Poems By Emily Dickinson - nouveau livre

POEMS BY EMILY DICKINSON C, Ci Ci CI C Ci i C Stf Poems Iry EMILY DICKINSON EDITED BY MARTHA DICKINSON BIANCHI AND ALFRED LEETE HAMPSON Introduction y ALFRED LEETE HAMPSON C E A BROWN AND 1948 INTRODUCTION JC MILY DICKINSON was born December loth, 1830, lived her life apart, and died May I5th, 1886, in the same little college town of Amherst, among the Massachusetts hills, where her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson a poet and mystic of another sort had ruined himself for the materializing of his apocalyptic vision the founding of Amherst College, which he foresaw as an agency to hasten the conversion of the whole world. Unknown during her lifetime, held by an intimate public in peculiar affection after her death as her first posthumous publications reached an outside world, later neglected for many years by public and critics alike and classified in 1912 as a forgotten poetess, her present eminence is a special triumph, unique in the annals of American letters. Though her period coincided with the Golden Era of New England literature, her fame, as pure poet, has outgrown that of every contempo rary. l She seems to many of us the greatest Ameri can poet of the Nineteenth Century. 2 A modern of moderns in 1936, critics on both sides of the Atlantic do not hesitate now to call her poetry, wholly underiva tive, the finest by a woman in the English language. Her influence, negligible at first, is now incalculable. By inheritance Emily Dickinson was the quintessence of New England. Of Norman origin, the name de-1 American Literature f An Introduction p. 68. Carl Van Doren. Neiv York Herald Tribune, September 27, 1936. XIII p. 6. Lewis Gannett. 8 Modern American Poetry fifth revisededition. Louis Untermeyer. riving from Gautier of Caen anglicized as Walter de Kenson who accompanied William the Conqueror in the invasion of England, her first Colonial an cestor was the picturesque and indomitable Nathaniel, whose spirit of adventure as well as his Puritan political convictions led him to set sail in 1630, with his wife Anna, the widow Gull, for the wilds of America, seeking not conquest or dominion, but free dom and the right to serve, at the dictation of his own conscience, his God before his King With a few others, they soon struck out for the hinter land, leaving the comparative security and companion ship of the coast settlements which retained, bleak out posts though they were, a tenuous connection with their old world, and eventually established the town of old Hadley, Massachusetts, some of their descendants cross ing the Connecticut river to occupy the district later called Amherst. Faced by primeval conditions of in credible hardship, surrounded by wild beasts and In dians, these uncompromising idealists wrought out their own Colonial history in blood and shining courage. Just two hundred years lay between the birth of Emily Dickinson and the coming of her first ancestor from England. She shared with the other children of her village the prevailing traditions and standards of her time. Her father, educated at Yale, followed the family profession of law, served in the State Legislature and also in Congress, and was Treasurer of Amherst College for nearly forty years. Although habitually reserved in manner, he evidenced the marked individu ality and love of independence characteristic of the Dick insons from the beginning, as well as under provoca tion theirproclivity for vivid and original expression. If Father is asleep on the lounge the house is full, Emily exclaimed. It revealed their fundamental under standing...