Emily Dickinson’s Essence of Renaissance

Emily Dickinson’s Essence of Renaissance

Miniaci Performing Arts Center

This paper seeks to establish Emily Dickinson’s abnormally isolated life and works as a microcosm of the American Renaissance movement. Emily Dickinson, though largely unread in her own time, is counted among the major forces in the American Renaissance, and in the Transcendentalist movement. Her abnormally isolated life and unique temperament make her life and work a microcosm of the American Renaissance. The paper focuses not on any biographies, or secondary sources, but an analysis of Dickinson's own letters to independently establish the facts of her life. A brief look is given to her literary relationship with Susannah Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, establishing her as an editor and confidant of Emily Dickinson. Poem 1129 ("Tell all the truth but tell it slant") is interpreted as an awareness of writing techniques of the time, namely the preface of the unreliable narrator to works of fiction. In short, Dickinson's poetry, way of life, and work, she is everything that the American Renaissance was, in miniature.