Photography. Amherst College
Emily Dickinson is one of most important poets in history of American and universal literature, at the level of his compatriots Edgar Allan Poe or Walt Whitman. Today was born in the city of Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. .
His work was marked by his education, that although among great intellectual figures, it was in a very puritanical environment. From a secluded life, so was his production, which was already edited after his death. But it is better to read it than to talk about it. So there it goes selection of some of the many short poems who wrote.
Emily Dickinson
It was daughter and granddaughter of relevant figures of the time, but that education in a strict and closed environment made her a lonely and nostalgic person. As a result of that he did not have many friends either. Among them was the reverend Charles wadsworth, who greatly influenced his thinking and poetry. Also he admired the poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Keats, as well as the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and that of the novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
His work goes from the conventionalism of its principles in terms of form and content to the sublimation and derivation of love -or unloving- earthly towards God. It is also product of his vital loneliness wanted of her own free will. And sometimes fluctuates between light and transparency and complexity more intellectual. But nothing detracts from your sensitivity. These are some poems that are always short.
Selection of poems
The sky is low
The sky is low, the clouds are ugly;
a snowflake traveler
through a barn or a furrow
debate if it will go.
A skinny wind complains all day
how someone treated him.
Nature, like us, is sometimes trapped
without her headband.
***
Know how to carry our portion at night
Know how to carry our portion at night
or pure morning;
fill our emptiness with contempt,
fill it with bliss.
Here a star, and another star far away:
some get lost.
Here a mist, beyond another mist,
but later the day.
***
It was too late for Man
It was too late for Man
but still early for God
Creation, powerless to help
but the prayer was on our side
How excellent heaven
when the earth cannot be had
How hospitable, then, the face
from our old neighbor, God.
***
Certainty
I've never seen a wasteland
and the sea I never got to see
but I have seen the eyes of the heather
And I know what the waves must be
I have never spoken with God
nor did I visit him in Heaven,
but I'm sure where I'm traveling from
as if they had given me the course.
***
That I always loved
That I always loved
I bring you the proof
that until I loved
I never lived -enough-
that I will always love
I will discuss it with you
what love is life
and life immortality
this -if you doubt it- dear,
so I don't have
nothing to show
except calvary
***
Dream
To escape the earth
a book is the best vessel;
and you travel better in the poem
that in the most spirited and quickest steed
Even the poorest can do it,
nothing for it has to pay:
the soul in the transport of its dream
it is nourished only by silence and peace.
***
In my flower I have hidden
In my flower I have hidden
so that, if you carry me on your chest,
without suspecting it, you were there too ...
And only the angels will know the rest.
In my flower I have hidden
so that, when I slip from your glass,
you, without knowing it, feel
almost the loneliness that I have left you.
***
Dreams are the subtle gift
Dreams are the subtle gift
that makes us rich for an hour
then they throw us poor.
Outside the purple door
In the cold seal
Previously owned.