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This is my letter to the World. That never wrote to Me. The simple News that Nature told, With tender Majesty. Her Message is committed. To Hands I cannot see. For love of Her — Sweet ...
The best This is my letter to the world study guide on the planet. The fastest way to understand the poem's meaning, themes, form, rhyme scheme, meter, and poetic devices.
- Author Biography
- Poem Summary
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- For Further Study
Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830 and lived there all her life. Her grandfather was the founder of Amherst College, and her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer who served as the treasurer of the college. He also held various political offices. Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, was a quiet and frail woman. Dickinson went t...
Lines 1-2
In these lines, the “letter” is a written message, quite possibly meaning this poem or a whole body of poetic work. The letter is addressed to the world, which could be the planet Earthor the whole natural universe; the reading public or the whole human race. It is not clear which specific meaning is intended here, and it is possible that all these meanings are implied. The letter is unrequited, for the speaker never received any letters from the world. Perhaps this is a metaphor for the expe...
Lines 3-4
Here, the speaker humbly stresses the simplicity of the “news,” or new information, contained in the writing. The speaker goes on to claim that the letter’s contents were inspired by the “tender
Media Adaptations
1. There are a variety of recordings available of fellow poets reading Dickinson’s work. Audio cassettes include “Fifty Poems of Emily Dickinson,” “Dickinson and Whitman; Ebb and Flow,” “Heaven Below, Heaven Above,” “The Enlightened Heart” and “Poems and Letters of Emily Dickinson,” all of which are available from the Audiobooks.comwebsite. Majesty,” or delicate power, of nature itself and not by the author’s will alone. If the speaker is an artist, then this statement is in keeping with the...
Alienation and Loneliness
One of the central themes of “This Is My Letter to the World,” is alienation; many readers agree that the poem seems to be written by a speaker who has waited so long for outside contact she finally decides to complete the message for herself. The poem, like many found after her death, balances a love for solitude with a loneliness for outside contact, or as Dickinson says of herself in another piece, it is a “Joy to be Hidden but a Disaster not to be Found.” During Dickinson’s time and still...
Art and Experience
Many critics consider this speaker’s “letter to the world” a metaphor, or analogy, for the role of art itself as a message from poet to reader, dancer to audience, painter to those who stand and gaze with arms crossed. How many times have you heard the question “what is art?” Unlike the cliche answer—that there is no answer, only something to be pondered over espresso in museum coffee shops—a simple but accurate response may be that
Topics for Further Study
1. Dickinson packs whole volumes of interpretation into a poem the size of a matchbook. Although she wasn’t known to read Japanese haiku, her ability to “spread out” in such a small space is reminiscent of the three-line form. Read Basho’s “Falling upon Earth,” included in Volume 2 of this textbook series. Which poem do you feel is more effective at expressing the poet’s emotions? Why? Discuss your answers. 2. Write your own letter to the world, in paragraph form, speaking to a reader who wil...
“This Is My Letter to the World” is a lyric written in two quatrains, or four-line verses, arranged in alternating lines of eight and six iambic syllables, the so-called common meter of the English hymns Dickinson knew from childhood. The uncomplicated syllabic and rhyme systems of common meter allowed Dickinson to showcase the power of language wi...
Emily Dickinson may be one of the few poets we read today who seems to resist her historical context, yet for that same reason she is one of the most personally accessible. With some poets, our full understanding of their work depends heavily upon our understanding of the historical and cultural context surrounding it before each line can expand li...
“This Is My Letter to the World” has received special attention from critics because of the verse’s apparent relevance to Dickinson’s career as a writer. The great Dickinson scholar Thomas H. Johnson, editor of the first complete edition of Dickinson’s poetry and author of the influential book Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography,views the po...
Chris Semansky
Chris Semansky teaches writing and literature at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon, and is a frequent contributor of poems and essays to literary journals. In the following essay, Semansky discusses how “This Is My Letter to the World” provides insights into Dickinson’s poetic identity and philosophy. Written in 1862, the year she tackled the subject of poethood in many of her verses, “This Is My Letter to the World” provides us with a glimpse into how Dickinson thought about the...
What Do I Read Next?
1. Walt Whitman, who lived and wrote during the same period as Dickinson, handled similar themes in an entirely different style. His Leaves of Grass,a book-length poem, is widely available and anthologized. 2. It was common practice for publishers to freely edit and change a writer’s poems before going to print; in some cases, as with Dickinson, what readers viewed barely resembled the poems as she intended. When Harvard University acquired the rights to the Dickinson estate in 1950, they pub...
Donald E. Thackrey
In the following excerpt, Thackrey considers that, for Emily Dickinson, the writing of poetry was a mystical experience. From what origin or impulse in the poet does poetry come? An answer to this question necessitates a brief glance at the poet herself. To any reader of her poems or letters, the emotional resources of Emily Dickinson seem boundless. She exhibits the capacity to experience the fullness and variety of an emotional life which the great mystics testify exists beyond the horizons...
Ferlazzo, Paul, Emily Dickinson,Boston: Twayne, 1976. Garbowsky, Maryanne M., The House without the Door: A Study of Emily Dickinson and the Illness of Agoraphobia,Teaneck, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989. Higgins, David, Portrait of Emily Dickinson: The Poet and Her Prose, New Brunswick, NJ:, Rutgers University Press, 1967. Johnson, ...
Aiken, Conrad, “Emily Dickinson,” in Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays,edited by Richard Sewall, Prentice Hall, Inc., 1963. Boruch, Marianne, “Dickinson Descending” in Poetry’s Old Air, University of MichiganPress, 1995. Dobson, Joanne, Dickinson and the Strategy of Reticence,Indiana University Press, 1989.
Jan 23, 2013 · My letter to the world and other poems. The latest installment in the Visions in Poetry series features the classic poems of Emily Dickinson interpreted--and beautifully rendered by--an outstanding contemporary artist who won the Governor General's Award for Illustration.
Poem analysis of Emily Dickinson’s This Is My Letter To The World through the review of literary techniques, poem structure, themes, and the proper usage of quotes.
In stark contrast to traditional epistolary forms, the poem's recipient is the "World" itself, an impersonal entity that has never communicated with the speaker. Through this unconventional approach, Dickinson examines themes of communication and the futile desire for recognition.
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‘This is my letter to the world’ by Emily Dickinson is a short poem about isolation, a desire for human connection, and the world community. In the first lines of this poem, the speaker describes the act of writing a letter.
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