THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Emily Dickinson

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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, concerns the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I discuss Dickinson’s biography, with an emphasis on the shadow cast by Calvinism over her milieu, as well as her literary influences, her poetic practices, and the textual and reception history of her work compared to other American writers and other Anglophone female poets of the 19th century. Then I discuss a selection of 20 of her poems under the headings of “God,” “Nature,” “Love,” “Pain,” and “Poetics,” emphasizing her anguished and ludic religious doubt, her play with personae and identities, her sense of nature’s otherness, her attitude toward her poetic vocation, her sexual and social vision for women, and her obsession with pain and death. Finally, I consider criticism on Dickinson by Adrienne Rich, Susan Howe, and Camille Paglia, and these critics’ own comparison of the poet to a wide range of other authors—Sade, Whitman, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Stein, Emily Brontë, Jonathan Edwards, William James, and more—in quest of her unique vision. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on Henry James, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall: