Reflection: Emily Dickinson Writing Style

Along with Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson was also considered a "tweener." Also, like Walt Whitman, she was in between the two writing eras of Realism and Modernism. Being grouped with Walt Whitman and Walt Whitman only, Emily Dickinson's works were very popular. If I was asked to name a female poet that I have learned about in High School, I would probably name Emily Dickinson. She wrote very strong and emotional poems. That characteristic made her writings not fit in with the style of the Realism time period. She gave way too much detail and used too much emotion to have her poems classified as Realism writings. It is very unusual that Emily Dickinson did not want her writings published. She only showed her writings to her sister Lavinia (Glencoe Literature). Lavinia sometimes edited the poem before she published them after Emily's death. This means that we really do not know what the exact thoughts of Emily Dickinson were because it is possibly that her sister went back and changed some things after she died. The Before You Read section in the Glencoe Literature book said that her sister Lavinia eliminated dashes, undid capitalizations, and completely changed some words. Emily Dickinson was a Christian because her family pressured her into it. She lived in a very religious time period, and her family thought that their Christian faith was very important. Another reason that she joined the Christian Church was because she was very close with her sister and her sister was very dependent on the teachings of Christianity. Dickinson often wrote of love, life, death, nature, and would often question immortality (McChesney). The subjects of her poems makes it really hard to put her into a category because she does not fit the Realism period of the Modernism period. She did not fit in to the Modernism time period becuase her writings seemed to keep a steady rate and the writings of other Modernist writers seemed to jump back and forth on controversial topics. In the Modernism time period, writers were said to have been trying something new. This means they were purposely trying to write like that of no other previous author. The Modernist writers were trying something new simply because they were trying to get all of the attention and glory for coming up with a new great writing era. A modernist writer believed that a real person who is both thoughtful and real does not fit into society because it is mindless after the first world war we had. Emily Dickinson did not feel this way therefore she did not fit directly into this literary period. I do think that Walt Whitman could have been classified as a Realist/ Transcendentalist because his writings were very similar to those of the other Realism and Transcendentalism writers. I cannot say the same for Ms. Emily Dickinson however. Emily's writings were unlike anyone else's from the time and I think that she does deserve that title of "tweener" because she really did not fit the characteristics of the Realism period or the Modernism period.

Wilhelm, Jeffrey D., Douglas Fisher, Beverly Ann. Chin, and Jacqueline Jones. Royster. "Before You Read: Whitman's Poetry." Glencoe Literature. New York: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2009. 455. Print.

McChesney, Sandra. "A View from the Window: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson." In Harold Bloom, ed. Emily Dickinson, Bloom's BioCritiques. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 2002. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 20 Mar. 2012.