Emily Dickinson on the Addictive Process Essay -- Emily Dickinson Auth

Emily Dickinson on the Addictive ProcessAwareness of Emily Dickinson has grown and deepened over the course of the twentieth century such that the delightful andplatitude-laden verses, as they were initially viewed, have provento be rich, often ironic, highly complex explorations of one poetssubjectivity. Dickinsons poetry today challenges us to confrontaspects of our own inner processes in relation to psychologicalpain, death, the world and attainable -- though not undoubted --transcendence of it, and frustrated desire, to name just a few ofthe themes. The emergence of discourse on addictions, both tosubstances and to modes of behavior, gives us a framework in whichwe can newly assess one of Dickinsons poems, and even though thepoets particular life circumstances -- involving the influence ofPuritanism, which would also affect Dickinsons contemporariesHerman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the limitations placed onwomen in nineteenth-century the States in general, and EmilyDickin sons own self-limiting reclusive existence -- differ fromour late-twentieth-century circumstances, nonetheless Dickinsonspoetry presents the overall shape of the subjective process underlying addiction in such an see form, that the work inquestion speaks to us directly over a century later. The circumstances alluded to above brought the poet into a situation in which she was caught between the desire to communicate her reflections on life -- she sent poems as both letters and aesthetic objects with illustrations of a collage character to friends -- and the distrust of worldly success and fame proceeding from the Puritanical customs embodied in the writings of the eighteenth-century preacher Jonathan Edwards. Whereas a later --and ma... ...mith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure A Study of HowPoems End. Chicago U of Chicago P, 1968.Turner, Clara in the altogetherman. My Personal admirer with Emily Dickinson in Sewall, Richard B., The Life of EmilyDickinson vol. 1. New York Farr ar, Straus & Giroux,1974.Van Wyck, William. Emily Dickinsons Songs out of Sorrow. Personalist, 18, no.2 (Spring/April 1937), 183-89.Webster, Noah. A Dictionary of the English Language...inTwo Volumes. London Black, Young, and Young, 1828.An American Dictionary of the EnglishLanguage...Revised and Enlarged by Chauncey Goodrich. Springfield Merriam, 1855.Whicher, George Frisbie. New England Poet in Mornings at850. Northampton The Hampshire Bookshop, 1950. This Was a Poet A Critical Biography of EmilyDickinson. New York Scribners, 1938.Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson. New YorkKnopf, 1986.