Reading Dickinson’s poetry often leaves readers feeling exactly this way, because she names so incisively many of our most troubling emotions and perceptions. While every reader of Dickinson’s poems has his or her own approach to the poetry, here are some suggestions for getting started on discoveries of her work:
1. Stay open to linguistic surprise. The characteristics that help to make Dickinson’s
poetry so intriguing—the absence of titles, her dense syntax, unusual
vocabulary, imperfect rhyme schemes, approaches to abstract ideas—can at first
seem to obscure rather than illuminate her meaning.
2. Read the poem again. The power of Dickinson’s poetry often comes from her
playful but potent sense of indirection. Trying to understand her poetry
doesn’t mean solving it like a riddle, but rather coming to recognize its
slippery strategies. Read the poem a third time. Set it aside and come back to
it. Look at the poem with a friend.
3. Review Major Characteristics
of Dickinson’s Poetry. Carefully read how does the
poem exemplify or confound these characteristics.
4. Set aside the expectation that a
poem has to “mean” one thing. A
Dickinson poem is often not the expression of any single idea but the movement
between ideas or images. It offers that rare privilege of watching a mind at
work. The question of how we know anything comes alive as we read Dickinson.
5. Try “filling in the blanks.” Sometimes Dickinson’s syntax is problematic—the poems
are so compressed! In lines where a verb or another critical word seems to be
missing, what words might create meaning? Don’t feel that there is only one
possibility. The variorum editions of her poetry reveal that she often thought
of many alternative ways of expressing an idea. Looking at her variant wordings
for a poem can help illuminate its possibilities.
6. Don’t try to make the poem “about”
Emily Dickinson. Dickinson writes in the lyric
style, in which the speaker of the poem is often referred to as “I.” While the
poem may represent the view of the poet, it also may not.
7. Look for recurring themes, images,
and strategies in Dickinson’s poetry.
8. Read the poem aloud. Poetry is an ancient, oral tradition. Often reading a
poem aloud can help to elucidate its meaning. One of Dickinson’s early editors,
Mabel Loomis Todd, convinced Thomas Wentworth Higginson (her future co-editor)
of the power of Dickinson’s poetry by reading selections aloud to him.
9. Keep reading. Keep reading the text and develop new strategies for
reading. This will help to capture the text.
