jnasci.orgjnasci.org/.../noid-essay_on_Dickinson_xodam.docx · Web viewSome consider the word “brethren” in the second stanza as a male religious relation ... which reminds

EMILY DICKINSON’S ‘I DIED FOR BEAUTY’ AN INTERPRETATION

“I died for beauty, but was scarce

Adjusted in the tomb,

When one who died for truth was lain

In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?

“For beauty,” I replied.

“And I for truth, -the two are one;

We brethren are,” he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,

We talked between the rooms,

Until the moss had reached our lips,

And covered up our names.”

There are lots of interpretations about Emily Dickinson’s poetry, especially the one that is

going to be discussed here.

“I Died for Beauty” is a very famous poem among the scholars. This is the story of a timeless

speech between truth and beauty. Some critics consider the ending of this poem a sad one, yet

others consider a happy ending for it. Some give a female sex to the poetic persona of the

poem merely because it has been composed by a female composer. Some consider the word

“brethren” in the second stanza as a male religious relation and some are amazed of using this

word by a poetess.

To put an end to this useless discussion, which reminds us of the endless discussion of the

difference between freewill and determinism, actually we should conclude that in the

spiritualistic realm there is no sex-limitation for beings. They are just sexless beauty and

sexless truth that’s all. They are brethren, regardless of their sexes and their fleshes. They are

beautiful and well-shaped, regardless of their voluptuousness or their ordinariness. They are

the real essence of beauty. As Immanuel Kant believes, “I have every reason to believe that

others, similarly free of their private interests, would arrive at the same judgment of the

Mohammad Reza Yarahmadi PhD Student of University of Tehran - Kish International Campus 2

beautiful.”1 One cannot measure their beauty and their truth with the earthly yardsticks. They

are far from diabolical realm of materialistic world. They relate to the celestial being, a kind

of being even not dependent upon their beings. Since they have reached the spiritual and

eternal world, they are like oceans, although they are only little drops. Every little drop in the

ocean contains all the characteristics and being of the ocean.

Even their being is different from their earthly being, according to John Donne they “Care

less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss,” because they are eternal. In that realm, silence is exactly

talking, and talking is exactly silence. Everything is perfect because it is related and connected

to eternity. In that land of eternity “affliction is a treasure”. “No man is an island, entire if

itself every man is connected and involved in mankind, so he is part of the main. No matter

who is talking, and who is listening. In that land nobody needs talking and nobody needs

listening. Their lips and ears are not made of flesh they are heavenly mouths and heavenly

ears. They listen without listening and talk without talking. People are not known by their

names. Namelessness is not vanishing in the celestial existence. All are going toward

namelessness, a land free from the boundaries of name and reputation. Namelessness does not

mean annihilation. It is the dominance of eternity; they know each other by their nothingness,

by their emptiness. This emptiness is not void. “Being” means to vacate the self from

selfishness, and to escape materialistic self.

In the world of eternity sometime a very small being is far bigger than a huge one. In the

world of mathematics, the illimitable numbers between ‘zero and one’ is equal to the whole

numbers, because we are dealing with infinities. That is why “beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

Some Critical Views

Jennifer A. Bussey

In a critical essay on “I Died for Beauty,” Jennifer A. Bussey discusses the poem. She divides

the poem into two parts, beauty and truth then, she discusses the poet’s treatment of the two in

the poem in a greater context.

She revised some of the themes as Life, Nature, Love, Time and Eternity in Dikinson’s

poems. “Dickinson is known for her preoccupation with death and her tendency at times to

1 Samuel Enoch Stumpf. Socrates to Sartre A history of Philosophy. Fifth Edition. New York: MacGraw-Hill.1993 p.321


slip into the macabre in her treatments of this theme. Dickinson seems to be so comfortable

with her own mortality that she thinks about death in unusual ways, and often in great detail.

She writes about the moment of death, the presence of death, and tombs.”2

Bussey believes that Dickinson creates parallels between beauty and truth. At the beginning

the two newly buried corpuses are delighted and happy in the grave. They are talking to each

other up to the time they are being kept silent by the moss on their lips. In fact they are no

longer talking and no communication is between them. She then interprets the word “for” in

the poem as follows: “There are two ways to interpret ‘‘for’’—the speaker may have died in

the service of or as a sacrifice for beauty, or she may have died in order to attain beauty.”3

Then Bussey relates another poem of Dickinson to “I died for beauty”, ‘‘To tell the beauty

would decrease,/ To state the Spell demean’’ to support her idea and illustrates that explaining

the reasons of beauty would be a heresy, because the realm of beauty and literature is an

unexplainable domain and when a person wants to illustrate abstract ideas like beauty or truth,

he turns a simple mater into an abstruse problem and opaque argument.

Bussey start another argument concerning the effect or the outcome of beauty in a poem by

Dickinson:

In another four-line poem, Dickinson writes: ‘‘So gay a flower bereaved the mind / As if it were

a woe, / Is Beauty an affliction, then? / Tradition ought to know.’’ In these short lines,

Dickinson tells of a flower so beautiful that it is painful to look at it. Beauty, therefore, can be

full of grief ‘‘as if it were a woe.’’ Dickinson juxtaposes the beauty and the onlooker’s reaction,

which leads naturally to the question: ‘‘Is Beauty an affliction, then?’’ She wonders if beauty is

less the joy people believe it to be, and is instead burdensome. Her answer is inconclusive and

likely unsatisfying to many readers: ‘‘Tradition ought to know.’’ In other words, only life

experience and the past can answer that question. Perhaps the answer is different for different

people.4

In her last argument about the poem which is the most relevant to ‘I died for beauty’ in a four-

line poem of Dickinson, Bussey indicates that in the lines “Beauty crowds me till I die,/

Beauty, mercy have on me!/ But if I expire today,/ Let it be in sight of thee.’’, beauty in the

first two lines is pictured as something unkind and invasive.

2 Jennifer A. Bussey, Critical Essay on ‘‘I Died for Beauty,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008.3 ibid4 ibid


This image offers a clear answer to the prior poem’s question: ‘‘Is Beauty an affliction, then?’’

For this speaker, the answer is a resounding yes, although the manifestation of beauty is unclear.

In the last half of the poem, however, she admits to having a need for beauty. She asks beauty

not to leave her if she dies today. The speaker wants to die ‘‘in sight of’’ beauty. The speaker

clearly has intense feelings about beauty, and those feelings figure prominently in her

anticipation of death.

On the whole these three examples and arguments on them introduce beauty as

“simultaneously indefinable, burdensome, intrusive, and comforting”.5 Then she results that

Emily Dickinson has a sophisticated and particular understanding of beauty and its meaning.

Then the critic shifts from beauty to truth in Dickinson’s poem. Bussey says that Dickinson’s

truth “transcends manipulation, logic, or understanding.”…. Dickinson personifies truth as a

woman to whom the crowds of men are irrelevant because she is with God. … What

Dickinson does not make clear is how much she values truth. It seems more like an

overarching force than something she connects with on a personal level. While it seems like

something that is great and enduring, it is difficult to make an argument that her poetry

reflects a belief that it is worthwhile to die for truth. 6

In this critique Bussey concludes that even for Dickinson it hardly seems worth dying for truth

or beauty. “In the end, as Dickinson sees it, people can die under the honorable banners of

beauty and truth, but their deaths go the way of all others. Their expressions go mute, their

bodies decay, and their names are forgotten.”7

Evan Carton

Another critique is by Evan Carton that has said almost nothing about Dickinson’s poem “I

died for beauty”, but it contains some hints about the ideas of Dickinson concerning a critical

overview of her poetry, focusing on the spiritual and philosophical theme of her work.

Dickinson, in the words of several of her critics, writes ‘‘poems of epistemological quest,’’

poems that enact ‘‘radical inquiry,’’ poems that test ‘‘the strength of the imagination against the

stubbornness of life, the repression of an antithetical nature, and that ‘hidden mystery’ with a

supreme reality which at once pervades her most intimate surroundings and remains beyond her

reach; to this end, she effects the odd fusions of homeliness and extravagance which 5 ibid6 ibid7 ibid


characterize her language and her conceptions. Because the supreme or divine reality that

Dickinson pursues is most hidden when it seems immediate and most mysterious when it seems

plain, the pursuit must be wage d by means of paradox, renunciation, and surprise.8

Evan Carton then quotes a beautiful sentence from Dickinson which is very helping.

“Whenever we take up our ideal, Dickinson suggests, whenever we clearly view the

object of our quest, we perceive it to be flawed. Its flaw, however, reflects our own

limitation or failure.’’

Carton asks a question about Dickinson’s faith, whether Emily Dickinson by nature was a

pagan? That is, was she irreligious?” he considers it something strange from the first look. It

is a faith of a little child. “She addresses the Almighty as ‘‘Papa above,’’ ‘‘our hospitable old

neighbor,’’ ‘‘the Jehovah who never takes a nap.’’ At times she was petulant and pouting—in

short, childish. She liked to regard herself some-what kittenishly as God’s ‘‘old- fashioned,

naughty’’ little girl. Of course she was not always childish. It is undeniable that albeit her faith

was simple, at the same time, it was very strong and an unbreakable one. “She was a mystic

also in the religious sense of the term—a Christian mystic.’’9

“Her own faith was equally confiding; it was a bridge without piers, which bore her bold soul

over its ‘‘unshakeable span of steel to the mysterious, yet certain Isle s of the Blest.’’ In the

midst of sorrow and hardships she could feel the hand of her Heavenly Father.”10

Mr. Carton concludes that:

Though she had rebelled against the Calvinistic faith of her parents, Emily Dickinson did not

turn to Unitarianism, as did Oliver Wendell Holmes, or to Episcopalianism, as did Harriet

Beecher Stowe. Nor did she become an agnostic like Francis Parkman, or an unbeliever like

William Dean Howells. She retained her religious faith, mystical and individualistic as it was.

She suggests the Transcendentalists, but the parallel must not be pressed. As in other respects,

so in her inner life, she was sui generis.11

Francis Stoddard

8 Evan Carton, ‘‘Dickinson and the Divine: The Terror of Integration, the Terror of Detachment,’’ in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1978, pp. 242–52.9 ibid10 ibid11 ibid


The third critic is Francis Stoddard. He offers a reasonable refutation against an earlier critic

review of Dickinson’s poetry. He debates the claim that has considered the poems of

Dickinson especially “I died for beauty” something formless, and proves that its form is

something new and does not follow the traditional poetic forms.

Francis Stoddard’s sent a letter to the Editors of The Critic. The Editors refer to the first

volume of Miss Dickinson as a ‘volume of keenly form-less poems,’ and suggest that the fact

of the issuance of several editions proves ‘that a great many persons care little for the form of

expression in poetry so long as the thoughts expressed are startling, eccentric and new.’ In the

same review the critic says of the two volumes taken together that ‘their absolute formlessness

keeps them almost outside the pale of poetry.’12 In order to make them understand, Stoddard

says that good poetry must have perfection, technique, metrical and grammatical finish, and

Miss Dickinson’s “I died for beauty’ seems to have not such grammatical finish;

“… the poems of Emily Dickinson do not have such finish; hence these verses are almost out of

the pale of poetry. The major premise here set down has not been attacked of late. The minor

one is not so easily disposed of. For Miss Dickinson’s poems may be formless, or they may be

worded to so fine and subtile a device that they seem formless, just as the spectrum of a far-off

star may seem blankness until examined with a lens of especial power. I wish to examine one

poem of Miss Dickinson’s, taken almost at random, and search for the fine lines of the

spectrum. For such example I take this poem [‘‘I died for beauty, but was scarce’’]

He considers the idea of the poem as the unity of truth and beauty. Because of the harmony he

says, we should expect a closely paralleled structure with a figure based on two factors.

In the first stanza there are some matched in pairs words like; ‘adjusted’: ‘joining’, died’:

died’, tomb’: room’. But ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’ do not match because they have not been proved

to have the same nature.

I died’ for beauty, but was scarce

Adjusted’ in the tomb’,

When one who died’ for truth’ was lain

In an adjoining room’.

“…in the first line, the slurred words ‘but was scarce’ are at the end, while in the

corresponding line the slurred words ‘when one who’ are at the beginning. Similarly, the

12 Francis H. Stoddard, ‘‘Technique in Emily Dickinson’s Poems,’’ in Critic, Vol. 17, No. 516, January 9, 1892, pp. 24–25.


slurred words in the in the second line are contrasted in position with the slurred words ‘ in an’

in the fourth line.”13

In the second stanza the harmony between truth and beauty is developed.

He questioned ’, softly’, why’ I failed’?

For beauty’; I replied’.

And I’—for truth’—t he two’ are one’,

We brethren’ are; he said’.

“Almost a formal balancing, but with a suggestion of relief; as, for example, in the harmonic

echo of ‘he questioned ’, in the opening line, with ‘We brethren’, in the closing line,

suggesting a recurrence of the first verse motive.”14

Then Mr. Stoddard suggests that although truth and beauty spiritually are the same, in this

physical world they are different.

In the third and last stanza we have a reversion in the form and tone, and the pattern changes.

And so as kinsmen’ met a night,

W e talked’ between the rooms’,

Until the moss’ had reached our lips ’

And covered’ up our names’.

“The rhyme changes to alliteration which is beginning-rhyme instead of end-rhyme— night:

names. That is, our earthly names are lost in the endless night of death; ourselves, at one with

each other, at one with truth and beauty, entered into the endless day of beauty and of truth.

I submit that such art as this may be subtle and medieval, but it is not formlessness.”15

Charlotte Alexander

Charlotte Alexander believes that the poem “I died for Beauty” is a document of her obsession

with death, although the subject is beauty and truth. By death she believes Dickinson may

mean devoted to the beauty in the realm of humanity or the supernatural. “By truth she may

be referring to philosophical or religious truth, or she may just mean, more generally, any

13 ibid14 ibid15 ibid


abstract ideas.”16 She claims that for sure the line “the two are one” is nothing but the

influence of Keats.

The setting is uncomfortable and grotesque she believes, but at the same time there is an

intimacy about it, in the spirit of John Donne’s poems of love and death. The setting seems to

be pathetic in Alexander’s opinion. Because Dickinson tries to inject her morbid inclination

and it shows her troubled spirit.

Some critics consider Emily Dickinson’s ‘I died for beauty’ nothing but an imitation of John

Keat’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, because of the famous purple patch of the poem, i.e. "Beauty

is truth, truth beauty,". It may be right, because Dickinson used to love Keat’s poems, but this

is not the only poem Dickinson has with this subject matter. She has lots of poems with the

theme of death, beauty and honesty as well as the subject related to afterlife. In order to

criticize Emily Dickinson’s ‘I died for beauty’, first of all we must be familiar with her

personal life specially her philosophy concerning death and afterlife.

There are definite speculation concerning Dickinson’s belief and philosophy. Some say she

was pagan, some say she was seriously religious. She had her own territory and divinity

concerning faith. In her long life she never claim to infer God fully, but she had a kind of

childish faith certainly more robust and strong that the people of her time.

“Emily inherited the Puritan traits of austerity, simplicity, and practicality, as well as an

astute observation of the inner self, but her communication with her higher Self was much

more informal than her God-fearing forefathers would have dared. The daughter of the

‘Squire’ of Amherst, she came from a line of gritty, stalwart pioneers, carrying what was

almost considered the blue blood of America. Her family was far from poor, but she did not

lead a lavish life, for the Puritans abhorred luxury and waste.”17

Until the age of 30 she continued going to church, although she was excluded from certain

meetings and services open only to those who had been ‘saved’. She became increasingly

reclusive throughout her 30s. It is tempting to see her seclusion as further evidence of spiritual

asceticism. Her spiritual path was certainly intensely lonely in such a social climate, but she

16 Charlotte Alexander. The Poetry of Emily Dickinson. USA: Simon & Schuster (Monarch Press) 1965, p.57-5817 http://www.poetseers.org/index.html


craved aloneness more and more, and seclusion somehow formed a symbiotic relationship

with her art. Increasingly her art became an expression of her spirituality.18

Emily’s truth-seeking was a spiritual quest that governed her inner life, and naturally

blossomed through her poetic works. Her own words, in a letter to a friend, succinctly claim

Eternity and Immortality as her own. Perhaps they also presage the enduring spiritual appeal

of her writing, far beyond the short span of her life.”19

What drove her consistently was that she needed truth, and at any cost. She needed to see it with her own eyes and feel it with her own heart, not grasp at it in the words of a clergyman but explain it to herself through her own words. It seems she was even ready to die for her cause:20

Her existence can be compared to a tree whose blossom was the result of her endeavor a

spiritual quest to find the truth of the existence. She was a pioneer of her time; her deeply

religious feeling was something unique and individual.

Death, in poems like ‘I died for beauty’ is one of the most spectacular things about her.

“Death, and the problem of life after death, obsessed her. She seems to have thought of it

constantly- she died all her life, she probed death daily.”21

One of the characteristics of mystic people is to attain ultimate reality or spiritual truth which

is the direct knowledge of God through intuition and insight. She believes in intuition most of

all. You can see in the following poem the beginning of the second stanza: By intuition,

Mightiest Things/ Assert themselves — and not by terms —

You'll know it — as you know 'tis Noon —By Glory —As you do the Sun —By Glory —As you will in Heaven —Know God the Father — and the Son.

By intuition, Mightiest ThingsAssert themselves — and not by terms —"I'm Midnight" — need the Midnight say —

18 ibid19 ibid20 ibid21 Conrad Aiken. Emily Dickinson A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Richard B. Sewall. USA: Prentice-Hall 1963. P14-15.


"I'm Sunrise" — Need the Majesty?

Omnipotence — had not a Tongue —His lisp — is Lightning — and the Sun —His Conversation — with the Sea —"How shall you know"?Consult your Eye!22

As you see Emily Dickinson herself insists on the importance of intuition and on the

worthlessness of terms, words and language as well. In another poem she also refers to silence

and emphasizes on it.

I felt a funeral in my brain,And mourners, to and fro,Kept treading, treading, till it seemedThat sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,A service like a drumKept beating, beating, till I thought My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,And creak across my soulWith those same boots of lead,Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,And Being but an ear,And I and silence some strange race, Wrecked, solitary, here.

And then a plank in reason, broke,And I dropped down and down--And hit a world at every plunge,And finished knowing--then—

“Dickinson uses the metaphor of a funeral to represent the speaker's sense that a part of her is

dying, that is, her reason is being overwhelmed by the irrationality of the unconscious.”23

What is also important here is the disturbance of irrationality which reaches the

meaninglessness of the language which itself is inarticulacy and being vague. Where she says

“And I and silence some strange race,/ Wrecked, solitary, here.” Again we have silence which

is full of saying.

22 Fascicle 15 (1862)23 http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/funeral.html

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/lit_term.html#figure


It is quite correct that Emily Dickinson rejects accepted beliefs and practice, but it is not at all

a good reason to consider her a pagan or a person with a shaky faith. She was so religious to

Gilbert P. Voigt that he compares her with St Teresa.

“There is a fairly close parallel between Emily Dickinson and St. Teresa. Both had frail

bodies. Both had literary genius. Both were aristocrats. Both were ‘‘romantic and ardent.’’

Both were torn between two worlds. Both disliked pretension and spiritual conceit. Both were

witty and full of fun. Both were angels of mercy. Both had a direct experience of God.”24

“Carl Sandburg has given Emily Dickinson the felicitous title, ‘‘the impish and mystic singer of Amherst.’’ And indeed she was a mystic. First, in the philosophical sense of the term.

By intuition mightiest things Assert themselves, and not by terms.

This was her belief. She was not a logician or a systematic philosopher. Her flashes of intuition were as disconnected as Emerson’s.

She was a mystic also in the religious sense of the term —a Christian mystic. Her knowledge of the Triune God was intuitive; she felt his presence constantly. Sometimes he seemed to be a next- door neighbor; at other times, a guest:

The Soul that has a Guest, Doth seldom go abroad, Diviner Crowd at home Obliterate the need...

Occasionally she was caught up into the seventh heaven, like Paul, and permitted a vision of ‘‘the colossal substance of immortality.’’ Now and then she felt herself united to God in immortal wedlock:

Bride of the Father and the Son, Bride of the Holy Ghost.

Like other mystics, she emphasized the beauty of God. Human life she found ‘‘all aglow with God and immortality.’’25

A Mystic is a “person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with or

absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that

are beyond the intellect.”26

“...the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the

transcendental order; whatever be the theological formula under which that order is understood.”27

24 Gilbert P. Voigt, ‘‘The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson,’’ in College English, Vol. 3, No. 2, November 1941, pp. 192–96.25 ibid26 http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Mystic.aspx27 Bloom, Harold (2010), Aldous Huxley, Infobase Publishing

http://books.google.nl/books?id=jdbDp9HlE8oC&dq=aldous+huxley+%22divine+ground%22&hl=nl&source=gbs_navlinks_s


We know definitely that she was a religious poetess, although her belief in different aspect of

Christianity was not following the trait of ordinary people.

We remember the conclusion of Bussey concerning the poem ‘I died for beauty’. Bussey concludes that although people can die honorable under the banner of beauty or truth, their death do not have minute difference with other ordinary people. Their efforts are doomed to failure, destruction and eradication. The evidence is the last and closing lines of the poem which says:


Until the moss had reached our lips,

And covered up our names.”

The two were talking until the moss had reached their lips, and covered up their names. But

for some reasons it is not so. It is quite correct that they are silent. They cannot talk any more,

but, the phrase “‘Silence is golden,’ is a proverbial saying that is used in certain circumstances

where saying nothing is the most preferred choice. The fuller version, speech is silver; silence

is golden, is rarely used.”28 By taking into consideration that truth and beauty are talking

between the walls, and at the end they are keeping silence. This is not death; this is perfection

as she says:

Speech is one symptom of Affection

And Silence one -

The perfectest communication

Is heard of none –

The realm of eternity cannot be put into words. It is beyond talking because talking can

express materialistic things. Silence sometimes is of full of upheaval. As Dickinson says

speech and silence are symptoms of Affection. “The perfectest communication is heard of

none.” When the communication is perfect there is no need to talk, one may say a world of

words in a glance. Again it occurs in the poem of John Keats “Heard melodies are sweet, but

those unheard are sweeter” the heard melodies may not have the necessary effect conveyed,

but an unheard melody is the melody of everyone’s imagination.

My best Acquaintances are those

With Whom I spoke no Word -

28 www.ask.com


The Stars that stated come to Town

Esteemed Me never rude

Although to their Celestial Call

I failed to make reply -

My constant -reverential Face

Sufficient Courtesy.

In the poem “I died for beauty”, the one who dies for beauty met the one who has died for

truth. They talk to each other. After asking each other the reason of their deaths they are like

relatives.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,


When they continue talking as kinsmen, they are the best acquaintances and quite familiar

with one another then, there is no need to talk.

My best Acquaintances are those

With Whom I spoke no Word –

They do not need to talk because they know everything about one another. They are talking through their emotions and feeling and a kind of power beyond human understanding.

By intuition, Mightiest ThingsAssert themselves — and not by terms —

Silence in this poem is a mature and ripe fruit of perfect understanding an understanding

empty of preconception and judgment. One should not take this silence as death. Quite vice

versa it is a kind of understanding, it is intuition. Intuition is a kind of ability to know things

by using your feeling rather than considering the facts. It is definitely not death. It is living, a

living under the lee of absolute silence. Therefore, this absolute comprehensive silence that

runs the residents of the tombs is not death. It is absolute perfection free of private interest. It

is a transformed living. It is true living. Living without preconception, like a mirror just

reflects what is before it. The representatives of beauty and truth are two mirrors in one being.

They reflect each other. Anyone of them can see himself in the mirror; logically there is no

question left. When there is no question, there is no talking. It is real silence, it is absolute

perfection. It is living silently ever after.


“It raises the possibility that God may not grant the immortality that we long for.29

I know that He exists.

Somewhere—in Silence

He has hid his rare life

From our gross eyes

'Tis an instant's play

'Tis a fond Ambush

Just to make Bliss

Earn her own surprise!

But—should the play

Prove piercing earnest

Should the glee—glaze

In Death's—stiff—stare

Would not the fun

Look too expensive!

Would not the jest

Have crawled too far!

29 Cliffs Notes.com


BIBLIOGRAPHY AND WEBLIOGRAPHY

academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu

Bloom, Harold (2010), Aldous Huxley, Infobase Publishing Carton, Evan‘‘Dickinson and the Divine: The Terror of Integration, the Terror of Detachment,’’ in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1978, pp. 242–52.

Charlotte Alexander. The Poetry of Emily Dickinson. USA: Simon & Schuster (Monarch Press) 1965, p.57-58

Conrad Aiken. Emily Dickinson A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Richard B. Sewall. USA: Prentice-Hall 1963. Evan

Fascicle 15 (1862)

Francis H. Stoddard, ‘‘Technique in Emily Dickinson’s Poems,’’ in Critic, Vol. 17, No. 516, January 9, 1892, pp. 24–25.

Gilbert P. Voigt, ‘‘The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson,’’ in College English, Vol. 3, No. 2, November 1941, pp. 192–96.

Jennifer A. Bussey, Critical Essay on ‘‘I Died for Beauty,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008.

Stumpf, Samuel Enoch. Socrates to Sartre A History of Philosophy. Fifth Edition. New York: MacGraw-Hill.1993

www.ask.com

www.encyclopedia.com

www.poetseers.org

http://www.encyclopedia.com/

http://www.ask.com/

http://books.google.nl/books?id=jdbDp9HlE8oC&dq=aldous+huxley+%22divine+ground%22&hl=nl&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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