Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein

The Introduction, Part 1, and Part 2 of Susan Howe’s “My Emily Dickinson” gave me a more complete picture of Emily Dickinson. Like Howe mentions, many scholars wrote off Emily Dickinson and continue to write her off. They say she was just a woman recluse. This is the view of her that I had before I read some of Howe’s piece. Emily Dickinson lived in New England, and was surrounded by the Puritan religious tradition. Her poem writing was also complicated because she was a woman, and women writers could not be taken seriously. Knowing this gave Dickinson’s poems a new meaning for me. They weren’t just the writings that a lonely woman who chose to scribble down some poems that weren’t discovered until after she died. But why didn’t she try to publish more of her poems? Would Dickinson have become a more respected poet if she did? When reading Gertrude Stein’s poems, I noticed that her style seemed similar to Dickinson’s. Both of their poems use more straightforward, unembellished language. Both of them also grew up in New England. Maybe the New England tradition has something to do with this.