CP ENGLISH 10• Please have out your note-taking notebooks. Emily

Dickinson will serve as a final inspiration for your poems which are due this Friday.

TODAY WE WILL:- Receive information on course selection.

- Learn the history and inspirations of American Poet, Emily Dickinson.

- Analyze several of her poems for literary devices.- Be exposed to “slant rhyme” a final sound device.

**VOLUNTEERS?PAPER PASS BACK PARTY!

If you were not here yesterday, see me BEFORE the bell!

Emily Dickinson1830 - 1886

Early Life She was born to religious,

well-to-do family and had a normal childhood in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Everyone expected her to marry and raise a family like most women of her class.

This all suddenly changed when she was 24.

She became a poet and recluse.

“Dickinson used precise language and unique poetic forms to simultaneously reveal and conceal her private thoughts and feelings” (Elements of Literature 345).

What happened to turn a young girl into an unrecognized poet who never left her house?

Speculations about Why

Went to DC with her father, a congressman, because she had fallen in love with a married lawyer, who soon died of TB.

There fell in love with another married man, a minister. He moved to San Francisco in 1862. About this time she wrote, “I sing as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.”

What would cause a young woman of 24 suddenly to isolate herself within her yard and house and ignore the world outside?

Return to Amherst

Within a few years, she had retreated from all social life in Amherst. Always wearing white, like the bride she would never be, she remained in her parents’ house and restricted herself to household work and writing poetry, which she would sometimes send to people as gifts for valentines or birthdays, along with a pie or cookies.

· Only a few of her poems were published in her lifetime. She sent four of them to a critic, Mr. Higginson, asking for his help. When he sent suggestions for changing her poems, she replied in a letter, “Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others, as you ask” (Higginson).

After her death, friends and relatives found bundles of her poems, which they edited and “corrected” and had published in installments.

In 1955, Thomas H. Johnson finally published a collection of her poems that had not been “corrected.” These are the versions we read today.

Here are two versions of one stanza of one of her poems. The first is unedited; the second has been “corrected.”

We passed the School, where Children stroveAt recess—in the Ring—We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—We passed the Setting Sun—

We passed the school where children playedTheir lessons scarcely done;We passed the fields of gazing grain,We passed the setting sun.

See the differences? How does the poem change?

Slant Rhyme vs. Exact Rhyme

Slant Rhyme - a close, but not exact, rhyme.

Often leaves the reader feeling uncomfortable.

Examples: Society/Majority, Nerve/Love

**This is the final sound device you may use for your poem projects.

Exact Rhyme - Rhyme in which the final accented vowel and all succeeding consonants or syllables are identical, while the preceding consonants are different.

Examples: great/late; rider/beside her; dutiful/ unbeautiful.

What sort of poet was she?

Dickinson is known for using poetry as private observation.

Her poems are carefully crafted in rhyme and meter.

TODAY…

“The Soul Selects Her Own Society”

“Tell All the Truth But Tell it Slant” “Because I Could Not Stop for

Death” “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died”