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Dickinson, the "Real Good Guy"

© Kay Day

Poetry seminars can be found in the corners of most every university, and what you hear there can sometimes seem like a mantra. What you won't hear relates to the fact that there were quite a few women who wrote eloquent poetry hundreds of years ago. A woman named Marie de France penned exquisite little poems called "lais" as early as 1170. The Lais of Marie de France rarely, if ever, work their way into a discussion of early poetica.

Not too many workshop leaders mention Ono No Komachi, a Japanese poet who penned dynamic verse around the year 850.

What, you might be asked, can top T. S. Eliot's, "The Waste Land?" What of the passion of Dylan Thomas, the exquisite craftmanship of W. H. Auden, the genius of James Dickey? What, indeed?

Emily Dickinson, for one. This shy, plain-Jane little woman wielded a pen as big as a battle axe where American verse is concerned. She is, along with Walt Whitman, credited for literally creating modern American poetry. No man alive will ever come close to her perspective, because, well, then he'd have to be a woman.

The ultimate Puritan, Dickinson is believed to have suffered from some great trauma in her early years. Whatever that was--some think it was a broken heart--created a life of solitude for her and a wealth of incredible poetry for posterity.

She did have one suitor, Benjamin F. Newton, who worked for her father's law firm. Newton, however, could not afford to marry and he died young. Newton is mentioned with affection in Dickinson's letters to her friend, Reverend Charles Wadsworth, and she seemed to have regretted that her suitor didn't live long enough to see her become a poet. For a firsthand look at the Belle of Amherst, read Emily Dickinson's Letters. Her words appear in their original format.

Dickinson's father was such a dominating influence in her life that she seems never to have been able to break away from him. She remained a spinster all her life, and much of the imagery in her poetry represents varying attitudes towards her male parent, ranging from awe to fear.

At the age of 56, she foretold her own death in a letter to her cousins on the day before she died with a note that read simply, "Called back." The world would only discover this poetic genius's true merit after her death.

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