文档介绍：TOPIC: Emily Dickinson and I’m Nobody!
OBJECTIVES:
A) Introduction to Emily Dickinson
B) Major works and special features
C) Study of I’m Nobody!
Emily Dickinson(1830-1886)
poet as a recluse
nature poet
Topic 1 — Introduction to Emily Dickinson
Comment:
◆ Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the turn of the century.
—Kathryn Vanspanckeren
◆ Her universe was that of the soul; her special task was to make that universe articulate.
—Spiller
Life experience
Emily Dickson (1830—1886)， pessimistic poetess， was born into a Calvinist family of Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father, a prominent lawyer and Congressman, played a big role in her life. Emily attended Amherst Academy from 1840 to 1847 and also spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. The school was strongly congregational, where she suffered serious religious crisis. After 1862, affected by an unhappy love affair with Reverend Charles Wadsworth, she became a total recluse, a life of self-seclusion, living a normal New England village life only with her family. Her private life was pretty much in order. She kept the house, sent letters to her friends, wrote poetry, and read intensively by herself. In general, Dickinson wanted to live simply as a complete independent being, and so she did, as a spinster.
Dickinson’s poetry writing began in the early 1850s, she wrote poems, of which only seven had appeared during her lifetime.
Guidelines
1. “This is my letter to the world” (441) is a poem expressing Emily Dickinson’s anxiety about her communication with the outside world.
2. Perhaps Dickinson’s greatest rendering of the moment of death is to be found in “I hear a Fly buzz－when I died －”(465), a poem universally considered one of her masterpieces.
3. Emily Dickinson is now re