but, I can't write
Poetry, Katharena!
Emily Dickinson Essentials |
American Poetry
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Emily Dickinson's poems of the 1850s are fairly conventional in sentiment and form, but beginning about 1860 they become experimental both in language and prosody, though they owe much to the metres of the English hymn writer Isaac Watts and to Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible. Dickinson's prevailing poetic form was the quatrain of three iambic feet, a type described in one of the books by Watts in the family library. Dickinson used many other forms as well, and to even the simpler hymnbook measures she gave complexity by constantly altering the metrical beat to fit her thought: now slow, now fast, now hesitant. She broke new ground in her wide use of off-rhymes, varying from the true in a variety of ways that also helped to convey her thought and its tensions. In striving for an epigrammatic conciseness, she stripped her language of superfluous words and saw to it that those that remained were vivid and exact. She tampered freely with syntax and liked to place a familiar word in an extraordinary context, shocking the reader to attention and discovery. --David J.M. Higgins |
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