Abstract:making of an artist such as Emily Dickinson, unpublished and posthumously discovered, is especially mysterious. Dickinson's habit of not dating her poems has rendered the whole question of her develop...making of an artist such as Emily Dickinson, unpublished and posthumously discovered, is especially mysterious. Dickinson's habit of not dating her poems has rendered the whole question of her development particularly troublesome. Because of the absence of a significant corpus of apprentice poetry, and because of the almost mythical quality of her experience, most studies of her development have focused primarily on her personal life. David T. Porter's The Art of Emily Dickinson's Early Poetry, the most thorough attempt to examine the development of her style, concentrates quite naturally on the period 1858-62. Porter begins in 1858 because the standard Johnson-Ward chronology identifies only five poems for the period before 1858. However, a careful reading of the poet's letters indicates that Dickinson was, indeed, writing poetry before 1858, that she was showing her poetry to friends, and that the five identifiable poems of her early apprenticeship are but emblems of a larger body of work.' Of the five surviving poems of Dickinson's youth, the most ambitious are two comic valentines. These poems are engaging emblems of her early humorous verse and of that comic bias which yielded the witty conjunctions of her art.2 Her valentines, to the extent that they have been discussed at all, are usually described as ingeniously conventional.' But if weRead More
Publication Year: 1974
Publication Date: 1974-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 2
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