Why Emily Dickinson?
Quantity: Dickinson wrote over 1,789 poems from 1850-1886. She wrote over 1,046 letters from 1842-1886. The collected poems contain over 9,275 unique words and nearly 100,000 word occurrences. Quality: Dickinson tells the truth, but she tells it “slant” (J1129/Fr1263) with allusions, ambiguities, circumlocutions, definitions, humor, irony, and riddles. Her poetic diction has a scriptural basis with more biblical allusions than any other source. Her texts present elevated language, moral values, theological questions, and epic themes, like the writings of Isaiah, William Shakespeare, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Neal A. Maxwell. Manner: Dickinson wrote in nineteenth-century American English, a neglected area in the history of the English language. She inherited the Indo-European bard tradition from the Classical Track at school. She wrote lyric poetry instead of common prose: the tongue of the gods vs. the tongues of men. Her language is aesthetically marked vs. unmarked in all major
