This month is Women’s History Month, so through the end of March, I will share a daily female poet from history along with 2 poems they have written.
While this is a fun way to celebrate women, I am also using it as an opportunity to educate myself more on the history and people of poetry. Even if poetry is a foreign language to you, this is also meant to be a way to learn history behind a form of art. So that’s 2 things you can get out of it – history and art!
For day five, I chose Emily Dickinson (I had been trying to decide when to post Dickinson, and today my excitement trumped my patience in waiting). Instead of a few "fun facts" as I have shared with the previous poets, here is a description from the Poetry Foundation that sums up Dickinson and her writing:
"To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized."
The Poetry Foundation has an article full of historical information and inspiration for Dickinson. You can read it in full here.
The first poem I chose for Dickinson is “'Hope' is the thing with feathers - (314)." This poem illustrates Dickinson's use of a concrete object to represent an abstract idea that is common in her poetry.
You can read the poem here.
The second poem is “They shut me up in Prose – (445)." This poem is short in length but deep in meaning. Dickinson describes what it is like as a poet - specifically a female poet. She is told to be "still" and others try to close her up. This proves futile, as Dickinson explains, for her mind and imagination can not be stilled or quieted.
You can read it in full here.
I significantly resonated with the second poem and its central theme, so here are some additional resource links and quotes that provide an analysis for it (I can't attest to if these are the best resources for poetry analysis, but they suffice to further explain this poem). These three stanzas address obstacles female writers faced then and still face today. As one analysis says, "It wasn’t unheard of for girls to be told that writing was not for them." Furthermore, this poem raises awareness for encouraging creativity and imagination in young girls. A second analysis says, "for surely a bird could not be guilty of treason, just as a little girl should not be considered guilty for her individuality."
Photo from Poetry Foundation.
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