Emily Dickinson's In A Library Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Emily Dickinson's In A Library - Essay Example Amherst Academy as a young girl where she learned the subjects of her time which included everything from classical literature and geology to religion and biology. She went on to study at Mary Lyons Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, but left less than a year later. She never traveled far from her home at Amherst, and was never married. Despite not being given much to cultivating human society, she certainly valued her friends, Susan Gilbert being one of her constant friends, who later became her sister-in-law. She maintained long correspondences with valued friends such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson who was possibly also her sole critic, and maybe even one of her romantic attachments. She wrote prolifically till her death in 1886. She died at the age of 56 of Brights disease, and was buried in white at Amherst, in keeping with her rigorously white attire through most of her later life. One of the strongest aspects of Dickinsons poetry is its capacity for layered meanings, and â€Å"In a Library† is no exception. For Dickinson, a written word was open to many interpretations, and the reader was very much a part of the poetic process: â€Å"A word is dead, when it is said /Some say - /I say it just begins to live/ That day†(L 374; P 1212). She accepted that her words could, and often did take different and often unintended meanings in a readers mind. On the surface, â€Å"In a Library† is a poem about delving into the past with a book, to take pleasure in a flight of fancy by witnessing history as recorded on its pages, by taking part in myth, by understanding the perspectives and opinions that informed scholastic work during a time long gone past. On another level, the poem can also be seen as an association with a dear old fatherly acquaintance, here personified in a book. The experience of reading a really old book, its aged textures and its nostalgic fragrance is almost like meeting up with an elderly, knowledgeable father figure, and Dickinson plays on this dual