Analysis of Emily Dickinson's Poem #732

This study will examine the poem which begins "She rose to His Requirement - dropt," by Emily Dickinson (also known as poem #732). The study will analyze the formalist and the feminist views of the poem, comparing the two critical approaches, and then arguing that the feminist approach is more able to provide the reader a more full appreciation of the heart and soul of the work.

Dickinson's poem is particularly useful in this study because it offers itself up so willingly to both the formalist and feminist schools. While the formalist approach does help the reader understand the complexities and organization of the work, the feminist approach, again, offers greater insight into the mind of the woman who created the poem.

Cuddon writes that the formalist approach originated in Russia in 1917 and held that "art is primarily a matter of style and technique and that technique is not only the method but the object of art" (Cuddon 277). Formalism, however, evolved into a richer interpretation of poetry in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. The emphasis remained on form and a "close reading and textual analysis" of a poem, disregarding the poet's personality, as well as "sources, the history of ideas and political and social implications" (Cuddon 422). Again, Dickinson's poem is ideal for such analysis because she is a poet who pays meticulous attention to every piece of the poem, so that it appears as a well-oiled machine.

At the same time, she treats the formal aspects

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ore speculative aspects of the work. Certainly the formalist approach misses the important social, economic, cultural and political elements which shout for attention (as much as anything could be said to shout in Dickinson's apparently quiet realm). From the feminist perspective, the poem gives the reader sad insight into what is lost when a woman surrenders her own desires and dreams, her own self in fact, or at least sublimates them to the desires and dreams of the man in her life: She rose to His Requirement---dropt The Playthings of Her Life To take the honorable Work Of Woman, and of Wife--- (Dickinson 218). This is meant to be ironic at best, if not outright cynical. Dickinson's own famous independence makes clear she does not believe in a woman's sublimating herself to serve a man. Dickinson the woman or the poet does not truly believe that a woman's desires are mere "playthings," nor that being a wife is more honorable than a woman's pursuit of her own dreams. To the contrary, her own life demonstrates her belief that a woman--or a man--must pursue his or her individual dreams if he or she is to be fulfilled. The poem suggests that the woman becomes more and more hidden, more and more of herself worn away as her life g

Category: Literature - A