poems in print, but also their future in digital formats - will be an invaluable resource for undergraduate and graduate students seeking to better understand the importance of this seminal American poet.
