Emily Dickinson

Abstract

Three of the subtlest and most effective elements in the style of EMILY DICKINSON (1830–1886, remaining all her life at Amherst, Massachusetts) are linguistic — the assonance of imperfect rhymes, the distinctive functions of English and Romance vocabulary, and the grammar. More emphasis, too, should be laid on her use of hymn-measures; she did not use them in sincere imitation of hymnody, her religious upbringing having inured her against their often trivial lilt, but it was not just in parody, either — it was simply the kind of metre to which her ear had grown accustomed. The rhyme-and-stress scheme a b c b 4343, and the only slightly less familiar a b c b 3343, are as common in hymnals as in her 1,775 poems, and they impose on her verses a simplicity that veils depth and complexity. Very often she ‘pointed’ her poems with her own strange system of punctuation: James Reeves, in his excellent edition of 181 poems (London: Heinemann, 1959), omits this pointing, and indeed it is hard to print it with consistency.