The Justification for Staying Private

Dickinson’s This is my Letter to the World raises tension between exclusion and the human conditions’ longing for belonging. Dickinson’s “letter to the world” is an extended metaphor of her deliberate attempt to establish an affinity with her society through art- her literature just like Grossman’s essay. Her vulnerability and isolation, is evident in her personal tone with “my letter” being exposed to the wider “world”. This disclosure juxtaposed with the next line “that never wrote to me” further emphasizes her reality filled with isolation. The juxtaposition encapsulates her position as an outsider, interplaying the themes of inclusion and exclusion, seen through her desire for her art to be reciprocated and appreciated by the open distant world. Furthermore, Dickinson covets for a sense of connection through the reoccurring motif of the natural world, personifying “her” as a feminine persona with a nurturing capacity emphasizes through the accumulation of endorsing imagery “tender majesty… hands I cannot see…for love of her”. Despite her lack of relationship with her environment, she elevates nature to be majestic further denigrating her own self status as her writing will still be “judged” no matter how “tenderly”. Thus Dickinson seeks a sense of belonging through nature deriving from the human condition, yet in this driving process towards inclusion is met by exclusion from her sense of identity

When people think of Emily Dickinson, they think of a white dressed, ghostly woman hidden in the corridors of home, writing poem after poem. They do not think of the actual person Emily was. Emily Dickinson grew up in a rich, social, scholarly environment. She could have chosen many paths that would have led her to a completely different life, but because of circumstances, the social, high energy girl with a sense of humor became isolated by her own choice. Though Emily Dickinson’s depression is romanticized, sickness, social life, and death led her to seclusion and deep poems.

Emily Dickinson was an exceptional writer through the mid-late 1800’s. She never published any of her writings and it wasn’t until after her death that they were even discovered. The complexity of understanding her poems is made prevalent because of the fact that she, the author, cannot expound on what her writing meant. This causes others to have to speculate and decide for themselves the meaning of any of her poems. There are several ways that people can interpret Emily Dickinson’s poems; readers often give their opinion on which of her poems present human understanding as something boundless and unlimited or something small and limited, and people always speculate Dickinson’s view of the individual self.

Emily Dickinson is one of the most influential figures in American literature. Her unusual character and style has made her become one of America’s best and most original poets of all time. She composed almost 1800 poems, but fewer than a dozen were published in her lifetime. In her poems, she expresses her feelings about identity, religion, nature, love, and death. Her poems tell us a lot about her lifestyle, which was very private and reserved from society. In poems 260 and 409 it talks about the theme of identity. Although they consist of the same theme, there are differences in meaning, tone, and narration.

Emily Dickinson chose not to conform to the madness of society and shut out many of the people that she felt wanted to change her. She wrote a poem called “The Soul Selects Her Own Society,” in this poem she writes about how the soul shuts certain people out and confides in only one person. Emily Dickinson writes “Then- close the Valves of her attention- Like Stone-,”

Emily Dickinson is the definition of poetry. Within her poems lies numerous underlying meanings and symbols from her lifetime. When she was just a teenager she left school and became a recluse on her family’s homestead. Where she would begin to write some of the greatest poems in history. It is recorded that she wrote hundreds of little poems on random pieces of paper. Some of her greatest poems were about society during her time period, and they can even relate up to today’s society. Some of her best poems about society are “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” and “Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant”. Both of these poems contain a lot of similarities. However they differ slightly, in saying that, the other really compliments the other within their deeper meanings. Within each of these poems lies metaphors, personification, and inverted syntax.

Emily Dickinson, recognized as one of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century, was born December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts (Benfey, 1). Dickinson’s greatness and accomplishments were not always recognized. In her time, women were not recognized as serious writers and her talents were often ignored. Only seven of her 1800 poems were ever published. Dickinson’s life was relatively simple, but behind the scenes she worked as a creative and talented poet. Her work was influenced by poets of the seventeenth century in England, and by her puritan upbringing. Dickinson was an obsessively private writer. Dickinson withdrew herself from the social contract around the age of thirty and devoted herself, in secret, to writing.

In his essay “Why Privacy Matters” from The Wilson Quarterly, Jeffrey Rosen offers a compelling account of the harmful effects of eradicating our privacy. Rosen ventures into several different fields affected by the ever-growing intrusion of our privacy, offering a rich compendium of illustrations from the real world. From Monica Lewinsky’s fate under her investigation, to a Charles Schwab employee, Rosen offers a prolific arsenal of incidents where the dignity of privacy is challenged. In his descriptive examples, Rosen demonstrates a broad expertise within the field by taking his time to describe a careful characterization of each case by both implying his own personal experience

Approaching Emily Dickinson’s poetry as one large body of work can be an intimidating and overwhelming task. There are obvious themes and images that recur throughout, but with such variation that seeking out any sense of intention or order can feel impossible. When the poems are viewed in the groupings Dickinson gave many of them, however, possible structures are easier to find. In Fascicle 17, for instance, Dickinson embarks upon a journey toward confidence in her own little world. She begins the fascicle writing about her fear of the natural universe, but invokes the unknowable and religious as a means of overcoming that fear throughout her life and ends with a contextualization of herself within

The first poem, "This is my letter to the World,” is very short and made up of only two stanzas. She reaches out to her audience by starting out by saying “This is my letter to the World” (1). If “this” is the Dickinson’s “letter to the World,” she has an implied desire that it be read, and possibly even responded to. However, the speaker does not offer more than “this.” She asks the reader to both recognize the letter and be satisfied that this is enough. The next line she says, “That never wrote to Me,” and this shows her alienation from the world. Her invisibility which makes her feel a sense of bitterness.

In Dickinson's poem “This is My Letter to the World,” she is expressing her reclusiveness towards the world. What Emily means by this is that she wrote a letter to the world, but the world does not know who she is since she never leaves her home. She also writes about what nature has taught her in hopes to teach other people lessons. In the closing of the poem she asks the readers to not judge her harshly on what she has written. The overall theme of this poem is that if people were to judge, they should judge by the truth. She does not want to be judged harshly for separating herself from the world, she just wants to belong. She uses many devices through all of her poems to help convey the overall theme. In the poem “This is My Letter to the World,” Dickson uses the personification of nature, rhyme scheme, and metaphor to show her overall theme.

Like many other hospitals in the nation, the Queen 's Medical Center (QMC) still has some semi-private rooms, holding two patients in a room with only two curtains separating them apart. Vocal sounds can easily travel from one portion of the room to the other section of the room. As with other hospitals, QMC also started the practice of bedside reporting, where the outgoing nurse gives an end of shift report to the incoming nurse in the patient 's room. As medical providers, nurses are entrusted with a vast amount of medical information regarding their patients and are expected to keep this information in a confidential manner. However, with bedside reporting, any staff who is inexperienced with

Dickinson on Isolation from Society Emily Dickinson’s poems “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” and “The Soul selects her own Society--“ both discuss the idea of reclusiveness and consciously separating one’s self from the general masses. Dickinson asserts the idea that it is beneficial for people to choose a few companions who matter to them and exclude all others from their inner consciousness.

Emily Dickinson was one of the many famous American poets whose work was published in the 19th century. Her writing style was seen as unconventional due to her use of “dashes and syntactical fragments”(81), which was later edited out by her original publishers. These fragmented statements and dashes were added to give emphasis to certain lines and subjects to get her point across. Even though Emily Dickinson was thought to be a recluse, she wrote descriptive, moving poems on death, religion, and love. Her poems continue to create gripping discussions among scholars on the meaning behind her poems.

The controversy surrounding Emily Dickinson is her odd lifestyle and her tendencies to be somewhat of a recluse. She is sometimes considered abnormal because she does things differently from most others. She spends much of her life dressed in white and withdrawn from much of society. Of course, her peers take this negatively, but what they do not understand is that her being so private is more of a meditation to her, instead of a hiding. She just wants to escape the pressures she feels are normally required of women. She does not want to be a servant to sick and elderly. She feels she has more potential for her mind to grow, and those obligations would just be hindrances to her writing (McQuade 1255). Her childhood and her staying out of society as an adult, along with many other aspects known and not known, influence her poems and the style in which she goes about writing the works. Her techniques of writing are completely different from any other writer, whether prose or poetry. Dickinson composes her phrases by marking them off with a dash, placing a space before and after. This small maneuver places more emphasis on her “impress of the mind in its analysis of experience” (McQuade 1256). Her slant thymes and unique form of expression produces more of an oddness to the audience.