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Emily DickinsonThere's A Certain Slant Of Light
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1890A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
In many ways, Dickinson’s poetry feels ahistorical. Despite living through the American Civil War, her poetry makes no explicit mention of this turmoil. This absence may be explained by geographical, autobiographical, and literary influences. Living in Massachusetts, her day-to-day life was likely unaffected despite Dickinson’s reading of the news about the war. In addition, her immediate family did not serve in the war, as her brother paid a fee rather than enlist. Since she lived more reclusively by the time of the war, her removal from the wider world might also explain this absence. The personal element of her poetry and her focus on small moments might also explain why such a significant historical event is absent from her work.
In contrast, her poetry is deeply grounded in the historical beliefs of the 19th century. Dickinson identified as a Congregationalist, a branch of the Calvinist church. Her most commonly used meter is the same as those used by hymns. This poem’s understanding of faith and despair are important ideas for Christianity at the time. Despair, one of two sins that could prevent a person from being allowed into Heaven, is the ultimate loss of hope. This lack of hope was seen as impossible if one truly believed in Jesus and the promise of an everlasting afterlife.
Critical Context
The critical response to Dickinson’s poetry has largely centered on her distinct use of punctuation, capitalization, and line breaks. Since her death, the editing and publishing of her work has both fascinated and stymied Dickinson scholars.
Upon Dickinson’s death, her sister Lavinia discovered her poetry in a locked chest. As Dickinson had left no instructions for what to do with the 40 notebooks and loose poems, Lavinia became obsessed with publishing Dickinson’s work. To do so, she turned to her brother’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, for help. Loomis Todd, despite having never met Dickinson, was fascinated by her. This partnership quickly breaks down, and the manuscripts are divided between Lavinia and Todd. As a result, there were no complete publications of Dickinson’s poetry for more than 50 years.
Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson edited and published 115 poems in the first volume, Poems, in 1890. The poems were edited extensively. While Todd claimed only essential changes were made, punctuation and capitalization were changed to match the time’s standards, lines were reworded to reduce ambiguity, and all references to Dickinson’s sister-in-law Susan (and Todd’s romantic rival) were deliberately removed.
This volume was a critical and financial success. In two years, the volume went through 11 printings. The second volume, Poems: Second Series, was published in 1891 and went through five editions in the next two years. The third series was published in 1896.
This division of Dickinson’s catalog continued from 1914 to 1945 with the next generation of women. Each family published collections based on the manuscripts their families held. These editions often rearranged both the order of the poems and the structure.
Scholarly work on Dickinson’s poetry became more prevalent in the early 1920s. Some scholars began arguing for Dickinson to be considered an essentially modern poet. The rise in Modernist poetry meant that her lack of conformity to 19th-century conventions was no longer shocking. Her style, rather than being a result of a lack of knowledge or skill, was instead viewed as intentionally and consciously artistic. At this point, she also began to be viewed as a great woman poet and started to develop a cult following.
The first scholarly edition came in 1955. Thomas H. Johnson edited a complete three-volume set that included all of Dickinson’s known poems. His goal was to restore the poems so the poet’s intentions were more accurately reflected. This edition left the poems untitled and numbered chronologically. Despite Johnson’s efforts, some scholars criticize the edition for altering the style and layout of the poems from what was in her manuscripts. The handwritten variations in her dashes, such as clear differences in length and angle, were also left unexamined by Johnson, who standardized them.
Dickinson’s reputation evolved in response to second-wave feminism. An important innovation of this new feminist lens was the consideration of Dickinson as both a woman and a poet instead of separating these aspects of her identity into two distinct categories.
In 1981, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson was published. Ralph W. Franklin examined the physical evidence on the original papers to try to determine their original binding, which might suggest an intended original publishing order. To do this, Franklin examined smudge marks, needle punctures, and other clues to reassemble the smaller packets she had created. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson is the only volume that keeps this order intact, as many scholars argued that these smaller collections would be better served by a thematic organization.
A 1998 edition, edited again by Franklin, used typeset dashes of various lengths to try to reflect Dickinson’s handwritten manuscripts more closely.
Noted 20th-century literary critic Harold Bloom placed Dickinson as the 26th central writer of Western civilization on his 1994 list of 26 writers. He included her among Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, T.S. Elliot, and Hart Crane as one of the major American poets.
Literary Context
Ever since the first publication of her work, Dickinson’s poetry has resisted easy classification. This difficulty could be due in part to her varied influences. She was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets, the Book of Revelation, and the Bible as a whole. She read popular literature, including the works of Charlotte Bronte and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She admired the poetry of Elizabeth Barret Browning, John Keats, and William Wordsworth. She was particularly fond of William Shakespeare’s plays. These varied influences informed the wide style and scope found in Dickinson’s canon.
Broadly, Dickinson could be identified as a Romantic. This movement peaked in Emily’s lifetime, and many of her themes reflect the key characteristics of Romanticism. She often uses natural imagery, focuses on the individual, and celebrates isolation and melancholy. More specifically, Dickinson could be identified as a Transcendentalist. Centered in New England where Dickinson lived, this movement lasted from the 1830 through the 1850s, the peak of Dickinson’s creative production. The movement’s key beliefs center on the ideas that everyone carries the universe in themselves, and each person deserves their own personal relationship with spirituality. These beliefs are apparent not only across her poems, but in “There’s a certain Slant of light” in particular.
Dickinson is also often identified with two emerging movements. Literary Realism focused on representing reality by focusing on the mundane and the everyday, which Dickinson’s work does. However, her consistent use of figurative language, especially personification, make such a categorization incomplete. More commonly, she is considered a proto-Modernist. Modernism didn’t fully emerge until a few years after Dickinson’s death, but her distinct and self-conscious break from the traditions and conventions of writing, especially in her punctuation, capitalization, and syntax, make a convincing case to identify her with the emergence of this movement.
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By Emily Dickinson
