This paper looks at the transcending reality in Emily Dickinson’s Fascicle Sixteen poems.
This paper discusses the work of Emily Dickinson focusing on her Fascicle Sixteen poems. An overview of the poems is given examining their themes and styles. The authors illustrates how the poems are compelling because of their boldness, their lack of fear, and their willingness to explore forbidden territory. The writer illustrates how although Emily Dickinson may have had little interest in the outer world and its troubles, she explored her own loneliness and her own obsessions mercilessly, then stitched the enigmatic results, and filed them away for eternity.
Emily Dickinson, as far as her biographers can determine, seemed unaware of or unconcerned with the national conflict. Instead, in the same time period, she would experience a tremendous period of artistic production, writing three hundred sixty-six poems in 1862 alone, a six-fold increase over her output in 1858. Eleven of her 1861-1862 poems she would bind in the little hand-sewn bundles she kept in a box under her bed; this collection of terse, conflicted lines is now called Fascicle Sixteen.
Our knowledge of significant events in her life is severely limited. She was not a diarist, and many of the most wrenching moments were purely internal and seemed to have little relationship to outer happenings. She was in her early thirties when Fascicle Sixteen was produced, a time of crisis for many women, especially for unmarried ones a century and a half ago.