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Emily DickinsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Dickinson published only seven of her more than 1,700 poems during her lifetime, so providing any one of her poems with an appropriate (and accurate) historical context is challenging. In filing her unpublished poems, Dickinson tended to bunch them by category—poems about nature, poems about love, poems about death—rather than in any chronological ordering. As her poems began to find their way to publication long after her death in 1886, it became something of a parlor game to try to find some keys in the poems themselves to when they might have been written.
That endeavor underscores the special nature of the historical context of Dickinson’s poems in that they almost entirely lack the reassuring anchorage in the era of their composition. Poem 54, however, is the exception that proves the rule, the exception because the poem’s second half evidences Dickinson’s familiarity with a very real historic event, and as such Poem 54 represents a unicorn in the Dickinson oeuvre, a poem directly generated by its historic context.
Dickinson composed Poem 54 in late 1857, the year the financial markets along the East Coast were shaken by a catastrophic panic over how the nation’s gold supply suddenly could not cover the country’s steadily mounting debts.
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Emily Dickinson
Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
I Can Wade Grief
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson
The Only News I Know
Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book
Emily Dickinson
Business & Economics
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Earth Day
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Fate
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Memory
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Mortality & Death
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Nature Versus Nurture
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Nostalgic Poems
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Poetry: Perseverance
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Short Poems
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Truth & Lies
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Valentine's Day Reads: The Theme of Love
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