Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Weird Em
Emily Dickinson is known for her unique style of writing poetry. Later editions of her poetry are published differently. In her original work, what do you think the capitalization in her poems? Why does she capitalize so many words, what does this add to the poem? Please use specific examples.
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I believe that Dickinson tends to capitalize all of the nouns in her poems along with words that she specifically wants to draw attention to. By capitalizing a word she is telling the reader that there is something more to the word than just it's normal meaning. It is like a warning flag. It tells the readers to dig a little deeper or to pay extra attention to the word.
ReplyDeleteDickinson generally capitalizes the nouns in her poems. I agree that her capitalizing these things do add emphasize on parts of the poem that need to be thought about more deeply. In poem #519 she does not capitalize the word "countrymen"; even though it is not capitalized it can be thought of in the same way. That is that, we need to think more in depth of why it is not capitalized, the only reason we would know to do this is because she has capitalized so many other words. Dickinson through her capitalizations wanted the reader to think more deeply about the capitalized words and then deeper at the poem as a whole.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of you, in fact analyzing Emiliy Dickinson's poems we can see that she adopts this method that consists in the capitalization of some of the words that in many cases are nouns. Obviously that is not a casualness and I think that the author wanted readers to pay more attention on those nouns because they are the key words that are necessary to the understanding of the deep meaning of each poem. In poem #620 for example with this method are underlined the following words: Madness, Sense, Eye, Majority and Chain, that can give us a primary indication of what the poem is about and its real sense.
ReplyDeleteI agree with all of you! I think that the capitalization in her poems is meant to draw our attention to the words. I personally think that she capitalized all the key words she thought were important for understanding the poem. Also if we read just the capitalized words we can get the sense of what is the poem going to be about. For example words from the poem #519: World, Me, News, Nature, Majesty, Message, Hands, Her, Sweet, Me. We can definitely get a sense of what is this poem going to be about and I think that she keep capitalizing the words that made the poem ambiguous. The whole idea of capitalizing makes her poems even more ambiguous. I think that this was her intention and she achieved with it what she wanted.
ReplyDeleteI agree with all of you, in that the capitalization of words does add emphasis on words. But more importantly, I think she wants us to question the poem and the way that we read it. This doesn't necessarily make that one word more important than any other within the poem, it just makes us read that phrase or perhaps the whole poem in a whole new light. For example, in poem #372 when she says "a Wooden way": think about wood and its characteristics. Wood is stiff, and it states in the same "state" for very long periods of time. This could represent the state of mind the person or "main character", if you will, in the poem is in.
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