Love and Emily Dickinson Essay example -- Biography Biographies Essays

Love and Emily DickinsonI am going out on the doorstep, to get you some new(a)green grassI shall pick it down in the corner, where you and I used to sit, and have long fancies. And perhaps the dear little grasses were developing all the whileand perhaps they heard what we said, but they cant tell Emily Dickinson to Susan gilbert Dickinson (L 85, 1852) Seventy-five years after the 1890s publication of the premier volumes of Emily Dickinsons poetry, critics motionless squabble roughly the poets possibly lesbian relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Indeed, the specifics of Dickinsons relationship to Susan are ambiguous at best. All of the critical attention that her mystifying sexuality receives reflects our cultures urge to sectionalize great literary icons into our own face-to-face niches, thereby absorbing them as our groups own voice. The poet, not the poetry, assumes the center of the discussion. The critics, whether parameter f or or against a lesbian interpretation of the famed couple, are equivalent two disgruntled neighbors arguing over a tree know for its particularly incendiary wood. They no longer focus on this evergreens essential beauty but, rather, on whose property it resides and who has the right to cut it down to instigate their cause. In all actuality, we will never know the truth about the pairs physical relationship the evidence is too ethereal to assume a definable substance. And, in part, this predictable public response motivated Susan Gilberts reluctance to release Dickinsons poems and letters after the poets death. Emily Dickinsons life has been thoroughly explored by scholars and critics. Her broad correspondence with all of her family and frien... ... longing for another, which transcend physical intimacy. Emily Dickinsons eloquent, overwhelming, consuming trust for a true companion is expressed as intensely in her words as it is felt in our souls.Works Cited Hart, Ellen Louise. The Encoding of homoerotic Desire Emily Dickinsons Letters and Poems to Susan Dickinson, 1850-1886. Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature 9 (1990) 251-72.Koski, Lena. Sexual Metaphors in Emily Dickinsons Letters to Susan Gilbert.The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996) 26-31. Sewall, Richard. The Life of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. New York Farrar, 1974. Smith, Martha Nell. The Belle of the Belle of Amherst. Harvard Gay & homosexual Review 3.1 (1996) 25-27.Susan and Emily Dickinson Their Lives, in Letters. The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Ed. Wendy Martin. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 2002. 51-73.