Featured writer

Today I thought I'd do something a little different: have a look at a writer who has influenced me in some way. I hope to make this a sort of series of posts because there have been a lot of writers who have inspired me, but we'll see how it goes. Today I'm going to tell you about Emily Dickinson.

I came across Emily Dickinson's work back in 2013 when I needed to find a poet to revise for my first year poetry exam. I chose Dickinson because her poems were easy to memorise and I quite liked them. From the one class we had on her, I knew she was something of a shut-in who wrote tons of poems (nearly 1,800 - which her family found after she died). She quite liked Robert and Elizabeth Browning's work as well as Keats. If you want more info on her, I can direct you to this page which has all the bio and trivia facts you might be interested in. I'm not. I only really care about her work, as harsh as that sounds.

The wings of fame.

For the poetry exam I mentioned, I basically picked out a few of Dickinson's poems I really liked and analysed them in detail. These were 'Hope' is the thing with feathers (314), Remorse is memory awake (781), Tell all the truth but tell it slant (1263) and Fame is a bee (1763). You may notice that all of these poems are quite short, which is probably a trend because they were chosen to be written about in my exam and I didn't want to be bogged down trying to remember a really long epic poem. That would just be madness.

Another commonality you might spot between these poems is they are all followed by a number. That's because none (or at least, very few) of Dickinson's poems were titled. The titles given are simply the first lines of the poem (but you figured that out all by yourself, didn't you?) and the number is the order in which it is believed Dickinson wrote these poems. Although the number can change depending on what collection of her work you're reading. For some reason, there exists some contention between some numbers of the poems...

Anyway, last year I made it my goal to write more poetry - which I did. It only recently hit me that, like Emily Dickinson, I did not title them and instead gave them a number. At the time of writing this, I'm up to 250; still nowhere near Emily Dickinson's 1,800 but I'm young.