What Were The Interests Of Emily Dickinson?

Emily Dickinson, a prominent 19th-century American poet, was known for her unique and original verse, which was often characterized by its epigrammatic compression and haunting personal voice. Despite her limited personal life, it is evident that she enjoyed spending time alone and observing the world. During her lifetime, Dickinson was better known as a gardener than a poet, creating sixty booklets or “packets” of her poetry. Her poems often focused on definition, with phrases like “hope” being the thing with feathers and “renunciation—is”.

Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley. She left school as a teenager and eventually lived a reclusive life on the family homestead, where she secretly created bundles of poetry and wrote about her eccentric personality and themes of death and mortality. Although she was a prolific writer, only a small portion of her work was published.

Dickinson’s hobbies included baking, gardening, and letter writing, with her main passion being baking. She also specialized in desserts, as noted by Thomas Wentworth Higginson in a letter to his wife. The Emily Dickinson Museum, located on the Dickinsons’ former property, recently led a restoration of Dickinson’s garden and greenhouse.

As an accomplished baker, Dickinson won second place at the 1856 Amherst Fair. Before starting to write poetry, she took on the art of botany and enjoyed gathering plants and flowers.

What did Emily Dickinson do during her life?

Emily Dickinson, born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, was an American lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. She is widely considered one of the two leading 19th-century American poets, alongside Walt Whitman. Only 10 of Dickinson’s nearly 1, 800 poems are known to have been published in her lifetime, and she sent hundreds to friends and correspondents while keeping the majority to herself.

Dickinson worked in verse forms suggestive of hymns and ballads, with lines of three or four stresses. Her unusual off-rhymes have been seen as experimental and influenced by the 18th-century hymnist Isaac Watts. She freely ignored the usual rules of versification and even grammar, and her intellectual content proved exceptionally bold and original.

Dickinson grew up in moderate privilege and with strong local and religious attachments. She resided in a mansion built by her paternal grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, who had helped found Amherst College but went bankrupt shortly before her birth. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a forceful and prosperous Whig lawyer who served as treasurer of the college and was elected to one term in Congress. Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, was an introverted wife and hardworking housekeeper.

Dickinson’s highly distinct and eccentric personalities led to strict limits to their intimacy. Only after her death did Lavinia and Austin realize her dedication to her art.

What was Emily Dickinson’s hobby?

Emily Dickinson was a passionate gardener throughout her life, showcasing her love for plants from a young age. She was able to tend plants year-round in the conservatory her father added to the Homestead, despite the challenges of crossing the floor to stand in the Spice Isles. Her mother, Mrs. Dickinson, instilled in Emily and her sister Lavinia a love for gardening, with the family’s roses including a Greville rose. Mrs. Dickinson was known for her ability with sensitive plants, receiving praise from the local paper, the Express, for her “delicious ripe figs”.

Emily Dickinson also learned about plants in botany courses at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. During her school years, she compiled an extensive herbarium, which now resides in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, demonstrating her intimate familiarity with her natural surroundings.

What was Emily Dickinson’s motivation?

Emily Dickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by seventeenth-century England Metaphysical poets, the Book of Revelation, and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town. She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Keats, and Walt Whitman, who are now connected as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. Dickinson was prolific and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, but was not publicly recognized during her lifetime.

Her family discovered forty handbound volumes of nearly 1, 800 poems, or “fascicles”, upon her death. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks, and the original order of the poems was not restored until 1981 when Ralph W. Franklin used physical evidence of the paper to reassemble the packets. Critics argue that there is a thematic unity in these small collections, rather than their order being simply chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) is the only volume that keeps the order intact.

Why was Emily Dickinson interested in death?

In a small New England town during Dickinson’s time, a high mortality rate among young people led to frequent scenes of bereavement in private residences. This prompted her preoccupation with death, withdrawal from social interaction, anguish over her lack of romantic love, and doubts.

Did Emily Dickinson like to read?

Emily Dickinson was born into a book-loving household and became a voracious reader, reading widely beyond the well-stocked libraries of her homestead and her brother Austin’s home. She read the Bible, Sabbath School stories, and Lydia Maria Child’s historical novels. In her early twenties, she discussed books with Amherst students and tutors who circulated books by Thomas De Quincey, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Carlyle, and German novelist Jean Paul Richter.

She belonged to a reading group of Amherst young people who tackled reading Shakespeare aloud. Dickinson was introduced to Emerson’s work by his first book of poems, a gift from her early mentor Benjamin Franklin Newton. Friendships with Amherst student Henry Vaughn Emmons expanded her awareness of and access to books beyond her own home shelves.

Dickinson’s father preferred “lonely and rigorous books” and spurned the authors his eldest daughter preferred as “modern Literati”. Her love for books led her to become one of the “Kinsmen of the Shelf”. In 1848, the novels of the Brontës launched a new era of psychological fiction, much of it by women, which captured Dickinson’s sensibilities and initiated her particular love for the works of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and novelist George Eliot.

Did Emily Dickinson like to bake?

In the mid to late 1800s, Emily Dickinson was not known for her poetry, with only 10 published before her death. However, she was known for her passion for cooking, sharing recipes and baked goods more publicly than her poems. It wasn’t until after her death that she gained fame and recognition as a poet. Dickinson disliked household chores and used cooking as a hobby and expression, just like poetry.

In her letters, she often wrote about food, her family’s vegetable garden, fruit trees, orchards, and how they progressed through the seasons. She also used food in cryptic ways to express her emotional needs, such as hunger, starvation, and thirst.

In her later years, Dickinson lived in isolation, but food served as a lifeline. She found comfort in cooking, even in the darkest times of her agoraphobia, and wanted to share her cooking with others, even hiding behind a curtain and lowering a basket of cookies from her window.

What was Emily Dickinson’s favorite subject?

Emily Dickinson, a renowned botanist and gardener, was known for her rigorous study of this subject at Amherst Academy, which was concurrent with her personal interest in gardening.

Did Emily Dickinson like gardening?

In her work, “The Gardens of Emily Dickinson,” Judith Farr emphasizes Dickinson’s profound interest in botany as a crucial element in comprehending her life, despite her reputation as a prominent horticulturist exceeding that of a poet.

Did Emily Dickinson have a love?

Emily Dickinson, the famous American author, was once thought to have a lifelong love affair with her childhood friend Susan Gilbert, who later became her sister-in-law after marrying her brother Austin Dickinson. However, scholars dispute this narrative, with Austin’s mistress Mabel Loomis Todd erasing references to Susan from Emily’s letters and painting their relationship as frosty. This led to the creation of a hilarious film by writer and director Madeleine Olnek, which portrays Emily as a vivacious, brilliant woman who passionately desired love and success.

The film is a bracing and often funny reclamation of a famous woman’s life as her own, with Molly Shannon playing her as a brilliant woman who passionately desired success. The film’s retelling of Emily’s story has garnered attention, and Olnek’s approach to the story is considered groundbreaking.

How smart was Emily Dickinson?

Emily Dickinson, a celebrated poet, is frequently ascribed the epithet of “genius” in reference to her literary abilities. Nevertheless, there is no conclusive evidence that she possessed an IQ at the level of a genius, as psychological testing was not a common practice during her lifetime.