ALICE S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

Chapter One Down the Rabbit Hole: Alice is feeling bored

and drowsy while sitting on the riverbank with her older sister,
who is reading a book with no pictures or conversations. She then
notices a White Rabbit wearing a waistcoat and pocket watch,
talking to itself as it runs past. She follows it down a rabbit hole,
but suddenly falls a long way to a curious hall with many locked
doors of all sizes. She finds a small key to a door too small for her
to fit through, but through it she sees an attractive garden. She
then discovers a bottle on a table labelled "DRINK ME", the
contents of which cause her to shrink too small to reach the key,
which she has left on the table. She eats a cake with "EAT ME"
written on it in currants as the chapter closes.

Chapter Two The Pool of Tears: Chapter Two opens with Alice
growing to such a tremendous size that her head hits the ceiling.
Alice is unhappy and, as she cries, her tears flood the hallway.
After shrinking down again due to a fan she had picked up, Alice
swims through her own tears and meets a Mouse, who is
swimming as well. She tries to make small talk with him in
elementary French (thinking he may be a French mouse) but her
opening gambit "O est ma chatte?" ("Where is my cat?") offends
the mouse and he tries to escape her.
Chapter Three The Caucus Race and a Long Tale: The sea
of tears becomes crowded with other animals and birds that have
been swept away by the rising waters. Alice and the other
animals convene on the bank and the question among them is
how to get dry again. The Mouse gives them a very dry lecture
on William the Conqueror. A Dodo decides that the best thing to
dry them off would be a Caucus-Race, which consists of everyone
running in a circle with no clear winner. Alice eventually frightens
all the animals away, unwittingly, by talking about her
(moderately ferocious) cat.
Chapter Four The Rabbit Sends a Little Bill: The White
Rabbit appears again in search of the Duchess's gloves and fan.
Mistaking her for his maidservant, Mary Ann, he orders Alice to go
into the house and retrieve them, but once she gets inside she
starts growing. The horrified Rabbit orders his gardener, Bill the
Lizard, to climb on the roof and go down the chimney. Outside,
Alice hears the voices of animals that have gathered to gawk at
her giant arm. The crowd hurls pebbles at her, which turn into
little cakes. Alice eats them, and make her smaller again.
Chapter Five Advice from a Caterpillar: Alice comes upon a
mushroom; sitting on it is a blue Caterpillar smoking a hookah.
The Caterpillar questions Alice and she admits to her current
identity crisis, compounded by her inability to remember a poem.
Before crawling away, the caterpillar tells Alice that one side of
the mushroom will make her taller and the other side will make
her shorter. She breaks off two pieces from the mushroom. One
side makes her shrink smaller than ever, while another causes her
neck to grow high into the trees, where a pigeon mistakes her for
a serpent. With some effort, Alice brings herself back to her
normal height. She stumbles upon a small estate and uses the
mushroom to reach a more appropriate height.
Chapter Six Pig and Pepper: A Fish-Footman has an invitation
for the Duchess of the house, which he delivers to a Frog-
Footman. Alice observes this transaction and, after a perplexing
conversation with the frog, lets herself into the house. The
Duchess's Cook is throwing dishes and making a soup that has
too much pepper, which causes Alice, the Duchess, and her baby
(but not the cook or grinning Cheshire Cat) to sneeze violently.
Alice is given the baby by the Duchess and to her surprise, the
baby turns into a pig. The Cheshire Cat appears in a tree,
directing her to the March Hare's house. He disappears, but his
grin remains behind to float on its own in the air, prompting Alice
to remark that she has often seen a cat without a grin but never a
grin without a cat.
Chapter Seven A Mad Tea-Party: Alice becomes a guest at a
"mad" tea party along with the March Hare, the Hatter, and a very
tired Dormouse who falls asleep frequently, only to be violently
woken up moments later by the March Hare and the Hatter. The
characters give Alice many riddles and stories, including the
famous "Why is a raven like a writing desk?". The Hatter reveals
that they have tea all day because Time has punished him by
eternally standing still at 6 pm (tea time). Alice becomes insulted
and tired of being bombarded with riddles and she leaves,
claiming that it was the stupidest tea party that she had ever
been to.
Chapter Eight The Queen's Croquet Ground: Alice leaves
the tea party and enters the garden, where she comes upon three
living playing cards painting the white roses on a rose tree red
because The Queen of Hearts hates white roses. A procession of
more cards, kings and queens and even the White Rabbit enters
the garden. Alice then meets the King and Queen. The Queen, a
figure difficult to please, introduces her trademark phrase "Off
with his head!", which she utters at the slightest dissatisfaction
with a subject. Alice is invited (or some might say ordered) to play
a game of croquet with the Queen and the rest of her subjects,
but the game quickly descends into chaos. Live flamingos are
used as mallets and hedgehogs as balls, and Alice once again
meets the Cheshire Cat. The Queen of Hearts then orders the Cat
to be beheaded, only to have her executioner complain that this
is impossible since the head is all that can be seen of him.
Because the cat belongs to the Duchess, the Queen is prompted
to release the Duchess from prison to resolve the matter.
Chapter Nine The Mock Turtle's Story: The Duchess is
brought to the croquet ground at Alice's request. She ruminates
on finding morals in everything around her. The Queen of Hearts
dismisses her with the threat of execution and she introduces
Alice to the Gryphon, who takes her to the Mock Turtle. The Mock
Turtle is very sad, even though he has no sorrow. He tries to tell
his story about how he used to be a real turtle in school, which
the Gryphon interrupts so that they can play a game.
Chapter Ten Lobster Quadrille: The Mock Turtle and the
Gryphon dance to the Lobster Quadrille, while Alice recites (rather
incorrectly) "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster". The Mock Turtle sings
them "Beautiful Soup" during which the Gryphon drags Alice away
for an impending trial.
Chapter Eleven Who Stole the Tarts?: Alice attends a trial in
which the Knave of Hearts is accused of stealing the Queen's
tarts. The jury is composed of various animals, includingBill the
Lizard; the White Rabbit is the court's trumpeter; and the judge is
the King of Hearts. During the proceedings, Alice finds that she is
steadily growing larger. The dormouse scolds Alice and tells her
she has no right to grow at such a rapid pace and take up all the
air. Alice scoffs and calls the dormouse's accusation ridiculous
because everyone grows and she cannot help it. Meanwhile,
witnesses at the trial include the Hatter, who displeases and
frustrates the King through his indirect answers to the
questioning, and the Duchess's cook.
Chapter Twelve Alice's Evidence: Alice is then called up as a
witness. She accidentally knocks over the jury box with the
animals inside, and the King orders the animals to be placed back
into their seats before the trial continues. The King and Queen
order Alice to be gone, citing Rule 42 ("All persons more than a
mile high to leave the court"), but Alice disputes their judgement
and refuses to leave. She argues with the King and Queen of
Hearts over the ridiculous proceedings, eventually refusing to
hold her tongue. The Queen shouts her familiar "Off with her
head!" but Alice is unafraid, calling them out as just a pack of
cards, just as they start to swarm over her. Alice's sister wakes
her up from a dream, brushing what turns out to be some leaves,
and not a shower of playing cards, from Alice's face. Alice leaves
her sister on the bank to imagine all the curious happenings for
herself.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

On Christmas Eve, around 1812,[9] Pip, an orphan who is about

seven years old, encounters an escaped convict in the village
churchyard while visiting the graves of his mother, father and
siblings. The convict scares Pip into stealing food and a file to
grind away his shackles, from the home he shares with his
abusive elder sister and her kind husband Joe Gargery, a
blacksmith. The next day, soldiers recapture the convict while he
is engaged in a fight with another escaped convict; the two are
returned to the prison ships.
Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster who wears an old wedding
dress and lives in the dilapidated Satis House, asks Pip's Uncle
Pumblechook (who is Joe's uncle) to find a boy to visit. Pip visits
Miss Havisham and her adopted daughter Estella, falling in love
with Estella on first sight, both quite young. Pip visits Miss
Havisham regularly until it comes time for him to learn a trade;
Joe accompanies Pip for the last visit when she gives the money
for Pip to be bound as apprentice blacksmith. Pip settles into
learning Joe's trade. When both are away from the house, Mrs. Joe
is brutally attacked, leaving her unable to speak or do her work.
Biddy arrives to help with her care and becomes 'a blessing to the
household'.
Four years into Pip's apprenticeship, Mr. Jaggers, a lawyer,
approaches him in the village with the news that he has
expectations from an anonymous benefactor, with immediate
funds to train him in the gentlemanly arts. He will not know the
benefactor's name until that person speaks up. Pip is to leave for
London in the proper clothes. He assumes that Miss Havisham is
his benefactor. He visits her to say good-bye.
Pip sets up house with Herbert Pocket at Barnard's Inn. Herbert
tells Pip the circumstances of Miss Havisham's romantic
disappointment, her jilting by her fianc. Pip goes to
Hammersmith, to be educated by Mr Matthew Pocket, Herbert's
father. Jaggers disburses the money Pip needs to set himself up in
his new life. Joe visits Pip at Barnard's Inn, where Pip is a bit
ashamed of Joe. Joe relays the message from Miss Havisham that
Estella will be at Satis House for a visit. Pip and Herbert exchange
their romantic secrets - Pip adores Estella and Herbert is engaged
to Clara.
Pip and Herbert build up debts. Mrs Joe dies and Pip returns to his
village for the funeral. Pip's income is fixed at 500 per annum
when he comes of age at twenty-one. Pip takes Estella to Satis
House. She and Miss Havisham quarrel. At the Assembly Ball
in Richmond Estella meets Bentley Drummle, a brute of a man. A
week after he turns 23 years old, Pip learns that his benefactor is
the convict from so long ago, Abel Magwitch, who had
been transported toNew South Wales after that escape. He
became wealthy after gaining his freedom there. As long as he is
out of England, Magwitch can live. But he returns to see Pip. Pip
was his motivation for all his success in New South Wales. Pip is
shocked, ceasing to take money from him. He and Herbert Pocket
devise a plan to get Magwitch out of England, by boat. Magwitch
shares his past history with Pip.
Pip tells Miss Havisham that he is as unhappy as she can ever
have meant him to be. He asks her to finance Herbert Pocket.
Estella tells Pip she will marry Bentley Drummle.
Miss Havisham tells Pip that Estella was brought to her by Jaggers
aged two or three. Before Pip leaves the property, Miss Havisham
accidentally sets her dress on fire. Pip saves her, injuring himself
in the process. She eventually dies from her injuries, lamenting
her manipulation of Estella and Pip. Jaggers tells Pip how he
brought Estella to Miss Havisham from Molly. Pip figures out that
Estella is the daughter of Molly and Magwitch.
A few days before the escape, Joe's former journeyman Orlick
seizes Pip, confessing past crimes as he means to kill Pip. Herbert
Pocket and Startop save Pip and prepare for the escape. On the
river, they are met by a police boat carrying Compeyson for
identification of Magwitch. Compeyson was the other convict
years earlier, and as well, the con artist who wooed and deserted
Miss Havisham. Magwitch seizes Compeyson, and they fight in the
river. Magwitch survives to be taken by police, seriously injured.
Compeyson's body is found later.
Pip visits Magwitch in jail and tells him that his daughter Estella is
alive. Magwitch responds by squeezing Pip's palm and dies soon
after, sparing an execution. After Herbert goes to Cairo, Pip falls ill
in his rooms. He is confronted with arrest for debt; he awakens to
find Joe at his side. Joe nurses Pip back to health and pays off the
debt. As Pip begins to walk about on his own, Joe slips away
home. Pip returns to propose to Biddy, to find that she and Joe
have just married. Pip asks Joe for forgiveness, and Joe forgives
him. As Magwitch's fortune in money and land was seized by the
court, Pip no longer has income. Pip promises to repay Joe.
Herbert asks him to join his firm in Cairo; he shares lodgings with
Herbert and Clara and works as a clerk, advancing over time.
Eleven years later, Pip visits the ruins of Satis House and meets
Estella, widow to the abusive Bentley Drummle. She asks Pip to
forgive her, assuring him that misfortune has opened her heart
and that she now empathises with Pip. As Pip takes Estella's hand
and leaves the ruins of Satis House, he sees "no shadow of
another parting from her."

TESS OF THE DURBERVILLES

Phase the First: The Maiden (111)

The novel is set in impoverished rural England, Thomas Hardy's

fictional Wessex, during the Long Depression of the 1870s. Tess is
the oldest child of John and Joan Durbeyfield, uneducated
peasants; however, John is given the impression by Parson
Tringham that he may have noble blood, since "Durbeyfield" is a
corruption of "D'Urberville", the surname of a
noble Norman family, then extinct. The news immediately goes to
John's head.

That same day, Tess participates in the village May Dance, where
she meets Angel Clare, youngest son of Reverend James Clare,
who is on a walking tour with his two brothers. He stops to join
the dance and partners several other girls. Angel notices Tess too
late to dance with her, as he is already late for a promised
meeting with his brothers. Tess feels slighted.

Tess' father gets too drunk to drive to the market that night, so
Tess undertakes the journey herself. However, she falls asleep at
the reins, and the family's only horse encounters a speeding
wagon and is fatally wounded. Tess feels so guilty over the horse's
death that she agrees, against her better judgement, to visit Mrs
d'Urberville, a rich widow who lives in the nearby town of
Trantridge, and "claim kin". She is unaware that, in reality, Mrs
d'Urberville's husband Simon Stoke adopted the surname even
though he was unrelated to the real d'Urbervilles.

Tess does not succeed in meeting Mrs d'Urberville, but chances to

meet her libertine son, Alec, who takes a fancy to Tess and
secures her a position as poultry keeper on the estate. Tess
dislikes Alec but endures his persistent unwanted attention to
earn enough to replace her family's horse. The threat that Alec
presents to Tess's virtue is obscured for Tess by her inexperience
and almost daily commonplace interactions with him. Late one
night, walking home from town with some other Trantridge
villagers, Tess inadvertently antagonizes Car Darch, Alec's most
recently discarded favourite, and finds herself in physical danger.
When Alec rides up and offers to "rescue" her from the situation,
she accepts. Instead of taking her home, he rides through the fog
until they reach an ancient grove in a forest called "The Chase",
where he informs her that he is lost and leaves on foot to get his
bearings. Alec returns to find Tess asleep, and it is implied that he
rapes her, although there remains a degree of ambiguity. [3] Mary
Jacobus, a commentator on Hardy's works, speculates that the
ambiguity may have been forced on the author to meet the
requirements of his publisher and the "Grundyist" readership of
his time.[4]

Phase the Second: Maiden No More (1215)

Tess goes home to her father's cottage, where she keeps almost
entirely to her room. The following summer, she gives birth to a
sickly boy who lives only a few weeks. On his last night alive,
Tess baptises him herself, because her father would not allow the
parson to visit, stating that he didn't want the parson to "pry into
their affairs". The child is given the name 'Sorrow' and Tess
arranges his burial in the "shabby corner" of the churchyard
reserved for unbaptised infants. Tess adds a homemade cross to
the grave with flowers in an empty marmalade jar.
Phase the Third: The Rally (1624)

More than two years after the Trantridge debacle, Tess, now
twenty, has found employment outside the village, where her past
is not known. She works for Mr. and Mrs. Crick as a milkmaid at
Talbothays Dairy. There, she befriends three of her fellow
milkmaids, Izz, Retty, and Marian, and meets again Angel Clare,
now an apprentice farmer who has come to Talbothays to learn
dairy management. Although the other milkmaids are in love with
him, Angel singles out Tess, and the two fall in love.

Phase the Fourth: The Consequence (2534)

Angel spends a few days away from the dairy, visiting his family
at Emminster. His brothers Felix and Cuthbert, both ordained
Church of England ministers, note Angel's coarsened manners,
while Angel considers them staid and narrow-minded. The Clares
have long hoped that Angel would marry Mercy Chant,
a pious schoolmistress, but Angel argues that a wife who knows
farm life would be a more practical choice. He tells his parents
about Tess, and they agree to meet her. His father, the Reverend
James Clare, tells Angel about his efforts to convert the local
populace, mentioning his failure to tame a young miscreant
named Alec d'Urberville.

Angel returns to Talbothays Dairy and asks Tess to marry him. This
puts Tess in a painful dilemma: Angel obviously thinks her a virgin
and she shrinks from confessing her past. Such is her love for him
that she finally agrees to the marriage, explaining that she
hesitated because she had heard he hated old families and
thought he would not approve of her d'Urberville ancestry.
However, he is pleased by this news because he thinks it will
make their match more suitable in the eyes of his family.

As the marriage approaches, Tess grows increasingly troubled.

She writes to her mother for advice; Joan tells her to keep silent
about her past. Her anxiety increases when a man from
Trantridge, named Groby, recognises her and crudely alludes to
her history. Angel overhears and flies into an uncharacteristic
rage. Tess, deciding to tell Angel the truth, writes a letter
describing her dealings with d'Urberville and slips it under his
door. When Angel greets her with the usual affection the next
morning, she thinks he has forgiven her; later she discovers the
letter under his carpet and realises that he has not seen it. She
destroys it.

The wedding goes smoothly, apart from the omen of a cock

crowing in the afternoon. Tess and Angel spend their wedding
night at an old d'Urberville family mansion, where Angel presents
his bride with diamonds that belonged to his godmother. When he
confesses that he once had a brief affair with an older woman in
London, Tess is moved to tell Angel about Alec, thinking he will
understand and forgive.

Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays (3544)

Angel is appalled by the revelation, and makes it clear that Tess is

reduced in his eyes. He spends the wedding night on a sofa. After
a few awkward days, a devastated Tess suggests they separate,
saying that she will return to her parents. Angel gives her some
money and promises to try to reconcile himself to her past, but
warns her not to try to join him until he sends for her. After a brief
visit to his parents, Angel takes ship for Brazil to start a new life.
Before he leaves, he encounters Tess's milkmaid friend Izz and
impulsively asks her to come to Brazil with him as his mistress.
She accepts, but when he asks her how much she loves him, she
admits "Nobody could love 'ee more than Tess did! She would
have laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more!" Hearing this,
he abandons the whim, and Izz goes home weeping bitterly.

Tess returns home for a time but, finding this unbearable, decides
to join Marian at a starve-acre farm called Flintcomb-Ash; they are
later joined by Izz. On the road, she is again recognised and
insulted by Groby, who proves to be her new employer. At the
farm, the three former milkmaids perform hard physical labour.

One day, Tess attempts to visit Angel's family at the parsonage in

Emminster, hoping for practical assistance. As she nears her
destination, she encounters Angel's older brothers, with Mercy
Chant. They do not recognise her, but she overhears them
discussing Angel's unwise marriage, and dares not approach
them. On the way, she overhears a wandering preacher and is
shocked to discover that it is Alec d'Urberville, who has been
converted to Methodism under the Reverend James Clare's
influence.

Phase the Sixth: The Convert (4552)

Alec and Tess are each shaken by their encounter, and Alec begs
Tess never to tempt him again as they stand beside an ill-omened
stone monument called the Cross-in-Hand. However, Alec soon
comes to Flintcomb-Ash to ask Tess to marry him, and she tells
him she is already married. He begins stalking her, despite
repeated rebuttals, returning at Candlemas and again in early
spring, when Tess is hard at work feeding a threshing machine. He
tells her he is no longer a preacher and wants her to be with him.
When he insults Angel, she slaps him, drawing blood. Tess then
learns from her sister, Liza-Lu, that her father, John, is ill and that
her mother is dying. Tess rushes home to look after them. Her
mother soon recovers, but her father unexpectedly dies from a
heart condition.

The family is evicted from their home, as Durbeyfield held only

a life lease on their cottage. Alec, having followed her to her
home village, tells Tess that her husband is never coming back
and offers to house the Durbeyfields on his estate. Tess refuses
his assistance. She had earlier written Angel a psalm-like letter,
full of love, self-abasement, and pleas for mercy; now, however,
she finally admits to herself that Angel has wronged her and
scribbles a hasty note saying that she will do all she can to forget
him, since he has treated her so unjustly.

The Durbeyfields plan to rent some rooms in the town of

Kingsbere, ancestral home of the d'Urbervilles, but arrive to find
that the rooms have already been rented to another family. All but
destitute, they are forced to take shelter in the churchyard, under
the D'Urberville window. Tess enters the church and in the
d'Urberville Aisle, Alec reappears and importunes Tess again. In
despair, she looks at the entrance to the d'Urberville vault and
wishes herself dead.

In the meantime, Angel has been very ill in Brazil and, his farming
venture having failed, heads home to England. On the way, he
confides his troubles to a stranger, who tells him that he was
wrong to leave his wife; what she was in the past should matter
less than what she might become. Angel begins to repent his
treatment of Tess.

Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment (5359)

Upon his return to his family home, Angel has two letters waiting
for him: Tess's angry note and a few cryptic lines from "two well-
wishers" (Izz and Marian), warning him to protect his wife from
"an enemy in the shape of a friend". He sets out to find Tess and
eventually locates Joan, now well-dressed and living in a pleasant
cottage. After responding evasively to his enquiries, she tells him
Tess has gone to live inSandbourne, a fashionable seaside resort.
There, he finds Tess living in an expensive boarding house under
the name "Mrs. d'Urberville." When he asks for her, she appears
in startlingly elegant attire and stands aloof. He tenderly asks her
forgiveness, but Tess, in anguish, tells him he has come too late;
thinking he would never return, she yielded at last to Alec
d'Urberville's persuasion and has become his mistress. She gently
asks Angel to leave and never come back. He departs, and Tess
returns to her bedroom, where she falls to her knees and begins
a lamentation. She blames Alec for causing her to lose Angel's
love a second time, accusing Alec of having lied when he said that
Angel would never return to her.

The landlady, Mrs. Brooks, tries to listen in at the keyhole, but

withdraws hastily when the argument becomes heated. She later
sees Tess leave the house, then notices a spreading red spot a
bloodstain on the ceiling. She summons help, and Alec is found
stabbed to death in his bed.
Angel, totally disheartened, has left Sandbourne; Tess hurries
after him and tells him that she has killed Alec, saying that she
hopes she has won his forgiveness by murdering the man who
ruined both their lives. Angel doesn't believe her at first, but
grants his forgiveness and tells her that he loves her. Rather than
head for the coast, they walk inland, vaguely planning to hide
somewhere until the search for Tess is ended and they can escape
abroad from a port. They find an empty mansion and stay there
for five days in blissful happiness, until their presence is
discovered one day by the cleaning woman.

They continue walking and, in the middle of the night, stumble

upon Stonehenge, where Tess lies down to rest on an ancient
altar. Before she falls asleep, she asks Angel to look after her
younger sister, Liza-Lu, saying that she hopes Angel will marry her
after she is dead. At dawn, Angel sees that they are surrounded
by police. He finally realises that Tess really has committed
murder and asks the men in a whisper to let her awaken naturally
before they arrest her. When she opens her eyes and sees the
police, she tells Angel she is "almost glad" because "now I shall
not live for you to despise me". Her parting words are, "I am
ready."

Tess is escorted to Wintoncester (Winchester) prison. The novel

closes with Angel and Liza-Lu watching from a nearby hill as the
black flag signalling Tess's execution is raised over the prison.
Angel and Liza-Lu then join hands and go on their way.

Symbolism and themes

Hardy's writing often explores what he called the "ache of

modernism", and this theme is notable in Tess, which, as one
critic noted,[5] portrays "the energy of traditional ways and the
strength of the forces that are destroying them". In depicting this
theme Hardy uses imagery associated with hell when describing
modern farm machinery, as well as suggesting the effete nature
of city life as the milk sent there must be watered down because
townspeople cannot stomach whole milk. Angel's middle-class
fastidiousness makes him reject Tess, a woman whom Hardy
presents as a sort of Wessex Eve, in harmony with the natural
world. When he parts from her and goes to Brazil, the handsome
young man gets so ill that he is reduced to a "mere yellow
skeleton". All these instances have been interpreted as
indications of the negative consequences of man's separation
from nature, both in the creation of destructive machinery and in
the inability to rejoice in pure and unadulterated nature.

On the other hand, Marxist critic Raymond Williams in The English

Novel From Dickens to Lawrence questions the identification of
Tess with a peasantry destroyed by industrialisation. Williams sees
Tess not as a peasant, but as an educated member of the rural
working class, who suffers a tragedy through being thwarted, in
her aspirations to socially rise and her desire for a good life
(which includes love and sex), not by industrialism, but by the
landed bourgeoisie (Alec), liberal idealism (Angel) and Christian
moralism in her family's village (see Chapter LI).

Another important theme of the novel is the sexual double

standard to which Tess falls victim; despite being, in Hardy's view,
a truly good woman, she is despised by society after losing her
virginity before marriage. Hardy plays the role of Tess's only true
friend and advocate, pointedly subtitling the book "a pure woman
faithfully presented" and prefacing it with Shakespeare's words
from The Two Gentlemen of Verona: "Poor wounded name! My
bosom as a bed/ Shall lodge thee." However, although Hardy
clearly means to criticise Victorian notions of female purity, the
double standard also makes the heroine's tragedy possible, and
thus serves as a mechanism of Tess's broader fate. Hardy
variously hints that Tess must suffer either to atone for the
misdeeds of her ancestors, or to provide temporary amusement
for the gods, or because she possesses some small but lethal
character flaw inherited from her ancestors.

Because of the numerous pagan and neo-Biblical references made

about her, Tess has been viewed variously as an Earth goddess or
as a sacrificial victim.[6] For example, early in the novel, she
participates in a festival for Ceres, the goddess of the harvest,
and when she baptises her dead child she chooses a passage
from Genesis, the book of creation, rather than the more
traditional New Testament verses. Then at the end, when Tess and
Angel come to Stonehenge, which was commonly believed in
Hardy's time to be a pagan temple, she willingly lies down on a
stone supposedly associated with human sacrifice.

Tess has also been seen as a personification of nature and her

association with animals throughout the novel emphasizes this
idea. Tess's misfortunes begin when she falls asleep while driving
Prince to market, and causes the horse's death; at Trantridge, she
becomes a poultry-keeper; she and Angel fall in love amid cows in
the fertile Froom valley; and on the road to Flintcombe-Ashe, she
kills some wounded pheasants to end their suffering.

However, Tess emerges as a powerful character not because of

this symbolism but because "Hardy's feelings for her were strong,
perhaps stronger than for any of his other invented personages".

THE SCARLET LETTER

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is an 1850 work of fiction in a

historical setting, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and is
considered to be his "masterwork".[1] Set in 17th-
century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, during the years 1642 to
1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a
daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life
of repentance and dignity. Throughout the book, Hawthorne
explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.

Plot

In June 1642, in the Puritan town of Boston, a crowd gathers to

witness the punishment of Hester Prynne, a young woman found
guilty of adultery. She is required to wear a scarlet "A" ("A"
standing for adulteress) on her dress to shame her. She must
stand on the scaffold for three hours, to be exposed to public
humiliation. As Hester approaches the scaffold, many of the
women in the crowd are angered by her beauty and quiet dignity.
When demanded and cajoled to name the father of her child,
Hester refuses.

As Hester looks out over the crowd, she notices a small,

misshapen man and recognizes him as her long-lost husband,
who has been presumed lost at sea. When the husband sees
Hester's shame, he asks a man in the crowd about her and is told
the story of his wife's adultery. He angrily exclaims that the child's
father, the partner in the adulterous act, should also be punished
and vows to find the man. He chooses a new name Roger
Chillingworth to aid him in his plan.

The Reverend John Wilson and the minister of Hester's church,

Arthur Dimmesdale, question the woman, but she refuses to
name her lover. After she returns to her prison cell, the jailer
brings in Roger Chillingworth, a physician, to xwcalm Hester and
her child with his roots and herbs. He and Hester have an open
conversation regarding their marriage and the fact that they were
both in the wrong. Her lover, however, is another matter and he
demands to know who it is; Hester refuses to divulge such
information. He accepts this, stating that he will find out anyway,
and forces her to hide that he is her husband. If she ever reveals
him, he warns her, he will destroy the child's father. Hester agrees
to Chillingworth's terms although she suspects she will regret it.

Following her release from prison, Hester settles in a cottage at

the edge of town and earns a meager living with her needlework.
She lives a quiet, sombre life with her daughter, Pearl. She is
troubled by her daughter's unusual fascination by Hester's scarlet
"A". As she grows older, Pearl becomes capricious and unruly. Her
conduct starts rumours, and, not surprisingly, the church
members suggest Pearl be ^$)ptaken away from Hester.

Hester, hearing rumors that she may lose Pearl, goes to speak to
Governor Bellingham. With him are ministers Wilson and
Dimmesdale. Hester appeals to Dimmesdale in desperation, and
the minister persuades the governor to let Pearl remain in
Hester's care.
Because Dimmesdale's health has begun to fail, the townspeople
are happy to have Chillingworth, a newly arrived physician, take
up lodgings with their beloved minister. Being in such close
contact with Dimmesdale, Chillingworth begins to suspect that
the minister's illness is the result of some unconfessed guilt. He
applies psychological pressure to the minister because he
suspects Dimmesdale to be Pearl's father. One evening, pulling
the sleeping Dimmesdale's vestment aside, Chillingworth sees a
symbol that represents his shame on the minister's pale chest.

Tormented by his guilty conscience, Dimmesdale goes to the

square where Hester was punished years earlier. Climbing the
scaffold, he admits his guilt to them but cannot find the courage
to do so publicly. Hester, shocked by Dimmesdale's deterioration,
decides to obtain a release from her vow of silence to her
husband.

Several days later, Hester meets Dimmesdale in the forest and

tells him of her husband and his desire for revenge. She convinces
Dimmesdale to leave Boston in secret on a ship to Europe where
they can start life anew. Renewed by this plan, the minister seems
to gain new energy. On Election Day, Dimmesdale gives what is
declared to be one of his most inspired sermons. But as the
procession leaves the church, Dimmesdale climbs upon the
scaffold and confesses his sin, dying in Hester's arms. Later, most
witnesses swear that they saw a stigma in the form of a scarlet
"A" upon his chest, although some deny this statement.
Chillingworth, losing his will for revenge, dies shortly thereafter
and leaves Pearl a substantial inheritance.

After several years, Hester returns to her cottage and resumes

wearing the scarlet letter. When she dies, she is buried near the
grave of Dimmesdale, and they share a simple slate tombstone
engraved with an escutcheon described as: "On a field, sable, the
letter A, gules" ("On a field, black, the letter A, red").

Major theme
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews remarks that Hawthorne in "The Custom-
house" sets the context for his story and "tells us about
'romance', which is his preferred generic term to describe The
Scarlet Letter, as his subtitle for the book 'A Romance' would
indicate." In this introduction, Hawthorne describes a space
between materialism and "dreaminess" that he calls "a neutral
territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where
the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbues itself
with nature of the other". This combination of "dreaminess" and
realism gave the author space to explore major themes.

Other themes

The experience of Hester and Dimmesdale recalls the story

of Adam and Eve because, in both cases, sin results in expulsion
and suffering. But it also results in knowledge specifically, in
knowledge of what it means to be immoral. For Hester, the Scarlet
Letter is a physical manifestation of her sin and reminder of her
painful solitude. She contemplates casting it off to obtain her
freedom from an oppressive society and a checkered past as well
as the absence of God. Because the society excludes her, she
considers the possibility that many of the traditions held up by
the Puritan culture are untrue and are not designed to bring her
happiness.

As for Dimmesdale, the "cheating minister", his sin gives him

"sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind,
so that his chest vibrate[s] in unison with theirs." His eloquent
and powerful sermons derive from this sense of empathy. The
narrative of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is quite in keeping
with the oldest and most fully authorized principles
in Christian thought. His "Fall" is a descent from apparent grace to
his own damnation; he appears to begin in purity but he ends in
corruption. The subtlety is that the minister's belief is his own
cheating, convincing himself at every stage of his
spiritual pilgrimage that he is saved.

The rose bush's beauty forms a striking contrast to all that

surrounds it as later the beautifully embroidered scarlet "A" will
be held out in part as an invitation to find "some sweet moral
blossom" in the ensuing, tragic tale and in part as an image that
"the deep heart of nature" (perhaps God) may look more kind on
the errant Hester and her child than her Puritan neighbors do.
Throughout the work, the nature images contrast with the stark
darkness of the Puritans and their systems.

Chillingworth's misshapen body reflects (or symbolizes) the anger

in his soul, which builds as the novel progresses, similar to the
way Dimmesdale's illness reveals his inner turmoil. The outward
man reflects the condition of the heart; an observation thought to
be inspired by the deterioration of Edgar Allan Poe, whom
Hawthorne "much admired".

Another theme is the extreme legalism of the Puritans and how

Hester chooses not to conform to their rules and beliefs. Hester
was rejected by the villagers even though she spent her life doing
what she could to help the sick and the poor. Because they
rejected her, she spent her life mostly in solitude, and wouldn't go
to church.

As a result, she retreats into her own mind and her own thinking.
Her thoughts begin to stretch and go beyond what would be
considered by the Puritans as safe or even Christian. She still sees
her sin, but begins to look on it differently than the villagers ever
have. She begins to believe that a person's earthly sins don't
necessarily condemn them. She even goes so far as to tell
Dimmesdale that their sin has been paid for by their daily
penance and that their sin won't keep them from getting to
heaven, however, the Puritans believed that such a sin surely
condemns.

But Hester had been alienated from the Puritan society, both in
her physical life and spiritual life. When Dimmesdale dies, she
knows she has to move on because she can no longer conform to
the Puritans' strictness. Her thinking is free from religious bounds
and she has established her own different moral standards and
beliefs.
MOBY DICK

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a novel by American

writer Herman Melville, published in 1851 during the period of
the American Renaissance. Sailor Ishmael tells the story of the
obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for
revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale which on an earlier
voyage destroyed his ship and severed his leg at the knee. The
novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time of the
author's death in 1891, but during the 20th century, its reputation
as aGreat American Novel was established. William
Faulkner confessed he wished he had written it himself, [1] and D.
H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful
books in the world", and "the greatest book of the sea ever
written".[2] "Call me Ishmael" is among world literature's most
famous opening sentences.[3]

The product of a year and a half of writing, the book draws on

Melville's experience at sea, on his reading in whaling literature,
and on literary inspirations such asShakespeare and the Bible.
The white whale is modeled on the notoriously hard to catch
actual albino whale Mocha Dick, and the ending is based on the
sinking of the whaler Essex by a whale. The detailed and realistic
descriptions of whale hunting and of extracting whale oil, as well
as life aboard ship among a culturally diverse crew, are mixed
with exploration of class and social status, good and evil, and
the existence of God. In addition to narrative prose, Melville uses
styles and literary devicesranging from songs, poetry, and
catalogs to Shakespearean stage directions, soliloquies,
and asides.

Dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, "in token of my admiration for

his genius", the work was first published as The
Whale in London in October 1851, and under its definitive title in
New York in November. Hundreds of differences, mostly slight and
some important, are seen between the two editions. The London
publisher censored or changed sensitive passages and Melville
made revisions, as well, including the last-minute change in the
title for the New York edition. The whale, however, appears in
both editions as "Moby Dick", with no hyphen. [4] About 3,200
copies were sold during the author's life.

Plot

The narrator, who calls himself Ishmael, travels in a December

month from Manhattan Island to New Bedford with plans to sign
up for a whaling voyage. The inn where he arrives is so crowded,
he must share a bed with the tattooed Polynesian Queequeg, a
harpooneer whose father was king of the (fictional) island
of Rokovoko. The next morning, Ishmael and Queequeg
attend Father Mapple's sermon on Jonah, then head for Nantucket.
Ishmael signs up with the Quaker ship-
owners Bildad and Peleg for a voyage on their whaler Pequod.
Peleg describes Captain Ahab: "He's a grand, ungodly, god-like
man" who nevertheless "has his humanities". They hire Queequeg
the following morning. A man named Elijah prophesies a dire fate
should Ishmael and Queequeg join Ahab. While provisions are
loaded, shadowy figures board the ship. On a cold Christmas Day,
the Pequod leaves the harbor.

Ishmael discusses cetology (the zoological classification and

natural history of the whale), and describes the crew members.
The chief mate is 30-year-old Starbuck, a Nantucket Quaker with a
realist mentality, whose harpooneer is Queequeg; second mate
is Stubb, from Cape Cod, happy-go-lucky and cheerful, whose
harpooneer isTashtego, a proud, pure-blooded Indian from Gay
Head, and the third mate is Flask, from Martha's Vineyard, short,
stout, whose harpooneer is Daggoo, a tall African, now a resident
of Nantucket.

When Ahab finally appears on the quarterdeck, he announces he

is out for revenge on the white whale which took one leg from the
knee down and left him with a prosthesis fashioned from a
whale's jawbone. Ahab will give the first man to sight Moby Dick
a doubloon, a gold coin, which he nails to the mast. Starbuck
objects that he has not come for vengeance but for profit. Ahab's
purpose exercises a mysterious spell on Ishmael: "Ahab's
quenchless feud seemed mine". Instead of rounding Cape Horn,
Ahab heads for the equatorial Pacific Ocean via southern Africa.
One afternoon, as Ishmael and Queequeg are weaving a mat
"its warp seemed necessity, his hand free will, and Queequeg's
sword chance" Tashtego sights a sperm whale. Immediately,
five hidden figures appear whom Ahab has brought as his own
boat crew. Their leader, Fedallah, a Parsee, is Ahab's harpooneer.
The pursuit is unsuccessful.

Southeast of the Cape of Good Hope, the Pequod makes the first
of nine sea-encounters, or "gams", with other ships: Ahab hails
the Goney (Albatross) to ask whether they have seen the White
Whale, but the trumpet through which her captain tries to speak
falls into the sea before he can answer. Ishmael explains that
because of Ahab's absorption with Moby Dick, he sails on without
the customary "gam", which defines as a "social meeting of two
(or more) Whale-ships", in which the two captains remain on one
ship and the chief mates on the other. In the second gam off the
Cape of Good Hope, with the Town-Ho, a Nantucket whaler, the
concealed story of a "judgment of God" is revealed, but only to
the crew: a defiant sailor who struck an oppressive officer is
flogged, and when that officer led the chase for Moby Dick, he fell
from the boat and was killed by the whale.

Ishmael digresses on pictures of whales, brit (microscopic sea

creatures on which whales feed), squid and after four boats
lowered in vain because Daggoo mistook a giant squidfor the
white whale whale-lines. The next day, in the Indian Ocean,
Stubb kills a sperm whale, and that night Fleece, the Pequod's
black cook, prepares him a rare whale steak. Fleece delivers a
sermon to the sharks that fight each other to feast on the whale's
carcass, tied to the ship, saying that their nature is to be
voracious, but they must overcome it. The whale is prepared,
beheaded, and barrels of oil are tried out. Standing at the head of
the whale, Ahab begs it to speak of the depths of the sea.
The Pequod next encounters theJeroboam, which not only lost its
chief mate to Moby Dick, but also is now plagued by an epidemic.
The whale carcass still lies in the water. Queequeg mounts it, tied
to Ishmael's belt by a monkey-rope as if they were Siamese twins.
Stubb and Flask kill a right whale whose head is fastened to a
yardarm opposite the sperm whale's head. Ishmael compares the
two heads in a philosophical way: the right whale is Lockean,
stoic, and the sperm whale as Kantean,platonic. Tashtego cuts
into the head of the sperm whale and retrieves buckets of oil. He
falls into the head, and the head falls off the yardarm into the sea.
Queequeg dives after him and frees his mate with his sword.

The Pequod next gams with the Jungfrau from Bremen. Both ships
sight whales simultaneously, with the Pequod winning the
contest. The three harpooneers dart their harpoons, and Flask
delivers the mortal strike with a lance. The carcass sinks, and
Queequeg barely manages to escape. The Pequod's next gam is
with the French whaler Bouton de Rose, whose crew is ignorant of
the ambergris in the head of the diseased whale in their
possession. Stubb talks them out of it, but Ahab orders him away.
Days later, an encounter with a harpooned whale prompts Pip, a
little black cabin-boy from Alabama, to jump out of his whale
boat. The whale must be cut loose, because the line has Pip so
entangled in it. Furious, Stubb orders Pip to stay in the whale
boat, but Pip later jumps again, and is left alone in the immense
sea and has gone insane by the time he is picked up.

Cooled sperm oil congeals and must be squeezed back into liquid
state; blubber is boiled in the try-pots on deck; the warm oil is
decanted into casks, and then stowed in the ship. After the
operation, the decks are scrubbed. The coin hammered to the
main mast shows three Andes summits, one with a flame, one
with a tower, and one a crowing cock. Ahab stops to look at the
doubloon and interprets the coin as signs of his firmness, volcanic
energy, and victory; Starbuck takes the high peaks as evidence of
the Trinity; Stubb focuses on the zodiacal arch over the
mountains; and Flask sees nothing of any symbolic value at all.
The Manxman mutters in front of the mast, and Pip declines the
verb "look".
The Pequod next gams with the Samuel Enderby of London,
captained by Boomer, a down-to-earth fellow who lost his right
arm to Moby Dick. Nevertheless, he carries no ill will toward the
whale, which he regards not as malicious, but as awkward. Ahab
puts an end to the gam by rushing back to his ship. The narrator
now discusses the subjects of 1) whalers supply; 2) a glen in
Tranque in the Arsacides islands full of carved whale bones, fossil
whales, whale skeleton measurements; 3) the chance that the
magnitude of the whale will diminish and that the leviathan might
perish.

Leaving the Samuel Enderby, Ahab wrenches his ivory leg and
orders the carpenter to fashion him another. Starbuck informs
Ahab of oil leakage in the hold. Reluctantly, Ahab orders the
harpooneers to inspect the casks. Queequeg, sweating all day
below decks, develops a chill and soon is almost mortally feverish.
The carpenter makes a coffin for Queequeg, who fears an
ordinary burial at sea. Queequeg tries it for size, with Pip sobbing
and beating his tambourine, standing by and calling himself a
coward while he praises Queequeg for his gameness. Yet
Queequeg suddenly rallies, briefly convalesces, and leaps up,
back in good health. Henceforth, he uses his coffin for a spare
seachest, which is later caulked and pitched to replace
the Pequod's life buoy.

The Pequod sails northeast toward Formosa and into the Pacific
Ocean. Ahab, with one nostril, smells the musk from
the Bashee isles, and with the other, the salt of the waters where
Moby Dick swims. Ahab goes to Perth, the blacksmith, with bag of
racehorse shoenail stubs to be forged into the shank of a special
harpoon, and with his razors for Perth to melt and fashion into a
harpoon barb. Ahab tempers the barb in blood from Queequeg,
Tashtego, and Daggoo.

The Pequod gams next with the Bachelor, a Nantucket ship

heading home full of sperm oil. Every now and then,
the Pequod lowers for whales with success. On one of those
nights in the whaleboat, Fedallah prophesies that neither hearse
nor coffin can be Ahab's, that before he dies, Ahab must see two
hearses one not made by mortal hands and the other made of
American wood that Fedallah will precede his captain in death,
and finally that only hemp can kill Ahab.

As the Pequod approaches the Equator, Ahab scolds his quadrant

for telling him only where he is and not where he will be. He
dashes it to the deck. That evening, an
impressive typhoon attacks the ship. Lightning strikes the mast,
setting the doubloon and Ahab's harpoon aglow. Ahab delivers a
speech on the spirit of fire, seeing the lightning as a portent of
Moby Dick. Starbuck sees the lightning as a warning, and feels
tempted to shoot the sleeping Ahab with a musket. Next morning,
when he finds that the lightning disoriented the compass, Ahab
makes a new one out of a lance, a maul, and a sailmaker's
needle. He orders the logbe heaved, but the weathered line
snaps, leaving the ship with no way to fix its location.

The Pequod is now heading southeast toward Moby Dick. A man

falls overboard from the mast. The life buoy is thrown, but both
sink. Now Queequeg proposes that his superfluous coffin be used
as a new life buoy. Starbuck orders the carpenter take care it is
lidded and caulked. Next morning, the ship meets in another
truncated gam with the Rachel, commanded by Captain Gardiner
from Nantucket. The Rachel is seeking survivors from one of her
whaleboats which had gone after Moby Dick. Among the missing
is Gardiner's young son. Ahab refuses to join the search. Twenty-
four hours a day, Ahab now stands and walks the deck, while
Fedallah shadows him. Suddenly, a sea hawk grabs Ahab's
slouched hat and flies off with it. Next, the Pequod, in a ninth and
final gam, meets the Delight, badly damaged and with five of her
crew left dead by Moby Dick. Her captain shouts that the harpoon
which can kill the white whale has yet to be forged, but Ahab
flourishes his special lance and once more orders the ship
forward. Ahab shares a moment of contemplation with Starbuck.
Ahab speaks about his wife and child, calls himself a fool for
spending 40 years on whaling, and claims he can see his own
child in Starbuck's eye. Starbuck tries to persuade Ahab to return
to Nantucket to meet both their families, but Ahab simply crosses
the deck and stands near Fedallah.

On the first day of the chase, Ahab smells the whale, climbs the
mast, and sights Moby Dick. He claims the doubloon for himself,
and orders all boats to lower except for Starbuck's. The whale
bites Ahab's boat in two, tosses the captain out of it, and scatters
the crew. On the second day of the chase, Ahab leaves Starbuck
in charge of the Pequod. Moby Dick smashes the three boats that
seek him into splinters and tangles their lines. Ahab is rescued,
but his ivory leg and Fedallah are lost. Starbuck begs Ahab to
desist, but Ahab vows to slay the white whale, even if he would
have to dive through the globe itself to get his revenge.

On the third day of the chase, Ahab sights Moby Dick at noon, and
sharks appear, as well. Ahab lowers his boat for a final time,
leaving Starbuck again on board. Moby Dick breaches and
destroys two boats. Fedallah's corpse, still entangled in the fouled
lines, is lashed to the whale's back, so Moby Dick turns out to be
the hearse Fedallah prophesied. "Possessed by all the fallen
angels", Ahab plants his harpoon in the whale's flank. Moby Dick
smites the whaleboat, tossing its men into the sea. Only Ishmael
survives. The whale now fatally attacks the Pequod. Ahab then
realizes that the destroyed ship is the hearse made of American
wood in Fedallah's prophesy. The whale returns to Ahab, who
stabs at him again. The line loops around Ahab's neck, and as the
stricken whale swims away, the captain is drawn with him out of
sight. Queequeg's coffin comes to the surface, the only thing to
escape the vortex when Pequod sank. For an entire day, Ishmael
floats on it, and then the Rachel, still looking for its lost seamen,
rescues him.

Structure

Point of view

Critic Walter Bezanson points out that Ishmael is the narrator,

shaping his story with use of many different genres including
sermons, stage plays, soliloquies, and emblematical readings.
[5]
Repeatedly, Ishmael refers to his writing of the book: "'But how
can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random
way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be
naught.'"[6] Scholar John Bryant calls Ishmael the novel's "central
consciousness and narrative voice."[7] Bezanson distinguishes
Ishmael as narrator from Ishmael as character, whom he calls
"forecastle Ishmael", the younger Ishmael of some years ago.
Narrator Ishmael, then, is "merely young Ishmael grown
older."[5] Bezanson further distinguishes Ishmael from the sailor
and author Herman Melville. Neither Ishmael must be equated
with Melville himself, Bezanson warns readers to "resist any one-
to-one equation of Melville and Ishmael." [8]

Chapter structure

According to critic Walter Bezanson, the chapter structure can be

divided into "chapter sequences", "chapter clusters", and
"balancing chapters". The simplest sequences are of narrative
progression, then sequences of theme such as the three chapters
on whale painting, and sequences of structural similarity, such as
the five dramatic chapters beginning with "The Quarter-Deck" or
the four chapters beginning with "The Candles". Chapter clusters
are the chapters on the significance of the colour white, and those
on the meaning of fire. Balancing chapters are chapters of
opposites, such as "Loomings" versus the "Epilogue," or similars,
such as "The Quarter-Deck" and "The Candles". [9]

Scholar Lawrence Buell describes the arrangement of the non-

narrative chapters as structured around three patterns: first, the
nine meetings of the Pequod with ships that have encountered
Moby Dick. Each has been more and more severely damaged,
foreshadowing the Pequod's own fate. Second, the increasingly
impressive encounters with whales. In the early encounters, the
whaleboats hardly make contact; later there are false alarms and
routine chases; finally, the massive assembling of whales at the
edges of the China Sea in "The Grand Armada". A typhoon near
Japan sets the stage for Ahab's confrontation with Moby Dick. The
third pattern is the cetological documentation, so lavish that it
can be divided into two subpatterns. These chapters start with the
ancient history of whaling and a bibliographical classification of
whales, getting closer with second-hand stories of the evil of
whales in general and of Moby Dick in particular, a chronologically
ordered commentary on pictures of whales. The climax to this
section is chapter 57, "Of whales in paint etc.", which begins with
the humble (a beggar in London) and ends with the sublime (the
constellation Cetus). The next chapter ("Brit"), thus the other half
of this pattern, begins with the book's first description of live
whales, and next the anatomy of the sperm whale is studied,
more or less from front to rear and from outer to inner parts, all
the way down to the skeleton. Two concluding chapters set forth
the whale's evolution as a species and claim its eternal nature. [3]

Some "ten or more" of the chapters on whale killings, beginning

at two-fifths of the book, are developed enough to be called
"events". As Bezanson writes, "in each case a killing provokes
either a chapter sequence or a chapter cluster of cetological lore
growing out of the circumstance of the particular killing," thus
these killings are "structural occasions for ordering the whaling
essays and sermons".[10]

Buell observes that the "narrative architecture" is an

"idiosyncratic variant of the bipolar observer/hero narrative", that
is, the novel is structured around the two main characters, Ahab
and Ishmael, who are intertwined and contrasted with each other,
with Ishmael the observer and narrator. [11] As the story of Ishmael,
remarks Robert Milder, it is a "narrative of education". [12]

Bryant and Springer find that the book is structured around the
two consciousnesses of Ahab and Ishmael, with Ahab as a force of
linearity and Ishmael a force of digression. [13] While both have an
angry sense of being orphaned, they try to come to terms with
this hole in their beings in different ways: Ahab with violence,
Ishmael with meditation. And while the plot in Moby-Dick may be
driven by Ahab's anger, Ishmael's desire to get a hold of the
"ungraspable" accounts for the novel's lyricism. [14] Buell sees a
double quest in the book: Ahab's is to hunt Moby Dick, Ishmael's
is "to understand what to make of both whale and hunt". [11]
One of the most distinctive features of the book is the variety of
genres. Bezanson mentions sermons, dreams, travel account,
autobiography, Elizabethan plays, and epic poetry. [15] He calls
Ishmael's explanatory footnotes to establish the documentary
genre "a Nabokovian touch".[16]

The meetings with other ships

A significant structural device is the series of nine meetings with

other ships, important in three ways, first of all their distribution
over the narrative. The first two meetings, as well as the last two,
are close together. The central group of five are "well spaced" by
about 12 chapters with reasonably limited divergences. This
"somewhat mechanical" pattern makes for "a stiffening element"
in the book, as if the encounters are "bones to the book's flesh".
Second, Ahab's response to the sequence of meetings shows the
"rising curve of his passion" so that the meetings form a diagram
of the climactic development of his monomania. Third, in contrast
to Ahab, Ishmael's response is to take each ship individually:
"each ship is a scroll which the narrator unrolls and reads." [10] For
Bezanson, there is no single systematic way to account for the
meaning of all of these ships. Instead, they may be interpreted
variously as "a group of metaphysical parables, a series of biblical
analogues, a masque of the situation confronting man, a pageant
of the humors within men, a parade of the nations, and so
forth,'as well as concrete and symbolic ways of thinking about the
White Whale".[17]

Scholar Nathalia Wright divides the meetings with the vessels

along other lines, singling out "four vessels met by
the Pequod which have already encountered Ahab's quarry".
[18]
The first of these, the Jeroboam, is named after the
predecessor of the biblical King Ahab. Her "prophetic" fate is "a
message of warning to all who follow, articulated by Gabriel and
vindicated by the Samuel Enderby, the Rachel, the Delight, and at
last the Pequod". None of the other ships has been completely
destroyed, because none of the captains shared Ahab's
monomania, so the fate of the Jeroboam reinforces the structural
parallel between Ahab and his biblical namesake: "Ahab did more
to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of
Israel that were before him" (I Kings 16:33).[19]

Themes

One of the early critics of the Melville Revival, British author E. M.

Forster, remarked in 1927: "Moby-Dick is full of meanings: its
meaning is a different problem."[20] Yet he saw as "the essential" in
the book "its prophetic song", which flows "like an undercurrent"
beneath the surface action and morality. [21]

Editors Bryant and Springer suggest perception is a central

theme, the difficulty of seeing and understanding, which makes
deep reality hard to discover and truth hard to pin down. Ahab
explains that, like all things, the evil whale wears a disguise: "All
visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks" and Ahab is
determined to "strike through the mask! How can the prisoner
reach outside, except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the
white whale is that wall" (Ch. 36, "The Quarter-Deck"). This theme
pervades the novel, perhaps never so emphatically as in "The
Doubloon" (Ch. 99), where each crewmember perceives the coin
in a way shaped by his own personality. Later, the American
edition has Ahab "discover no sign" (Ch. 133) of the whale when
he is staring into the deep. In fact, Moby Dick is then swimming
up at him. In the British edition, Melville changed the word
"discover" to "perceive", and with good reason, for "discovery"
means finding what is already there, but "perceiving", or better
still, perception, is "a matter of shaping what exists by the way in
which we see it".[22] The point is not that Ahab would discover the
whale as an object, but that he would perceive it as a symbol of
his making.[22]

Melville biographer Delbanco cites race as an example of this

search for truth beneath surface differences. All races are
represented among the crew members of the Pequod. Although
Ishmael initially is afraid of Queequeg as a tattooed cannibal, he
soon decides, "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken
Christian."[23] While it may be rare for a mid-19th century
American book to feature black characters in a nonslavery
context, slavery is frequently mentioned. The theme of race is
primarily carried by Pip, the diminutive black cabin boy. [24] When
Pip has almost drowned, Ahab, genuinely touched by Pip's
suffering, questions him gently, Pip "can only parrot the language
of an advertisement for the return of a fugitive slave: 'Pip! Reward
for Pip!'".[25]

Yet Melville does not offer easy solutions. Ishmael and Queequeg's
sensual friendship initiates a kind of racial harmony that is
shattered when the crew's dancing erupts into racial conflict in
"Midnight, Forecastle" (Ch. 40).[13] Fifty chapters later, Pip suffers
mental disintegration after he is reminded that as a slave he
would be worth less money than a whale. Commodified and
brutalized, "Pip becomes the ship's conscience." [26] His views of
property are another example of wrestling with moral choice. In
Chapter 89, Ishmael expounds the concept of the fast-fish and the
loose-fish, which gives right of ownership to those who take
possession of an abandoned fish or ship, and observes that the
British Empire took possession of American Indian lands in
colonial times in just the way that whalers take possession of an
unclaimed whale.[27]

Style

An incomplete inventory of the language of Moby-Dick by editors

Bryant and Springer includes "nautical, biblical, Homeric,
Shakespearean, Miltonic, cetological" influences, and his style is
"alliterative, fanciful, colloquial, archaic, and unceasingly
allusive": Melville tests and exhausts the possibilities of grammar,
quotes from a range of well-known or obscure sources, and
swings from calm prose to high rhetoric, technical exposition,
seaman's slang, mystic speculation, or wild prophetic archaism. [28]

The superabundant vocabulary of the work can be broken down

into strategies used individually and in combination. First, the
original modification of words as "Leviathanism" [29] and the
exaggerated repetition of modified words, as in the series
"pitiable", "pity", "pitied" and "piteous" (Ch. 81, "The Pequod
Meets the Virgin"),[30] Second, the use of existing words in new
ways, as when the whale "heaps" and "tasks". [29] Third, words
lifted from specialized fields, as "fossiliferous". [29] Fourth, the use
of unusual adjective-noun combinations, as in "concentrating
brow" and "immaculate manliness" (Ch. 26, "Knights and
Squires").[31] Fifth, using the participial modifier to emphasize and
to reinforce the already established expectations of the reader, as
the words "preluding" and "foreshadowing" ("so still and subdued
and yet somehow preluding was all the scene ...", "In this
foreshadowing interval ...").[30]

Characteristic stylistic elements of another kind are the echoes

and overtones.[32] Responsible for this are both Melville's imitation
of certain distinct styles and his habitual use of sources to shape
his own work. His three most important sources, in order, are the
Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton.[33]

Another notable stylistic element are the several levels of

rhetoric, the simplest of which is "a relatively
straightfoward expository style" that is evident of many passages
in the cetological chapters, though they are "rarely sustained, and
serve chiefly as transitions" between more sophisticated levels.
One of these is the "poetic" level of rhetoric, which Bezanson sees
"well exemplified" in Ahab's quarter-deck soliloquy, to the point
that it can be set as blank verse.[34] Set over a metrical patern, the
rhythms are "evenly controlled--too evenly perhaps for prose,"
Bezanson suggests.[35] A third level of rhetoric is the idiomatic,
and just as the poetic it hardly is present in pure form. Examples
of this are "the consistently excellent idiom" of Stubb, such as in
the way he encourages the rowing crew in a rhythm of speech
that suggests "the beat of the oars takes the place of the
metronomic meter". The fourth and final level of rhetoric is
the composite, "a magnificent blending" of the first three and
possible other elements:

The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone,

in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it
as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his
buisiness, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it
overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as
praisie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs
them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not
the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another
world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman.
With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked
to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of
sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under
his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
("Nantucket," Ch. 14).

This passage, from a chapter that Bezanson calls a comical "prose

poem", blends "high and low with a relaxed assurance". Similar
great passages include the "marvelous hymn to spiritual
democracy" that can be found in the middle of "Knights and
Squires".[36]

The elaborate use of the Homeric simile may not have been
learned from Homer himself, yet Matthiessen finds the writing
"more consistently alive" on the Homeric than on the
Shakespearean level, especially during the final chase the
"controlled accumulation" of such similes emphasizes
Ahab's hubris through a succession of land-images, for instance:
"The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a
cannon-ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare and turns up the
level field" ("The Chase - Second Day," Ch. 134). [37] One
paragraph-long simile describes how the 30 men of the crew
became a single unit:

For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together
of all contrasting things--oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and
pitch, and hemp--yet all these ran into each other in the one
concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed
by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the
crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all
varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that
fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
("The Chase - Second Day," Ch. 134).
The final phrase fuses the two halves of the comparison, the men
become identical with the ship, which follows Ahab's direction.
The concentration only gives way to more imagery, with the
"mastheads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly
tufted with arms and legs". All these images contribute their
"startling energy" to the advance of the narrative. When the boats
are lowered, the imagery serves to dwarf everything but Ahab's
will in the presence of Moby Dick.[37] These similes, with their
astonishing "imaginative abundance," are not only invaluable in
creating the dramatic movement, Matthiessen observes: "They
are no less notable for breadth; and the more sustained among
them, for an heroic dignity."[38]

Assimilation of Shakespeare

The influence of Shakespeare on the book has been analyzed

by F.O. Matthiessen in his 1941 study of the American
Renaissance with such results that almost a half century later
Bezanson still considered him "the richest critic on these
matters."[39] According to Matthiesen, then, Melville's "possession
by Shakespeare went far beyond all other influences" [40] in that it
made Melville discover his own full strength "through the
challenge of the most abundant imagination in history". [40]
[40]
Especially the influence of King Lear and Macbeth has
attracted scholarly attention.[41] On almost every page debts to
Shakespeare can be discovered, whether hard or easy to
recognize. Matthiessen points out that the "mere sounds, full of
Leviathanism, but signifying nothing" at the end of "Cetology"
(Ch.32) echo the famous phrase in Macbeth: "Told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."[40] As Matthiessen
demonstrates, Ahab's first extended speech to the crew, in the
"Quarter-Deck" (Ch.36), is "virtually blank verse, and can be
printed as such":[40]

But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat,

That thing unsays itself. There are men

From whom warm words are small indignity.
I mean not to incense thee. Let it go.
Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn--
Living, breathing pictures painted by the sun.
The pagan leopards--the unrecking and
Unworshipping things, that live; and seek and give

No reason for the torrid life they feel! [42]

Most importantly, through Shakespeare, Melville infused Moby-

Dick with a power of expression he had not previously possessed.
[43]
Reading Shakespeare, Matthiessen observes, had been "a
catalytic agent" for Melville, one that transformed his writing
"from limited reporting to the expression of profound natural
forces".[44] The extent to which Melville was in full possession of
his powers is demonstrated by Matthiessen through the
description of Ahab, which ends in language "that suggests
Shakespeare's but is not an imitation of it: 'Oh, Ahab! what shall
be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked from the skies and
dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!' The
imaginative richness of the final phrase seems particularly
Shakespearean, "but its two key words appear only once each in
the plays ... and to neither of these usages is Melville indebted for
his fresh combination."[45] Melville's assimilation of Shakespeare,
Matthiessen concludes, gave Moby-Dick "a kind of diction that
depended upon no source",[46] and that could, as D.H. Lawrence
put it, convey something "almost superhuman or inhuman, bigger
than life."[47] The prose is not based on anybody else's verse but
on "a sense of speech rhythm".[48]

In addition to this sense of rhythm, Melville acquired verbal

resources which for Matthiessen showd that he "now mastered
Shakespeare's mature secret of how to make language itself
dramatic".[48] He had learned three essential things, Matthiessen
sums up:

To rely on verbs of action, "which lend their dynamic

pressure to both movement and meaning."[48] The effective
tension caused by the contrast of "thou launchest navies of
full-freighted worlds" and "there's that in here that still remains
indifferent" in "The Candles" (Ch. 119) makes the last clause
 lead to a "compulsion to strike the breast", which suggests
"how thoroughly the drama has come to inhere in the
words;"[49]

The Shakespearean energy of verbal compounds was not

lost on him ("full-freighted");

And, finally, Melville learned how to handle "the quickened

sense of life that comes from making one part of speech act as
another for example, 'earthquake' as an adjective, or the
coining of 'placeless', an adjective from a noun." [50]

Background

Autobiographical elements

Moby-Dick is based on Melville's actual experience on a whaler.

On December 30, 1840, he signed on as a green hand for the
maiden voyage of the Acushnet, planned to last for 52 months. Its
owner, Melvin O. Bradford, resembled Bildad, who signed on
Ishmael, in that he was a Quaker: on several instances when he
signed documents, he erased the word "swear" and replaced it
with "affirm".[51] Its captain was Valentine Pease, Jr., who was 43
years old at the start of the voyage. [52] Although 26 men signed up
as crew members, two did not show up for the ship's departure
and were replaced by one new crew member. Five of the crew
were foreigners, four of them Portuguese. The Scottish carpenter
was one of the two who did not show for the ship's departure.
Three black men were in the crew, two seamen and the cook.
Fleece, the cook of the Pequod, was also black, so probably
modeled on this Philadelphia-born William Maiden, who was 38
years old when he signed for the Acushnet.[53]

Only 11 of the 26 original crew members completed the voyage.

The others either deserted or were regularly discharged.
[54]
The First Officer, Frederic Raymond, left the ship after a "fight"
with the captain.[55] A first mate, actually called Edward C.
Starbuck, was on an earlier voyage with Captain Pease, in the
early 1830s, and was discharged at Tahiti under mysterious
circumstances.[56] The second mate on the Acushnet was John
Hall, English-born but a naturalized American. [57] He is identified
as Stubb in an annotation in the book's copy of crew member
Henry Hubbard, who, like Melville, had joined the voyage as a
green hand. Hubbard also identified the model for Pip: John
Backus, a little black man added to the crew during the voyage.
[58]
Hubbard's annotation appears in the chapter "The Castaway"
and reveals that Pip's falling into the water was authentic;
Hubbard was with him in the same boat when the incident
occurred.

Ahab seems to have had no model in real life, though his death
may have been based on an actual event. On May 18, 1843,
Melville was aboard The Star, which sailed for Honolulu. Aboard
were two sailors from the Nantucket who could have told him that
they had seen their second mate "taken out of a whaleboat by a
foul line and drowned".[59] The model for the Whaleman's Chapel
of chapter 7 is the Seamen's Bethel on Johnny Cake Hill. Melville
attended a service there shortly before he shipped out on
the Acushnet, and he heard a sermon by the chaplain, 63-year-old
Reverend Enoch Mudge, who is at least in part the model for
Father Mapple. Even the topic of Jonah and the Whale may be
authentic, for Mudge was a contributor to Sailor's Magazine,
which printed in December 1840 the ninth of a series of sermons
on Jonah.[60]

LEAVES OF GRASS
Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt
Whitman (18191892). Though the first edition was published in
1855, Whitman spent most of his professional life writing and re-
writing Leaves of Grass,[1] revising it multiple times until his death.
This resulted in vastly different editions over four decadesthe
first a small book of twelve poems and the last a compilation of
over 400.
The poems of Leaves of Grass are loosely connected, with each
representing Whitman's celebration of his philosophy of life and
humanity. This book is notable for its discussion of delight in
sensual pleasures during a time when such candid displays were
considered immoral. Where much previous poetry,
especially English, relied onsymbolism, allegory,
and meditation on the religious and spiritual, Leaves of
Grass (particularly the first edition) exalted the body and
the material world. Influenced byRalph Waldo Emerson and
the Transcendentalist movement, itself an offshoot
of Romanticism, Whitman's poetry praises nature and the
individual human's role in it. However, much like Emerson,
Whitman does not diminish the role of the mind or the spirit;
rather, he elevates the human form and the human mind,
deeming both worthy of poetic praise.

With one exception, the poems do not rhyme or follow standard

rules for meter and line length. Among the poems in the collection
are "Song of Myself", "I Sing the Body Electric", "Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking". Later editions included Whitman's elegy to
the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom'd".

Leaves of Grass was highly controversial during its time for its
explicit sexual imagery, and Whitman was subject to derision by
many contemporary critics. Over time, the collection has
infiltrated popular culture and been recognized as one of the
central works of American poetry.

Publication history and origin

Initial publication

Leaves of Grass has its genesis in an essay called The

Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1844, which
expressed the need for the United States to have its own new and
unique poet to write about the new country's virtues and vices.
Whitman, reading the essay, consciously set out to answer
Emerson's call as he began work on the first edition of Leaves of
Grass. Whitman, however, downplayed Emerson's influence,
stating, "I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson
brought me to a boil".[2]

On May 15, 1855, Whitman registered the title Leaves of

Grass with the clerk of the United States District Court, Southern
District of New Jersey, and received its copyright. [3]The first
edition was published in Brooklyn at the printing shop of two
Scottish immigrants, James and Andrew Rome, whom Whitman
had known since the 1840s,[4] on July 4, 1855. The shop was
located at Fulton Street (now Cadman Plaza West) and Cranberry
Street, now the site of apartment buildings that bear Whitman's
name.[5][6] Whitman paid for and did much of the typesetting for
the first edition himself. The book did not include the author's
name, instead offering an engraving by Samuel Hollyer depicting
Whitman in work clothes and a jaunty hat, arms at his side.
[7]
Early advertisements for the first edition appealed to "lovers of
literary curiosities" as an oddity.[8] Sales on the book were few but
Whitman was not discouraged.

The first edition was very small, collecting only twelve unnamed
poems in 95 pages.[9] Whitman once said he intended the book to
be small enough to be carried in a pocket. "That would tend to
induce people to take me along with them and read me in the
open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the
open air", he explained.[10]About 800 were printed,[11] though only
200 were bound in its trademark green cloth cover. [3] The only
American library known to have purchased a copy of the first
edition was in Philadelphia.[12] The poems of the first edition,
which were given titles in later issues, were "Song of Myself", "A
Song for Occupations", "To Think of Time", "The Sleepers", "I Sing
the Body Electric", "Faces", "Song of the Answerer", "Europe: The
72d and 73d Years of These States", "A Boston Ballad", "There
Was a Child Went Forth", "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?" and
"Great Are the Myths".

The title Leaves of Grass was a pun. "Grass" was a term given by
publishers to works of minor value and "leaves" is another name
for the pages on which they were printed. [9]
Whitman sent a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass to
Emerson, the man who had inspired its creation. In a letter to
Whitman, Emerson said "I find it the most extraordinary piece of
wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." [13] He went on, "I
am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy."

Republications

There have been held to be either six or nine editions of Leaves of

Grass, the count depending on how they are distinguished.
Scholars who hold that an edition is an entirely new set of type
will count the 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 187172, and 1881.
Others add in the 1876, 188889, and 189192 (the "deathbed
edition"[14]).

It was Emerson's positive response to the first edition that

inspired Whitman to quickly produce a much-expanded second
edition in 1856,[13] now 384 pages with a cover price of a dollar.
[10]
This edition included a phrase from Emerson's letter, printed
in gold leaf: "I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great
Career."[10] Emerson later took offense that this letter was made
public[15] and would become more critical of the work. [16]

The publishers of the 1860 edition, Thayer and Eldridge,

declared bankruptcy shortly after its publication and were almost
unable to pay Whitman. "In regard to money matters", they
wrote, "we are very short ourselves and it is quite impossible to
send the sum". Whitman received only $250 and the original
plates made their way to Boston publisher Horace Wentworth.
[17]
When the 456-page book was finally issued, Whitman said, "It
is quite 'odd', of course", referring to its appearance: it was bound
in orange cloth with symbols like a rising sun with nine spokes of
light and a butterfly perched on a hand.[18] Whitman claimed that
the butterfly was real in order to foster his image as being 'one
with nature'. In fact, the butterfly was made of cloth; it was
attached to his finger with wire.[19]

The 1867 edition was intended to be, according to Whitman, "a

new & much better edition of Leaves of Grass complete
that unkillable work!"[20] He assumed it would be the final edition.
[21]
The edition, which included the Drum-Taps section and
its Sequel and the new Songs before Parting, was delayed when
the binder went bankrupt and its distributing firm failed. When it
was finally printed, it was a simple edition and the first to omit a
picture of the poet.[22]

In 1879, Richard Worthington purchased the electrotype

plates and began printing and marketing unauthorized copies.

The eighth edition in 1889 was little changed from the 1881
version, though it was more embellished and featured several
portraits of Whitman. The biggest change was the addition of an
"Annex" of miscellaneous additional poems. [23]

"Deathbed edition"

As 1891 came to a close, Whitman prepared a final edition

of Leaves of Grass, writing to a friend upon its completion, "L. of
G. at last complete after 33 y'rs of hackling at it, all times &
moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and
peace & war, young & old".[24] This last version of Leaves of
Grass was published in 1892 and is referred to as the "deathbed
edition".[25] In January 1892, two months before Whitman's death,
an announcement was published in the New York Herald:

Walt Whitman wishes respectfully to notify the public that the

book Leaves of Grass, which he has been working on at great
intervals and partially issued for the past thirty-five or forty years,
is now completed, so to call it, and he would like this new 1892
edition to absolutely supersede all previous ones. Faulty as it is,
he decides it as by far his special and entire self-chosen poetic
utterance.[26]

By the time this last edition was completed, Leaves of Grass had
grown from a small book of 12 poems to a hefty tome of almost
400 poems.[14] As the volume changed, so did the pictures that
Whitman used to illustrate themthe last edition depicts an older
Whitman with a full beard and jacket, appearing more
sophisticated and wise.

Analysis

Whitman's collection of poems in Leaves of Grass is usually

interpreted according to the individual poems contained within its
individual editions. The editions were of varying length, each one
larger and augmented from the previous version, until the final
edition reached over 400 poems. Discussion is often focused also
upon the major editions of Leaves of Grass often associated with
the very early respective versions of 1855 and 1856, to the 1860
edition, and finally to editions very late in Whitman's life which
also included the significant Whitman poem "When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom'd". The 1855 edition is particularly notable
for the inclusion of the two poems "Song of Myself" and "The
Sleepers". The 1856 edition included the notable Whitman poem
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry". In the 1860 edition, Whitman further
added the major poems "A Word Out of the Sea" and "As I Ebb'd
With the Ocean of Life". The specific interpretation of many of
Whitman's major poems may be found in the articles associated
with those individual poems.

Particularly in "Song of Myself", Whitman emphasized an all-

powerful "I" who serves as narrator. The "I" tries to relieve both
social and private problems by using powerful affirmative cultural
images.[27] The emphasis on American culture helped reach
Whitman's intention of creating a distinctly American epic
poem comparable to the works of Homer.[28] Originally written at a
time of significant urbanization in America, Leaves of
Grass responds to the impact urbanization has on the masses.
[29]
However, the title metaphor of grass indicates a pastoral vision
of rural idealism. The poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom'd" is Whitman's elegy to Lincoln after his death. Whitman
was a believer in phrenology (in the 1855 preface to Leaves of
Grass he includes the phrenologist among those he describes as
"the lawgivers of poets"), and borrowed its term "adhesiveness",
which referred to the propensity for friendship and camaraderie.
[30]

Whitman edited, revised, and republished Leaves of Grass many

times before his death, and over the years his focus and ideas
were not static. One critic has identified three major "thematic
drifts" in Leaves of Grass: the period 1855 to 1859, from 1859 to
1865, and from 1866 to his death. In the first period, 1855 to
1859, his major work is "Song of Myself" and it exemplifies his
prevailing love for freedom. "Freedom in nature, nature which is
perfect in time and place and freedom in expression, leading to
the expression of love in its sensuous form." [31] The second period,
from 1859 to 1865, paints the picture of a more melancholic,
sober poet. In poems like "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"
and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", the prevailing
themes are of love and of death. From 1866 to his death, the
ideas Whitman presented in his second period had experienced
an evolution. His focus on death had grown to a focus on
immortality, the major theme of this period. Whitman became
more conservative in his old age, and had come to believe that
the importance of law exceeded the importance of freedom. His
materialistic view of the world became far more spiritual, and
Whitman believed that life had no meaning outside of the context
of Gods plan.[31]

Critical response and controversy

When the book was first published, Whitman was fired from his
job at the Department of the Interior after Secretary of the
Interior James Harlan read it and said he found it offensive.
[25]
Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was said to have thrown his 1855
edition into the fire.[13] Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote, "It is
no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only
that he did not burn it afterwards."[32] Critic Rufus Wilmot
Griswold reviewed Leaves of Grass in the November 10, 1855,
issue of The Criterion, calling it "a mass of stupid filth"[33] and
categorized its author as a filthy free lover.[34] Griswold also
suggested, in Latin, that Whitman was guilty of "that horrible sin
not to be mentioned among Christians", one of the earliest public
accusations of Whitman's homosexuality. [35] Griswold's intensely
negative review almost caused the publication of the second
edition to be suspended.[36] Whitman included the full review,
including the innuendo, in a later edition of Leaves of Grass.[33]

An early review of the first publication focused on the persona of

the anonymous poet, calling him a loafer "with a certain air of
mild defiance, and an expression of pensive insolence on his
face".[7] Another reviewer viewed the work as an odd attempt at
reviving old Transcendental thoughts, "the speculations of that
school of thought which culminated at Boston fifteen or eighteen
years ago."[35] Emerson approved of the work in part because he
considered it a means of reviving Transcendentalism, [37] though
even he urged Whitman to tone down the sexual imagery in 1860.
[38]

On March 1, 1882, Boston district attorney Oliver Stevens wrote to

Whitman's publisher, James R. Osgood, that Leaves of
Grass constituted "obscene literature".[39] Urged by the New
England Society for the Suppression of Vice, his letter said: "We
are of the opinion that this book is such a book as brings it within
the provisions of the Public Statutes respecting obscene literature
and suggest the propriety of withdrawing the same from
circulation and suppressing the editions thereof." Stevens
demanded the removal of the poems "A Woman Waits for Me" and
"To a Common Prostitute", as well as changes to "Song of Myself",
"From Pent-Up Aching Rivers", "I Sing the Body Electric",
"Spontaneous Me", "Native Moments", "The Dalliance of the
Eagles", "By Blue Ontario's Shore", "Unfolded Out of the Folds",
"The Sleepers" and "Faces".

Whitman rejected the censorship, writing to Osgood, "The list

whole & several is rejected by me, & will not be thought of under
any circumstances." Osgood refused to republish the book and
returned the plates to Whitman when suggested changes and
deletions were ignored.[25] The poet found a new publisher, Rees
Welsh & Company, which released a new edition of the book in
1882.[40] Whitman believed the controversy would increase sales,
which proved true. Its banning in Boston, for example, became a
major scandal and it generated much publicity for Whitman and
his work.[41] Though it was also banned by retailers
like Wanamaker's in Philadelphia, this version went through five
editions of 1,000 copies each.[42]Its first printing, released on July
18, sold out in a day.[43]

Not all responses were negative, however. Critic William Michael

Rossetti considered Leaves of Grass a classic along the lines of
the works of William Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri.[44] A woman
from Connecticutnamed Susan Garnet Smith wrote to Whitman to
profess her love for him after reading Leaves of Grass and even
offered him her womb should he want a child. [45] Though he found
much of the language "reckless and indecent", critic and
editor George Ripley believed "isolated portions" of Leaves of
Grass radiated "vigor and quaint beauty".[46]

Whitman firmly believed he would be accepted and embraced by

the populace, especially the working class. Years later, he would
regret not having toured the country to deliver his poetry directly
by lecturing. "If I had gone directly to the people, read my poems,
faced the crowds, got into immediate touch with Tom, Dick, and
Harry instead of waiting to be interpreted, I'd have had my
audience at once," he claimed.[47]

Legacy

Leaves of Grass's status as one of the most important collections

of American poetry has meant that over time various groups and
movements have used it, and Whitman's work in general, to
further their own political and social purposes. In the first half of
the 20th century, the popular Little Blue Book series introduced
Whitmans work to a wider audience than ever before. A series
that backed socialist and progressive viewpoints, the publication
connected the poets focus on the common man to the
empowerment of the working class. During WWII, the American
government distributed for free much of Whitman's poetry to their
soldiers. They believed that his celebrations of the American Way
would inspire the people tasked with protecting it. Whitmans
work has also been claimed in the name of racial equality. In a
preface to the 1946 anthology I Hear the People Singing:Selected
Poems of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes wrote that Whitman's
"all-embracing words lock arms with workers and farmers,
Negroes and whites, Asiatics and Europeans, serfs, and free men,
beaming democracy to all".[48] Similarly, a 1970 volume of
Whitman's poetry published by the United States Information
Agency describes Whitman as a man who will "mix
indiscriminately" with the people. The volume, which was
presented for an international audience, attempted to present
Whitman as representative of an America that accepts people of
all groups.[48]

In popular culture

Leaves of Grass plays a prominent role in the American television

series Breaking Bad. Episode 5.8 (titled "Gliding Over All" after
poem 271 in the book), pulls together many of the series'
references to Leaves of Grass, such as the fact that Walter
White has the same initials as Walt Whitman (as noted in episode
4.4, "Bullet Points", and made more salient in "Gliding Over All"),
that leads Hank Schrader to realize Walt is Heisenberg. Numerous
reviewers have analyzed and discussed the various connections
among Walt Whitman/Leaves of Grass/"Gliding Over All", Walt,
and the show.[49][50][51]

Leaves of Grass plays a major role in the John Green novel Paper
Towns. The 1989 film Dead Poets Society makes repeated
references to the poem "O Captain! My Captain!" from Leaves of
Grass, along with other references to Whitman himself.

American singer Lana Del Rey references Walt Whitman

and Leaves of Grass in her song "Body Electric" from her 2012
EP Paradise. She also quotes some verses from Whitman's "I Sing
the Body Electric" in her 2013 short film Tropico.[52]

In the BYUtv series Granite Flats Season 3, Episode 8, Timothy

gives Madeline a first-edition copy of Leaves of Grass as a
Christmas gift.[53] Many of Walt Whitman's poems are quoted in
season 2 and 3.

In 1997, American President Bill Clinton made a gift of Leaves of

Grass to Monica Lewinsky prior to the unfolding of their affair.[54]

EMILY DICKINSON
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 May 15,
1886) was an American poet. Dickinson was born in Amherst,
Massachusetts. Although part of a prominent family with strong
ties to its community, Dickinson lived much of her life highly
introverted. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven
years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke
Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in
Amherst. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a
noted penchant for white clothing and became known for her
reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her
bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between
her and others depended entirely upon correspondence.

While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of

her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. [2] The
work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered
significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules
of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she
wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often
use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and
punctuation.[3] Many of her poems deal with themes of death and
immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

Although Dickinson's acquaintances were most likely aware of her

writing, it was not until after her death in 1886 when Lavinia,
Dickinson's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems that
the breadth of her work became apparent to the public. Her first
collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal
acquaintancesThomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis
Todd, though both heavily edited the content. A complete, and
mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for
the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The
Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955. Despite some unfavorable
reception and skepticism over the late 19th and early 20th
centuries regarding her literary prowess, Dickinson is now almost
universally considered to be one of the most significant of all
American poets.[4][5]

Life

Family and early childhood

The Dickinson children (Emily on the left), ca. 1840. From the
Dickinson Room at Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at the family's

homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830,
into a prominent, but not wealthy, family. [6] Two hundred years
earlier, her patrilineal ancestors had arrived in the New Worldin
the Puritan Great Migrationwhere they prospered.[7] Emily
Dickinson's paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, had almost
single-handedly founded Amherst College.[8] In 1813, he built the
homestead, a large mansion on the town's Main Street, that
became the focus of Dickinson family life for the better part of a
century.[9] Samuel Dickinson's eldest son, Edward, was treasurer
of Amherst College for nearly forty years, served numerous terms
as a State Legislator, and represented the Hampshire district in
the United States Congress. On May 6, 1828, he married Emily
Norcross from Monson. They had three children:

William Austin (18291895), known as Austin, Aust or Awe

Emily Elizabeth

Lavinia Norcross (18331899), known as Lavinia or Vinnie[10]

By all accounts, young Emily was a well-behaved girl. On an
extended visit to Monson when she was two, Emily's Aunt Lavinia
described Emily as "perfectly well & contentedShe is a very
good child & but little trouble."[11] Emily's aunt also noted the girl's
affinity for music and her particular talent for the piano, which she
called "the moosic".[12]

Dickinson attended primary school in a two-story building on

Pleasant Street.[13] Her education was "ambitiously classical for a
Victorian girl".[14] Her father wanted his children well-educated and
he followed their progress even while away on business. When
Emily was seven, he wrote home, reminding his children to "keep
school, and learn, so as to tell me, when I come home, how many
new things you have learned".[15] While Emily consistently
described her father in a warm manner, her correspondence
suggests that her mother was regularly cold and aloof. In a letter
to a confidante, Emily wrote she "always ran Home to Awe
[Austin] when a child, if anything befell me. He was an awful
Mother, but I liked him better than none."[16]

On September 7, 1840, Dickinson and her sister Lavinia started

together at Amherst Academy, a former boys' school that had
opened to female students just two years earlier. [13] At about the
same time, her father purchased a house on North Pleasant
Street.[17] Emily's brother Austin later described this large new
home as the "mansion" over which he and Emily presided as "lord
and lady" while their parents were absent. [18]The house
overlooked Amherst's burial ground, described by one local
minister as treeless and "forbidding". [17]

Teenage years

They shut me up in Prose

As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet
Because they liked me "still"
 Still! Could themself have peeped
And seen my Brain go round
They might as wise have lodged a
Bird
For Treason in the Pound

Emily Dickinson, c. 1862[19]

Dickinson spent seven years at the Academy, taking classes

in English and classical literature, Latin, botany, geology, history,
"mental philosophy," and arithmetic.[20]Daniel Taggart Fiske, the
school's principal at the time, would later recall that Dickinson
was "very bright" and "an excellent scholar, of exemplary
deportment, faithful in all school duties". [21] Although she had a
few terms off due to illnessthe longest of which was in 1845
1846, when she was enrolled for only eleven weeks[22]she
enjoyed her strenuous studies, writing to a friend that the
Academy was "a very fine school".[23]

Dickinson was troubled from a young age by the "deepening

menace" of death, especially the deaths of those who were close
to her. When Sophia Holland, her second cousin and a close
friend, grew ill from typhus and died in April 1844, Emily was
traumatized.[24] Recalling the incident two years later, Emily wrote
that "it seemed to me I should die too if I could not be permitted
to watch over her or even look at her face." [25] She became so
melancholic that her parents sent her to stay with family
inBoston to recover.[23] With her health and spirits restored, she
soon returned to Amherst Academy to continue her studies.
[26]
During this period, she first met people who were to become
lifelong friends and correspondents, such as Abiah Root, Abby
Wood, Jane Humphrey, and Susan Huntington Gilbert (who later
married Emily's brother Austin).

In 1845, a religious revival took place in Amherst, resulting in

46 confessions of faith among Dickinson's peers.[27] Dickinson
wrote to a friend the following year: "I never enjoyed such perfect
peace and happiness as the short time in which I felt I had found
my savior."[28] She went on to say that it was her "greatest
pleasure to commune alone with the great God & to feel that he
would listen to my prayers."[28] The experience did not last:
Dickinson never made a formal declaration of faith and attended
services regularly for only a few years. [29] After her church-going
ended, about 1852, she wrote a poem opening: "Some keep the
Sabbath going to Church / I keep it, staying at Home".[30]

During the last year of her stay at the Academy, Emily became
friendly with Leonard Humphrey, its popular new young principal.
After finishing her final term at the Academy on August 10, 1847,
Dickinson began attending Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female
Seminary (which later became Mount Holyoke College) in South
Hadley, about ten miles (16 km) from Amherst.[31] She was at the
seminary for only ten months. Although she liked the girls at
Holyoke, Dickinson made no lasting friendships there. [32] The
explanations for her brief stay at Holyoke differ considerably:
either she was in poor health, her father wanted to have her at
home, she rebelled against the evangelical fervor present at the
school, she disliked the discipline-minded teachers, or she was
simply homesick.[33] Whatever the specific reason for leaving
Holyoke, her brother Austin appeared on March 25, 1848, to
"bring [her] home at all events".[34] Back in Amherst, Dickinson
occupied her time with household activities. [35] She took up baking
for the family and enjoyed attending local events and activities in
the budding college town.[36]

Early influences and writing

When she was eighteen, Dickinson's family befriended a young

attorney by the name of Benjamin Franklin Newton. According to
a letter written by Dickinson after Newton's death, he had been
"with my Father two years, before going to Worcester in
pursuing his studies, and was much in our family." [37] Although
their relationship was probably not romantic, Newton was a
formative influence and would become the second in a series of
older men (after Humphrey) that Dickinson referred to, variously,
as her tutor, preceptor or master.[38]

Newton likely introduced her to the writings of William

Wordsworth, and his gift to her of Ralph Waldo Emerson's first
book of collected poems had a liberating effect. She wrote later
that he, "whose name my Father's Law Student taught me, has
touched the secret Spring".[39] Newton held her in high regard,
believing in and recognizing her as a poet. When he was dying
of tuberculosis, he wrote to her, saying that he would like to live
until she achieved the greatness he foresaw. [39] Biographers
believe that Dickinson's statement of 1862"When a little Girl, I
had a friend, who taught me Immortality but venturing too near,
himself he never returned"refers to Newton.[40]

Dickinson was familiar not only with the Bible but also with
contemporary popular literature.[41] She was probably influenced
by Lydia Maria Child's Letters from New York, another gift from
Newton[24] (after reading it, she gushed "This then is a book! And
there are more of them!"[24]). Her brother smuggled a copy
of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Kavanagh into the house for her
(because her father might disapprove)[42] and a friend lent
her Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre in late 1849.[43] Jane Eyre's
influence cannot be measured, but when Dickinson acquired her
first and only dog, a Newfoundland, she named him "Carlo" after
the character St. John Rivers' dog.[43] William Shakespeare was
also a potent influence in her life. Referring to his plays, she wrote
to one friend "Why clasp any hand but this?" and to another,
"Why is any other book needed?"[44]

Adulthood and seclusion

In early 1850, Dickinson wrote that "Amherst is alive with fun this
winter ... Oh, a very great town this is!"[35] Her high spirits soon
turned to melancholy after another death. The Amherst Academy
principal, Leonard Humphrey, died suddenly of "brain congestion"
at age 25.[45] Two years after his death, she revealed to her friend
Abiah Root the extent of her depression:
some of my friends are gone, and some of my friends are
sleeping sleeping the churchyard sleep the hour of evening is
sad it was once my study hour my master has gone to rest,
and the open leaf of the book, and the scholar at school alone,
make the tears come, and I cannot brush them away; I would not
if I could, for they are the only tribute I can pay the departed
Humphrey.[46]

During the 1850s, Emily's strongest and most affectionate

relationship was with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. Emily
eventually sent her over three hundred letters, more than to any
other correspondent, over the course of their friendship. Susan
was supportive of the poet, playing the role of "most beloved
friend, influence, muse, and adviser" whose editorial suggestions
Dickinson sometimes followed, Sue played a primary role in
Emily's creative processes."[47] Sue married Austin in 1856 after a
four-year courtship, though their marriage was not a happy one.
Edward Dickinson built a house for Austin and Sue naming it the
Evergreens, a stand of which was located on the west side of the
Homestead.[48] There is controversy over how to view Emily's
friendship with Susan; according to a point of view first promoted
by Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin's longtime mistress, Emily's
missives typically dealt with demands for Sue's affection and the
fear of unrequited admiration. Todd believed that because Sue
was often aloof and disagreeable, Emily was continually hurt by
what was mostly a tempestuous friendship. [49] However, the
notion of a "cruel" Susanas promoted by her romantic rivalhas
been questioned, most especially by Sue and Austin's surviving
children, with whom Emily was close. [50]

Until 1855, Dickinson had not strayed far from Amherst. That
spring, accompanied by her mother and sister, she took one of
her longest and farthest trips away from home. [51]First, they spent
three weeks in Washington, where her father was
representing Massachusetts in Congress. Then they went
to Philadelphia for two weeks to visit family. In Philadelphia, she
met Charles Wadsworth, a famous minister of the Arch Street
Presbyterian Church, with whom she forged a strong friendship
which lasted until his death in 1882.[52] Despite seeing him only
twice after 1855 (he moved to San Francisco in 1862), she
variously referred to him as "my Philadelphia", "my Clergyman",
"my dearest earthly friend" and "my Shepherd from 'Little
Girl'hood".[53]

In September 2012, the Amherst College Archives and Special

Collections unveiled this daguerreotype, proposing it to be
Dickinson and her friend Kate Scott Turner (ca. 1859); it has not
been authenticated.[54]

From the mid-1850s, Emily's mother became effectively

bedridden with various chronic illnesses until her death in 1882.
[55]
Writing to a friend in summer 1858, Emily said that she would
visit if she could leave "home, or mother. I do not go out at all,
lest father will come and miss me, or miss some little act, which I
might forget, should I run away Mother is much as usual. I Know
not what to hope of her".[56] As her mother continued to decline,
Dickinson's domestic responsibilities weighed more heavily upon
her and she confined herself within the Homestead. Forty years
later, Lavinia stated that because their mother was chronically ill,
one of the daughters had to remain always with her. [56] Emily took
this role as her own, and "finding the life with her books and
nature so congenial, continued to live it". [56]

Withdrawing more and more from the outside world, Emily began
in the summer of 1858 what would be her lasting legacy.
Reviewing poems she had written previously, she began making
clean copies of her work, assembling carefully pieced-together
manuscript books.[57] The forty fascicles she created from 1858
through 1865 eventually held nearly eight hundred poems. [57] No
one was aware of the existence of these books until after her
death.

In the late 1850s, the Dickinsons befriended Samuel Bowles, the

owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican, and his
wife, Mary.[58] They visited the Dickinsons regularly for years to
come. During this time Emily sent him over three dozen letters
and nearly fifty poems.[59] Their friendship brought out some of
her most intense writing and Bowles published a few of her
poems in his journal.[60] It was from 1858 to 1861 that Dickinson is
believed to have written a trio of letters that have been called
"The Master Letters". These three letters, drafted to an unknown
man simply referred to as "Master", continue to be the subject of
speculation and contention amongst scholars. [61]

The first half of the 1860s, after she had largely withdrawn from
social life,[62] proved to be Dickinson's most productive writing
period.[63] Modern scholars and researchers are divided as to the
cause for Dickinson's withdrawal and extreme seclusion. While
she was diagnosed as having "nervous prostration" by a physician
during her lifetime,[64] some today believe she may have suffered
from illnesses as various as agoraphobia[65] and epilepsy.[66]

Is "my Verse ... alive?"

In April 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary critic,

radical abolitionist, and ex-minister, wrote a lead piece for The
Atlantic Monthly entitled, "Letter to a Young Contributor".
Higginson's essay, in which he urged aspiring writers to "charge
your style with life", contained practical advice for those wishing
to break into print.[67] Dickinson's decision to contact Higginson
suggests that by 1862 she was contemplating publication and
that it may have become increasingly difficult to write poetry
without an audience.[68] Seeking literary guidance that no one
close to her could provide, Dickinson sent him a letter which read
in full:[69]

Mr Higginson,
Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?
The Mind is so near itself it cannot see, distinctly and I have
none to ask
Should you think it breathed and had you the leisure to tell me, I
should feel quick gratitude
If I make the mistake that you dared to tell me would give me
sincerer honor toward you
I enclose my name asking you, if you please Sir to tell me
what is true?
That you will not betray me it is needless to ask since Honor is
it's [sic] own pawn

This highly nuanced and largely theatrical letter was unsigned,

but she had included her name on a card and enclosed it in an
envelope, along with four of her poems. [70] He praised her work
but suggested that she delay publishing until she had written
longer, being unaware that she had already appeared in print. She
assured him that publishing was as foreign to her "as Firmament
to Fin", but also proposed that "If fame belonged to me, I could
not escape her".[71] Dickinson delighted in dramatic self-
characterization and mystery in her letters to Higginson. [72] She
said of herself, "I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like
the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the
guest leaves."[73] She stressed her solitary nature, stating that her
only real companions were the hills, the sundown, and her dog,
Carlo. She also mentioned that whereas her mother did not "care
for Thought", her father bought her books, but begged her "not to
read them because he fears they joggle the Mind". [74]

Dickinson valued his advice, going from calling him "Mr.

Higginson" to "Dear friend" as well as signing her letters, "Your
Gnome" and "Your Scholar".[75] His interest in her work certainly
provided great moral support; many years later, Dickinson told
Higginson that he had saved her life in 1862. [76] They
corresponded until her death, but her difficulty in expressing her
literary needs and a reluctance to enter into a cooperative
exchange left Higginson nonplussed; he did not press her to
publish in subsequent correspondence.[77] Dickinson's own
ambivalence on the matter militated against the likelihood of
publication.[78] Literary critic Edmund Wilson, in his review of Civil
War literature, surmised that "with encouragement, she would
certainly have published".[79]

The woman in white

In direct opposition to the immense productivity that she

displayed in the early 1860s, Dickinson wrote fewer poems in
1866.[80] Beset with personal loss as well as loss of domestic help,
Dickinson may have been too overcome to keep up her previous
level of writing.[81] Carlo died during this time after providing
sixteen years of companionship; Dickinson never owned another
dog. Although the household servant of nine years, Margaret O
Brien, had married and left the Homestead that same year, it was
not until 1869 that her family brought in a permanent household
servant, Margaret Maher, to replace the old one.[82] Emily once
again was responsible for chores, including the baking, at which
she excelled.

A solemn thing it was I said

A Woman White to be
And wear if God should count me
fit
Her blameless mystery

Emily Dickinson, c. 1861[83]

Around this time, Dickinson's behavior began to change. She did

not leave the Homestead unless it was absolutely necessary and
as early as 1867, she began to talk to visitors from the other side
of a door rather than speaking to them face to face. [84] She
acquired local notoriety; she was rarely seen, and when she was,
she was usually clothed in white. Dickinson's one surviving article
of clothing is a white cotton dress, possibly sewn circa 1878
1882.[85] Few of the locals who exchanged messages with
Dickinson during her last fifteen years ever saw her in person.
[86]
Austin and his family began to protect Emily's privacy, deciding
that she was not to be a subject of discussion with outsiders.
[87]
Despite her physical seclusion, however, Dickinson was socially
active and expressive through what makes up two-thirds of her
surviving notes and letters. When visitors came to either the
Homestead or the Evergreens, she would often leave or send over
small gifts of poems or flowers.[88]Dickinson also had a good
rapport with the children in her life. Mattie Dickinson, the second
child of Austin and Sue, later said that "Aunt Emily stood
for indulgence."[89]MacGregor (Mac) Jenkins, the son of family
friends who later wrote a short article in 1891 called "A Child's
Recollection of Emily Dickinson", thought of her as always offering
support to the neighborhood children.[89]

When Higginson urged her to come to Boston in 1868 so that they

could formally meet for the first time, she declined, writing:
"Could it please your convenience to come so far as Amherst I
should be very glad, but I do not cross my Father's ground to any
House or town".[90] It was not until he came to Amherst in 1870
that they met. Later he referred to her, in the most detailed and
vivid physical account of her on record, as "a little plain woman
with two smooth bands of reddish hair ... in a very plain &
exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl." [91] He
also felt that he never was "with any one who drained my nerve
power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am
glad not to live near her."[92]

Posies and poesies

Scholar Judith Farr notes that Dickinson, during her lifetime, "was
known more widely as a gardener, perhaps, than as a poet".
[93]
Dickinson studied botany from the age of nine and, along with
her sister, tended the garden at Homestead. [93] During her
lifetime, she assembled a collection of pressed plants in a sixty-
six page leather-bound herbarium. It contained 424 pressed
flower specimens that she collected, classified, and labeled using
the Linnaean system.[94] The Homestead garden was well-known
and admired locally in its time. It has not survived but efforts to
revive it have begun.[95] Dickinson kept no garden notebooks or
plant lists, but a clear impression can be formed from the letters
and recollections of friends and family. Her niece, Martha
Dickinson Bianchi, remembered "carpets of lily-of-the-
valley and pansies, platoons of sweetpeas,hyacinths, enough in
May to give all the bees of summer dyspepsia. There were ribbons
of peony hedges and drifts of daffodils in season, marigolds to
distractiona butterfly utopia".[96] In particular, Dickinson
cultivated scented exotic flowers, writing that she "could inhabit
the Spice Isles merely by crossing the dining room to the
conservatory, where the plants hang in baskets". Dickinson would
often send her friends bunches of flowers with verses attached,
but "they valued the posy more than the poetry". [96]

Later life

On June 16, 1874, while in Boston, Edward Dickinson suffered a

stroke and died. When the simple funeral was held in the
Homestead's entrance hall, Emily stayed in her room with the
door cracked open. Neither did she attend the memorial service
on June 28.[97] She wrote to Higginson that her father's "Heart was
pure and terrible and I think no other like it exists." [98] A year later,
on June 15, 1875, Emily's mother also suffered a stroke, which
produced a partial lateral paralysis and impaired memory.
Lamenting her mother's increasing physical as well as mental
demands, Emily wrote that "Home is so far from Home". [99]

Though the great Waters sleep,

That they are still the Deep,
We cannot doubt
No vacillating God
Ignited this Abode
To put it out

Emily Dickinson, c. 1884[100]

Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly judge on the Massachusetts Supreme

Judicial Court from Salem, in 1872 or 1873 became an
acquaintance of Dickinson's. After the death of Lord's wife in
1877, his friendship with Dickinson probably became a late-life
romance, though as their letters were destroyed, this is surmised.
[101]
Dickinson found a kindred soul in Lord, especially in terms of
shared literary interests; the few letters which survived contain
multiple quotations of Shakespeare's work, including the
playsOthello, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet and King Lear. In
1880 he gave her Cowden Clarke's Complete Concordance to
Shakespeare (1877).[102] Dickinson wrote that "While others go to
Church, I go to mine, for are you not my Church, and have we not
a Hymn that no one knows but us?"[103] She referred to him as "My
lovely Salem"[104] and they wrote to each other religiously every
Sunday. Dickinson looked forward to this day greatly; a surviving
fragment of a letter written by her states that "Tuesday is a
deeply depressed Day".[105]

After being critically ill for several years, Judge Lord died in March
1884. Dickinson referred to him as "our latest Lost". [106] Two years
before this, on April 1, 1882, Dickinson's "Shepherd from 'Little
Girl'hood", Charles Wadsworth, also had died after a long illness.

Decline and death

Although she continued to write in her last years, Dickinson

stopped editing and organizing her poems. She also exacted a
promise from her sister Lavinia to burn her papers. [107] Lavinia,
who also never married, remained at the Homestead until her
own death in 1899.

The 1880s were a difficult time for the remaining Dickinsons.

Irreconcilably alienated from his wife, Austin fell in love in 1882
with Mabel Loomis Todd, an Amherst College faculty wife who had
recently moved to the area. Todd never met Dickinson but was
intrigued by her, referring to her as "a lady whom the people call
the Myth".[108] Austin distanced himself from his family as his affair
continued and his wife became sick with grief. [109] Dickinson's
mother died on November 14, 1882. Five weeks later, Dickinson
wrote "We were never intimate ... while she was our Mother but
Mines in the same Ground meet by tunneling and when she
became our Child, the Affection came." [110] The next year, Austin
and Sue's third and youngest child, GilbertEmily's favoritedied
of typhoid fever.[111]

As death succeeded death, Dickinson found her world upended. In

the fall of 1884, she wrote that "The Dyings have been too deep
for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has
come."[112] That summer she had seen "a great darkness coming"
and fainted while baking in the kitchen. She remained
unconscious late into the night and weeks of ill health followed.
On November 30, 1885, her feebleness and other symptoms were
so worrying that Austin canceled a trip to Boston. [113] She was
confined to her bed for a few months, but managed to send a final
burst of letters in the spring. What is thought to be her last letter
was sent to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross, and simply
read: "Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily". [114] On May 15, 1886,
after several days of worsening symptoms, Emily Dickinson died
at the age of 55. Austin wrote in his diary that "the day was
awful ... she ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before
the [afternoon] whistle sounded for six."[115] Dickinson's chief
physician gave the cause of death as Bright's disease and its
duration as two and a half years.[116]

Dickinson was buried, laid in a white coffin with vanilla-scented

heliotrope, a Lady's Slipper orchid, and a "knot of blue
field violets" placed about it.[96][117] The funeral service, held in the
Homestead's library, was simple and short; Higginson, who had
met her only twice, read "No Coward Soul Is Mine", a poem
by Emily Bront that had been a favorite of Dickinson's. [115] At
Dickinson's request, her "coffin [was] not driven but carried
through fields of buttercups" for burial in the family plot at West
Cemetery on Triangle Street.[93]

Publication

Despite Dickinson's prolific writing, fewer than a dozen of her

poems were published during her lifetime. After her younger
sister Lavinia discovered the collection of nearly 1800 poems,
Dickinson's first volume was published four years after her death.
Until Thomas H. Johnson published Dickinson's Complete Poems in
1955, Dickinson's poems were considerably edited and altered
from their manuscript versions. Since 1890 Dickinson has
remained continuously in print.
Contemporary

A few of Dickinson's poems appeared in Samuel

Bowles' Springfield Republican between 1858 and 1868. They
were published anonymously and heavily edited, with
conventionalized punctuation and formal titles. [118] The first poem,
"Nobody knows this little rose", may have been published without
Dickinson's permission.[119] TheRepublican also published "A
narrow Fellow in the Grass" as "The Snake", "Safe in their
Alabaster Chambers " as "The Sleeping", and "Blazing in the Gold
and quenching in Purple" as "Sunset".[120][121] The poem "I taste a
liquor never brewed " is an example of the edited versions; the
last two lines in the first stanza were completely rewritten. [120]

Original wording Republican version

I taste a liquor never brewed I taste a liquor never brewed
From Tankards scooped in Pearl From Tankards scooped in
Not all the Frankfort Berries Pearl
Yield such an Alcohol! Not Frankfort Berries yield the
sense
Such a delirious whirl!

In 1864, several poems were altered and published in Drum

Beat, to raise funds for medical care for Union soldiers in
the war.[122] Another appeared in April 1864 in theBrooklyn
Daily Union.[123]

In the 1870s, Higginson showed Dickinson's poems to Helen

Hunt Jackson, who had coincidentally been at the Academy
with Dickinson when they were girls. [124] Jackson was deeply
involved in the publishing world, and managed to convince
Dickinson to publish her poem "Success is counted sweetest"
anonymously in a volume called A Masque of Poets.[124] The
poem, however, was altered to agree with contemporary taste.
It was the last poem published during Dickinson's lifetime.
Posthumous

After Dickinson's death, Lavinia Dickinson kept her promise and

burned most of the poet's correspondence. Significantly
though, Dickinson had left no instructions about the 40
notebooks and loose sheets gathered in a locked chest.
[125]
Lavinia recognized the poems' worth and became obsessed
with seeing them published.[126] She turned first to her brother's
wife and then to Mabel Loomis Todd, her brother's mistress, for
assistance.[117] A feud ensued, with the manuscripts divided
between the Todd and Dickinson houses, preventing complete
publication of Dickinson's poetry for more than half a century.
[127]

The first volume of Dickinson's Poems, edited jointly by Mabel

Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, appeared in November 1890.
[128]
Although Todd claimed that only essential changes were
made, the poems were extensively edited to match
punctuation and capitalization to late 19th-century standards,
with occasional rewordings to reduce Dickinson's obliquity.
[129]
The first 115-poem volume was a critical and financial
success, going through eleven printings in two years.
[128]
Poems: Second Series followed in 1891, running to five
editions by 1893; a third series appeared in 1896. One
reviewer, in 1892, wrote: "The world will not rest satisfied till
every scrap of her writings, letters as well as literature, has
been published".[130]

Nearly a dozen new editions of Dickinson's poetry, whether

containing previously unpublished or newly edited poems, were
published between 1914 and 1945.[131] Martha Dickinson
Bianchi, the daughter of Susan and Edward Dickinson,
published collections of her aunt's poetry based on the
manuscripts held by her family, whereas Mabel Loomis Todd's
daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, published collections based
on the manuscripts held by her mother. These competing
editions of Dickinson's poetry, often differing in order and
structure, ensured that the poet's work was in the public's eye.
[132]

The first scholarly publication came in 1955 with a complete

new three-volume set edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Forming
the basis of later Dickinson scholarship,
Johnson'svariorum brought all of Dickinson's known poems
together for the first time.[133] Johnson's goal was to present the
poems very nearly as Dickinson had left them in her
manuscripts.[134] They were untitled, only numbered in an
approximate chronological sequence, strewn with dashes and
irregularly capitalized, and often extremely elliptical in their
language.[135] Three years later, Johnson edited and published,
along with Theodora Ward, a complete collection of Dickinson's
letters, also presented in three volumes.

In 1981, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson was

published. Using the physical evidence of the original papers,
the poems were intended to be published in their original order
for the first time. Editor Ralph W. Franklin relied on smudge
marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the
poet's packets.[134] Since then, many critics have argued for
thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering
of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient.

Dickinson biographer Alfred Habegger wrote in My Wars Are

Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (2001) that
"The consequences of the poet's failure to disseminate her
work in a faithful and orderly manner are still very much with
us".[136]

Poetry

Dickinson's poems generally fall into three distinct periods,

the works in each period having certain general characters
in common.

Pre-1861. These are often conventional

and sentimental in nature.[137] Thomas H. Johnson, who
 later published The Poems of Emily Dickinson, was able to
date only five of Dickinson's poems before 1858. [138]Two of
these are mock valentines done in an ornate and
humorous style, and two others are conventional lyrics,
one of which is about missing her brother Austin. The fifth
poem, which begins "I have a Bird in spring", conveys her
grief over the feared loss of friendship and was sent to
her friend Sue Gilbert.[138]

18611865. This was her most creative periodthese

poems are more vigorous and emotional. Johnson
estimated that she composed 86 poems in 1861, 366 in
1862, 141 in 1863, and 174 in 1864. He also believed that
this is when she fully developed her themes of life and
death.[139]

Post-1866. It is estimated that two-thirds of the entire

body of her poetry was written before this year. [139]
Structure and syntax

The extensive use of dashes and

unconventional capitalization in Dickinson's manuscripts,
and the idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery, combine to
create a body of work that is "far more various in its styles
and forms than is commonly supposed".[3][140] Dickinson
avoids pentameter, opting more generally for trimeter,
tetrameter and, less often, dimeter. Sometimes her use of
these meters is regular, but oftentimes it is irregular. The
regular form that she most often employs is the ballad
stanza, a traditional form that is divided into quatrains,
using tetrameter for the first and third lines and trimeter for
the second and fourth, while rhyming the second and fourth
lines (ABCB). Though Dickinson often uses perfect rhymes
for lines two and four, she also makes frequent use of slant
rhyme.[141] In some of her poems, she varies the meter from
the traditional ballad stanza by using trimeter for lines one,
two and four, while only using tetrameter for line three.
Since many of her poems were written in traditional ballad
stanzas with ABCB rhyme schemes, some of these poems
can be sung to fit the melodies of popular folk songs and
hymns that also use the common meter, employing
alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.
[142]
Familiar examples of such songs are "O Little Town of
Bethlehem" and "Amazing Grace'".

Dickinson scholar and poet Anthony Hecht finds resonances

in Dickinson's poetry not only with hymns and song-forms
but also with psalms and riddles, citing the following
example: "Who is the East? / The Yellow Man / Who may be
Purple if he can / That carries the Sun. / Who is the West? /
The Purple Man / Who may be Yellow if He can / That lets
Him out again."[140]

Late 20th-century scholars are "deeply interested" by

Dickinson's highly individual use of punctuation and
lineation (line lengths and line breaks).[125] Following the
publication of one of the few poems that appeared in her
lifetime "A narrow Fellow in the Grass", published as "The
Snake" in the Republican Dickinson complained that the
edited punctuation (an added comma and a full stop
substitution for the original dash) altered the meaning of the
entire poem.[120]

Original wording Republican version[120]

A narrow Fellow in the Grass A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides Occasionally rides
You may have met Him did you You may have met Him did
not you not,
His notice sudden is His notice sudden is.

As Farr points out, "snakes instantly notice you";

Dickinson's version captures the "breathless immediacy"
of the encounter; and The Republican's punctuation
renders "her lines more commonplace".[125] With the
increasingly close focus on Dickinson's structures and
syntax has come a growing appreciation that they are
"aesthetically based".[125] Although Johnson's landmark
1955 edition of poems was relatively unaltered from the
original, later scholars critiqued it for deviating from the
style and layout of Dickinson's manuscripts. Meaningful
distinctions, these scholars assert, can be drawn from
varying lengths and angles of dash, and differing
arrangements of text on the page.[143] Several volumes
have attempted to render Dickinson's handwritten dashes
using many typographic symbols of varying length and
angle. R. W. Franklin's 1998 variorum edition of the
poems provided alternate wordings to those chosen by
Johnson, in a more limited editorial intervention. Franklin
also used typeset dashes of varying length to
approximate the manuscripts' dashes more closely. [134]

Major themes

Dickinson left no formal statement of her aesthetic

intentions and, because of the variety of her themes, her
work does not fit conveniently into any one genre. She
has been regarded, alongside Emerson (whose poems
Dickinson admired), as a Transcendentalist.[144] However,
Farr disagrees with this analysis, saying that Dickinson's
"relentlessly measuring mind ... deflates the airy
elevation of the Transcendental".[145] Apart from the major
themes discussed below, Dickinson's poetry frequently
uses humor, puns, irony and satire.[146]

Flowers and gardens: Farr notes that Dickinson's

"poems and letters almost wholly concern flowers" and
that allusions to gardens often refer to an "imaginative
realm ... wherein flowers [are] often emblems for actions
and emotions".[147] She associates some flowers,
like gentians and anemones, with youth and humility;
others with prudence and insight.[147] Her poems were
often sent to friends with accompanying letters
and nosegays.[147] Farr notes that one of Dickinson's
earlier poems, written about 1859, appears to "conflate
her poetry itself with the posies": "My nosegays are for
Captives / Dim long expectant eyes / Fingers denied
the plucking, / Patient till Paradise / To such, if they sh'd
whisper / Of morning and the moor / They bear no other
errand, / And I, no other prayer".[147]

The Master poems: Dickinson left a large number of

poems addressed to "Signor", "Sir" and "Master", who is
characterized as Dickinson's "lover for all eternity".
[148]
These confessional poems are often "searing in their
self-inquiry" and "harrowing to the reader" and typically
take their metaphors from texts and paintings of
Dickinson's day.[148] The Dickinson family themselves
believed these poems were addressed to actual
individuals but this view is frequently rejected by
scholars. Farr, for example, contends that the Master is an
unattainable composite figure, "human, with specific
characteristics, but godlike" and speculates that Master
may be a "kind of Christian muse".[148]

Morbidity: Dickinson's poems reflect her "early and

lifelong fascination" with illness, dying and death.
[149]
Perhaps surprisingly for a New England spinster, her
poems allude to death by many methods: "crucifixion,
drowning, hanging, suffocation, freezing, premature
burial, shooting, stabbing and guillotinage". [149] She
reserved her sharpest insights into the "death blow aimed
by God" and the "funeral in the brain", often reinforced by
images of thirst and starvation. Dickinson scholar Vivian
Pollak considers these references an autobiographical
reflection of Dickinson's "thirsting-starving persona", an
outward expression of her needy self-image as small, thin
and frail.[149] Dickinson's most psychologically complex
poems explore the theme that the loss of hunger for life
causes the death of self and place this at "the interface of
murder and suicide".[149]

Gospel poems: Throughout her life, Dickinson wrote

poems reflecting a preoccupation with the teachings of
Jesus Christ and, indeed, many are addressed to him.
[150]
She stresses the Gospels' contemporary pertinence
and recreates them, often with "wit and American
colloquial language".[150] Scholar Dorothy Oberhaus finds
that the "salient feature uniting Christian poets ... is their
reverential attention to the life of Jesus Christ" and
contends that Dickinson's deep structures place her in the
"poetic tradition of Christian devotion"
alongside Hopkins, Eliot and Auden.[150] In a Nativity
poem, Dickinson combines lightness and wit to revisit an
ancient theme: "The Savior must have been / A docile
Gentleman / To come so far so cold a Day / For little
Fellowmen / The Road to Bethlehem / Since He and I were
Boys / Was leveled, but for that twould be / A rugged
billion Miles ".[150]

The Undiscovered Continent: Academic Suzanne

Juhasz considers that Dickinson saw the mind and spirit
as tangible visitable places and that for much of her life
she lived within them.[151] Often, this intensely private
place is referred to as the "undiscovered continent" and
the "landscape of the spirit" and embellished with nature
imagery. At other times, the imagery is darker and
forbiddingcastles or prisons, complete with corridors
and roomsto create a dwelling place of "oneself" where
one resides with one's other selves.[151] An example that
brings together many of these ideas is: "Me from Myself
to banish / Had I Art / Impregnable my Fortress / Unto
All Heart / But since myselfassault Me / How have I
peace / Except by subjugating / Consciousness. / And
since We're mutual Monarch / How this be / Except by
Abdication / Me of Me?".[151]
Reception
Dickinson wrote and sent this poem ("A Route to
Evanescence") to Thomas Higginson in 1880.

The surge of posthumous publication gave Dickinson's

poetry its first public exposure. Backed by Higginson and
with a favorable notice from William Dean Howells, an
editor ofHarper's Magazine, the poetry received mixed
reviews after it was first published in 1890. Higginson
himself stated in his preface to the first edition of
Dickinson's published work that the poetry's quality "is
that of extraordinary grasp and insight", [152] albeit
"without the proper control and chastening" that the
experience of publishing during her lifetime might have
conferred.[153] His judgment that her opus was
"incomplete and unsatisfactory" would be echoed in the
essays of the New Critics in the 1930s.

Maurice Thompson, who was literary editor of The

Independent for twelve years, noted in 1891 that her
poetry had "a strange mixture of rare individuality and
originality".[154]Some critics hailed Dickinson's effort, but
disapproved of her unusual non-traditional style. Andrew
Lang, a British writer, dismissed Dickinson's work, stating
that "if poetry is to exist at all, it really must have form
and grammar, and must rhyme when it professes to
rhyme. The wisdom of the ages and the nature of man
insist on so much".[155] Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a poet and
novelist, equally dismissed Dickinson's poetic technique
in The Atlantic Monthly in January 1892: "It is plain that
Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional
and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the
mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the
mannerism of Emerson ... But the incoherence and
formlessness of her versicles are fatal ... an eccentric,
dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New
England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity
set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar". [156]
Critical attention to Dickinson's poetry was meager from
1897 to the early 1920s.[157] By the start of the 20th
century, interest in her poetry became broader in scope
and some critics began to consider Dickinson as
essentially modern. Rather than seeing Dickinson's poetic
styling as a result of lack of knowledge or skill, modern
critics believed the irregularities were consciously artistic.
[158]
In a 1915 essay, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant called
the poet's inspiration "daring" and named her "one of the
rarest flowers the sterner New England land ever bore".
[159]
With the growing popularity of modernist poetry in the
1920s, Dickinson's failure to conform to 19th-century
poetic form was no longer surprising nor distasteful to
new generations of readers. Dickinson was suddenly
referred to by various critics as a great woman poet, and
a cult following began to form.[160]

In the 1930s, a number of the New Critics among

them R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks and Yvor
Winters appraised the significance of Dickinson's poetry.
As critic Roland Hagenbchle pointed out, their
"affirmative and prohibitive tenets turned out to be of
special relevance to Dickinson scholarship". [161] Blackmur,
in an attempt to focus and clarify the major claims for and
against the poet's greatness, wrote in a landmark 1937
critical essay: "... she was a private poet who wrote as
indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift for
words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her
to poetry instead of antimacassars ... She came... at the
right time for one kind of poetry: the poetry of
sophisticated, eccentric vision."[162]

The second wave of feminism created greater cultural

sympathy for her as a female poet. In the first collection
of critical essays on Dickinson from a feminist
perspective, she is heralded as the greatest woman poet
in the English language.[163] Biographers and theorists of
the past tended to separate Dickinson's roles as a woman
and a poet. For example, George Whicher wrote in his
1952 book This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily
Dickinson, "Perhaps as a poet [Dickinson] could find the
fulfillment she had missed as a woman." Feminist
criticism, on the other hand, declares that there is a
necessary and powerful conjunction between Dickinson
being a woman and a poet.[164] Adrienne Rich theorized
in Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson (1976)
that Dickinson's identity as a woman poet brought her
power: "[she] chose her seclusion, knowing she was
exceptional and knowing what she needed...She carefully
selected her society and controlled the disposal of her
time...neither eccentric nor quaint; she was determined to
survive, to use her powers, to practice necessary
economics."[165]

Some scholars question the poet's sexuality, theorizing

that the numerous letters and poems that were dedicated
to Susan Gilbert Dickinson indicate a lesbian romance,
and speculating about how this may have influenced her
poetry.[166] Critics such as John Cody, Lillian Faderman,
Vivian R. Pollak, Paula Bennett, Judith Farr, Ellen Louise
Hart, and Martha Nell Smith have argued that Susan was
the central erotic relationship in Dickinson's life. [167]

Legacy

In the early 20th century, Dickinson's legacy was

promoted in particular by Martha Dickinson Bianchi and
Millicent Todd Bingham. Bianchi, who had inherited The
Evergreens as well as the copyright for her aunt's poetry
from her parents, published works such as Emily
Dickinson Face to Face and Letters of Emily Dickinson,
which stoked public curiosity about her aunt. Her books
perpetrated the myths surrounding her aunt, while
combining family tradition, personal recollections, and
pieces of correspondence. In comparison, Millicent Todd
Bingham's works provided a more distant and realistic
perspective of the poet.[168]

Emily Dickinson is now considered a powerful and

persistent figure in American culture.[169] Although much
of the early reception concentrated on Dickinson's
eccentric and secluded nature, she has become widely
acknowledged as an innovative, pre-modernist poet.
[170]
As early as 1891, William Dean Howells wrote that "If
nothing else had come out of our life but this strange
poetry, we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson,
America, or New England rather, had made a distinctive
addition to the literature of the world, and could not be
left out of any record of it."[171] Twentieth-century
critic Harold Bloom has placed her alongside Walt
Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot,
and Hart Crane as a major American poet,[4] and in
1994 listed her among the 26 central writers of Western
civilization.[172]

Dickinson is taught in American

literature and poetry classes in the United States from
middle school to college. Her poetry is frequently
anthologized and has been used as texts for art songs by
composers such as Aaron Copland, Nick Peros, John
Adams and Michael Tilson Thomas.[173] Several schools
have been established in her name; for example, two
Emily Dickinson Elementary Schools exist in Bozeman,
Montana,[174] and Redmond, Washington.[175] A few literary
journalsincluding The Emily Dickinson Journal, the
official publication of the Emily Dickinson International
Societyhave been founded to examine her work. [176] An
8-cent commemorative stamp in honor of Dickinson was
issued by the United States Postal Service on August 28,
1971 as the second stamp in the "American Poet" series.
[177]
A one-woman play entitled The Belle of Amherst first
appeared on Broadway in 1976, winning several awards;
it was later adapted for television. [178]
Dickinson's herbarium, which is now held in the Houghton
Library at Harvard University, was published in 2006
as Emily Dickinson's Herbarium by Harvard University
Press.[179]The original work was compiled by Dickinson
during her years at Amherst Academy, and consists of
424 pressed specimens of plants arranged on 66 pages of
a bound album. A digital facsimile of the herbarium is
available online.[180] The town of Amherst Jones Library's
Special Collections department has an Emily Dickinson
Collection consisting of approximately seven thousand
items, including original manuscript poems and letters,
family correspondence, scholarly articles and books,
newspaper clippings, theses, plays, photographs and
contemporary artwork and prints.[181] The Archives and
Special Collections at Amherst College has substantial
holdings of Dickinson's manuscripts and letters as well as
a lock of Dickinson's hair and the original of the only
positively identified image of the poet. In 1965, in
recognition of Dickinson's growing stature as a poet, the
Homestead was purchased by Amherst College. It opened
to the public for tours, and also served as a faculty
residence for many years. The Emily Dickinson
Museum was created in 2003 when ownership of the
Evergreens, which had been occupied by Dickinson family
heirs until 1988, was transferred to the college. [182]