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Emily DickinsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Some 50 years before Friedrich Nietzsche, the existential angst-meister, boasted that whatever does not kill you makes you stronger, Dickinson embraces that bravura concept in talking about both private and particular agonies. Only her pain makes her strong. It is tempting to assume that here is the familiar Emily Dickinson, the forever-gloomy, perpetually morose recluse, savaging outright even the idea of joy and preferring rather to submerge herself in pain. Grief, she says serenely, is what I am used to. But to read Poem 252 as simply the sad poem of a bitter old woman testifying that the least brush of joy would be dangerous reduces the poet to a caricature.
At some point—perhaps when she compares happiness to alcohol or perhaps when she teases that happiness is toxic—the possibility enters into an analysis of this poem that there is some delight in the poet’s indulgence of hyperbole, a woman not savoring agony but wondering why other people consider it a burden. She is not defending her life apart but merely reassuring those few friends and family members who were ever invited to read her poetry that joy is not anathema to her, that pain is not her go-to recreational activity but rather that joy is rare, for her and for many others, and that living with a certain level of emotional heaviness is not toxic—it is merely what it means to be human.
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Emily Dickinson
Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If I should die
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson
The Only News I Know
Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book
Emily Dickinson