Emily Dickinson Writing Style

Emily Dickinson wrote roughly eighteen hundred poems and published fewer than a dozen while she was alive, most of them anonymously and all of them tidied by other hands. The manuscripts she left behind were sewn into small booklets. What those booklets showed, once scholars went back to them, was a poet whose punctuation and capital letters had been doing structural work that her first editors quietly removed.

The dash is the famous part. In her hand it does the job a comma, a colon, a full stop or a held breath might do, and often several of those at once, which leaves a line suspended rather than closed. Her editors in 1890 swapped them for ordinary punctuation. Thomas H. Johnson put them back in 1955, and the poems changed shape again.

Underneath the strangeness sits something ordinary. Dickinson wrote most of her poems in common metre, the four-beat and three-beat alternation of the Protestant hymnal she grew up singing, which is why a surprising number of them can be sung to tunes people already know. That borrowing is also the source of the unease, because she pours doubt, death and the silence of God into the exact container built to hold reassurance.

Then she rhymes almost. Soul and all, room and storm: near enough to promise a rhyme, wrong enough to withhold it. The form keeps its shape and refuses its comfort.

The dash as a breath mark

Her dash is not punctuation in the grammatical sense. It marks a hesitation. Or a substitution, a swerve, or the place where a thought runs out before the line does. Because it can stand for several different marks at once, it declines to tell a reader which one is meant, and that refusal to specify is the whole of the effect she gets from it. Prose can borrow a weak version by ending a clause early and letting the next begin somewhere unexpected. The mark itself is less important than the suspension it protects.

Common metre, borrowed and broken

Common metre alternates four beats with three, and it is the measure of the hymns Dickinson sang in church every week of her life, which means she chose the most conventional container available to her. Taking a form with that much built-in reassurance and filling it with doubt produces friction a free-verse poem cannot get. The container promises resolution and the content declines to supply any. Writers of prose can steal the principle without the metre. Choose a shape your reader recognises, a recipe or a letter of condolence, and put the wrong thing inside.

Slant rhyme

Soul and all. Room and storm. Dickinson rhymes closely enough that a reader hears the pattern and wrongly enough that the pattern refuses to pay out. The ear keeps waiting for a click that does not come, and the small unfinished feeling that leaves behind is doing thematic work in poems about doubt and unfinished dying. Full rhyme would have closed them. Reach for the near miss whenever the subject refuses to resolve, because a satisfied ear stops listening.

Capitals that promote a noun

Dickinson capitalises common nouns in the middle of a line, and the effect is to raise a word to the status of a proper name. Death, Soul, Circumference and Noon stop being concepts and start being parties to the scene, which is what allows them to arrive, sit down and take her hand. Her first editors regularised this away because it looked like carelessness. It was doing the casting.

The definition that opens the poem

Hope is the thing with feathers. The line states an equation between an abstraction and an object, and the rest of the poem then spends itself testing whether the equation holds up under any weight at all. It is an efficient opening because it gives a reader something to picture and something to argue with in the same breath. Try it as a first sentence in prose. Name the abstraction your piece is about, attach it to one physical thing, and spend the rest of the page earning the attachment.

Compression to the turn

A Dickinson poem is short because everything that is not the turn has been cut away, and the cutting happens at the level of the individual word rather than the sentence or the stanza, which is why her density survives paraphrase so badly. She removes articles, auxiliaries and the polite connectives that tell a reader how one clause relates to the next, which forces the reader to supply the relation and makes them complicit. Count the words in a stanza of hers. Then count yours. The gap is the lesson.

Personified abstraction

Death drives the carriage. Hope perches. The Soul shuts the door. Dickinson turns concepts into agents so consistently that her poems become small dramas with a cast of two, the speaker and something that cannot ordinarily be met. The device works because she keeps the behaviour ordinary once the casting is done, so Death is courteous rather than terrible and the horror arrives through the manners. Give the abstraction a body and then let it behave politely.

Ellipsis

She leaves words out. Verbs vanish. Subjects go missing. A line will present two images with nothing between them to explain the relation. The reader closes the gap without noticing, which is what produces the sensation of a poem thinking faster than its own syntax. The risk is obvious enough: cut too much and the line stops meaning anything. Her control comes from keeping the concrete nouns and cutting only the machinery that joins them.

The hymn stanza

Four beats, then three, then four, then three, rhyming on the short lines. It is the commonest stanza in English devotional verse and Dickinson used it for most of a lifetime's work. The choice is an argument rather than a convenience, because a form carrying that much inherited consolation makes a poem about doubt sound like a hymn that has gone wrong. She rarely departs from the shape. She departs from what it is supposed to say.

Paradox held open

Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed. Water is taught by thirst. Dickinson builds a line that contradicts itself and then declines to resolve the contradiction, which leaves a reader holding both halves. The technique needs a plain statement rather than a decorated one, because the strangeness has to sit in the logic and not in the vocabulary. Say the impossible thing in the flattest words available and then stop talking.

Scattering dashes as decoration

The commonest Dickinson imitation adds dashes everywhere and changes nothing else, which produces a page that looks interrupted while the sentences underneath run on exactly as before. Her dash marks a real break in thought, a substitution or a swerve, and it appears where the syntax gives way. If the same line reads identically with commas restored, the dash was doing nothing. Take it out and find the place where the thought breaks.

Capitalising words at random

Capitals in Dickinson promote a noun to a character, and the poems that use them hardest are the ones staging an encounter. Imitators capitalise adjectives, verbs and whatever seems weighty, which produces the look of significance with none of the casting behind it. Ask what the capitalised word is going to do in the scene. When nothing comes to mind, the capital is costume, and a reader who knows the real thing will spot it immediately.

Reaching for archaic diction

Thee, doth and o'er belong to the nineteenth century rather than to Dickinson, whose vocabulary is startlingly plain and often shorter than a modern writer would choose. Bee, broom, fly, plank, noon. The strangeness of her work sits in the syntax and in the logic rather than in the vocabulary, so a writer can use entirely contemporary words and still keep every part of what makes the style recognisably hers. Period diction on ordinary thinking produces a greetings card.

Mistaking short for compressed

A Dickinson stanza is dense rather than merely brief, and the density comes from cutting connective words while keeping every concrete noun. Imitations cut the nouns and keep the abstractions, which leaves something short and vague that a reader cannot picture. Test your draft by asking how many things in it could be photographed. If the answer is none, the piece is only small rather than compressed, and shortening it further will make matters worse.