but, I can't write
Poetry, Katharena!
Emily Dickinson Essentials |
American Poetry
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Emily Dickinson began to write verse about 1850, apparently while under the spell of the poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Brontë and under the tutelage of Benjamin F. Newton, a young man studying law in her father's office. Only a handful of her poems can be dated before 1858, when she began to collect them into small, handsewn booklets. Her letters of the 1850s reveal a vivacious, humorous, somewhat shy young woman. In 1855 Dickinson went to Washington, D.C., with her sister to visit their father, who was serving in Congress. During the trip they stopped off at Philadelphia, where she heard the preaching of the noted clergyman, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who was to become her “dearest earthly friend.” He was something of a romantic figure: a man said to have known great sorrow, whose eloquence in the pulpit contrasted with his solitary broodings. He and Dickinson exchanged letters on spiritual matters, his Calvinist orthodoxy perhaps serving as a useful foil for her own speculative reasoning. She may also have found in his stern, rigorous beliefs a welcome corrective to the easy assumption of a benign universe made by Emerson and the other transcendentalists. --David J.M. Higgins |
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