Friday, February 1, 2013

How does Emily Dickinson approach democratic poetry? Discuss “The Soul Selects Her Own Society,” “I’m Nobody,” and “I Dwell in Possibility.”

I tend to disagree with the premise that Emily Dickinson's poetry has a connection with democracy or that she expresses specifically democratic values, in these particular poems or in her work as a whole. Dickinson was basically a "loner" throughout most of her life, and her sense of isolation comes through in her work. In "The Soul Selects Her Own Society" the speaker is discussing the way she has excluded other people from her life except one, but then she "closes the Valves of her attention/Like Stone" on this one as well. Similarly, "I'm Nobody" repeats the desire to be anonymous, to be excluded from the great crowd of "somebodies" and therefore to retreat into isolation.
"I Dwell in Possibility" expresses not so much isolation as it does the extravagance of the speaker's wish that she is not contented with the prosaic kinds of things that other people experience and accept as fulfillment in their lives.
Though it is perhaps not the best approach always to interpret her verse in the light of her biography, Dickinson, as we know, remained unmarried and became increasingly reclusive. "Possibility" for her means something greater than "normal," and this is, in effect, what she achieved in her art, though she didn't live to see any public recognition of it.
All of these factors arguably do not add up to a resistance to the growing democratic, all-embracing ideals of Dickinson's time, as to a removal of herself from such concerns. If we compare her poetry with that of her contemporary Walt Whitman, whose work is constantly dealing with "the people" and Whitman's desire to connect with them, Dickinson's rarefied and isolated viewpoint becomes even more apparent.
That said, a case can admittedly be made that in her tendency to retire from the world, so to speak, to remain invisible and not invite fame, she is expressing the egalitarian ideals of the new nation which the United States still was at that time. She also often appears to reject this world in favor of a life to come, and the hope that in the next life she will find the fulfillment denied her in this one.

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