Monday, April 5, 2010

I am in love

I have fallen in love - with Emily Dickinson's poetry. I keep coming across lines in her work that resonate so strongly.

This is my letter to the world
that never wrote to me

Such heart-aching loneliness echoes through those words. The words of someone lonely, isolated. That is probably why I feel such a closeness to her work. Dickinson eventually became an recluse. I have felt like that all too often, wishing the whole world would just leave me the hell alone.

While I have a number of her poems in anthologies and some that were available off the Internet, I decided to investigate an anthology of her poems. I found one earlier today - selected poems. It seemed to be quite an accessible work, roughly comparable to Sylvia Plath's collected works in the same series by that particular publisher. Then I saw her collected works - about three times the size. I had not realised how prolific she was, and by her death, none it published.

That ginormous anthology is too much for me. For now I think that I shall continue to enjoy and study the few that I already have.

Those two lines would also make a beaut intro to a novel.

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