Only So Much Is Certain: Selective Rhyme in Dickinson

Abstract

Emily Dickinson was born into comfortable upper-middle-class, mid-nineteenth-century American life, and although she never shattered any of its social, religious, or gender norms, the way she lived and wrote rattled the windows and doors of her apparently placid domestic environment. As Robin Fraser points out, the topics of her poems are conventional – faith, death, beauty, truth – and their form appears even more so. But in subtle, and radical, ways she unsettles conventional pieties by disrupting literary expectations. She published almost nothing during her lifetime, but subsequent generations recognized the work of a great poet.

Dr. Bruce Greenfield