5 - Dickinson in Cultural Context: Principal Critical Insights

Summary

The Queen, discerns like me —

Provincially —

(Fr256; J285)

To study the cross-influences and dynamics between the major and minor writers is to participate in the democratic spirit of the major authors themselves, all of whom in various ways expressed their profound debt to lesser writers.

— David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (1988)

Dickinson herself knew she was not entirely alone, not writing in a vacuum. She was both at home and at sea in her New England female context. The most accurate judgment we can make is that her work remembers others' poems even as it forgets them.

— Cheryl Walker, “Dickinson in Context: Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets” (2004)

JACK L. CAPPS NOTES in the opening line of the preface to his Emily Dickinson's Reading (1966) that the poet's “voluntary seclusion has often been mistakenly equated to intellectual isolation” (vii). Dickinson, as Capps's book demonstrates, was highly attuned to her society. She was an avid reader of current events, literary journalism, contemporary as well as classic literature, and, especially in her formative years, a devotee of innovative religious and scientific discourse. She was privy (despite the restrictions imposed on her gender) to her lawyer/civic activist father's and brother's professional activities. Her personal and family friends included journalists, theologians, educators, scientists, and publishers (or their spouses or children). The importance of this for her art, according to Capps, is that through her keen awareness of her surroundings and especially through her extensive reading, Dickinson acquired her vicarious experience and perspective and made her perceptive observations and penetrating analyses possible (145).