Contents
1．Introduction 1
2. Background of the poetess 2
2.1 Family background 2
2.2 Reclusive life 2
3. Unique style of Emily Dickinson’s poetry 3
3.1 Idiosyncratic language 3
3.1.1 Untitled poetry 3
3.1.2 Unconventional syntax 4
3.1.3 Special language deviation 8
3.1.4 Unusual rhythm 10
3.2 Psychological description 11
3.2.1 Dickinson’s vivid psychological description 11
3.2.2 Ways of Dickinson’s psychological description 12
3.3 Images and symbols 13
3.3.1 Images 13
3.3.2 Symbols 14
4．Contribution 15
4.1 Influences on modernistic poetry 15
4.2 Dickinson’s dedication 15
5．Conclusion 15
Acknowledgements 16
References 17
1．Introduction
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson（1830-1886）was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, and led a privileged life with financially comfortable and well-respected family in a deeply Calvinist New England community. She was educated at Amherst Academy (1834-1847) and Mount Holyoake (1947-184). In her early years she appears to have been a bright and sociable young scholar, but in her twenties she began to withdraw from the outside world. By her forties she had become a complete recluse, refusing to leave her house and shunning all contact with strangers. Although she is now regarded as a famous poetess of the 19th century, her poetry was not published until after her death, wrote altogether 1,775 poems of startling originality and freshness. Since the complete edition of her poems was published in 1955, Emily Dickinson and her poetry attracted more and more attention from the common readers as well as the literacy critics. Like her mysterious and reclusive life, which had made many critics searched enthusiastically and deeply, her poetry had been controversially discussed because of the unique style. Including the form and content in her poetry, scholars had been universally made in the 20th century.
Even today, more than one hundred years after her death, she continues to be a source of inspiration and new ideas for contemporary poets. In order to explore Emily Dickinson’s language style since her poetry plays a crucial role in the history of American literature, this paper will first discuss the poetess’ biography and her poetry’s background, then find out her language features, special psychological description, image and symbols, and finally explore her particular literature value and impacts on modernism poetry.
2. Background of the poetess
2.1 Family background
Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts，in which people could hardly hide their private business at that time, for news spreading quickly by word of mouth at community gatherings, church services, funerals, and social visits. Emily Dickinson’s poetic personality also had been formed by this small neighbourhood. Dickinson family name was well know and established long before Emily Dickinson’s birth. Her paternal grandfather, Samuel, helped found Amherst College and funded various projects within town. When Emily Dickinson’s father, Edward, was born, the family name was associated with wealth and social prominence. However, Samuel Dickinson founded schemes that were not financially viable, spent money his family could not afford to lose, and ultimately caused their financial ruin.
Edward Dickinson had very strong opinions on the social roles of men and women, he believed that men should guard the women around them, which later instilled in his only son Austin [1]46. His expectations of himself, his wife and his children were very high. Emily Dickinson’s relationship with her father was one of the most influential in her life, and her family’s financial status was very crucial to her as a poet. Her brother Austin was expected to follow their father’s footsteps, however, the girls were supposed to do essential duties to maintain a household. Luckily for Emily, her sister Lavinia provide her with a release from the family chores, so she had time to write and further her talents on poetry.
2.2 Reclusive life
Emily Dickinson’s long-time reclusive life represents her as the loneliest and the most mysterious poetess in that time, or even in the whole history of the world’s literature. She devoted her entire life to poetry, unmarried and isolated from the outside society.
At the beginning of her 20-year-old, she had an inclination to be reclusive, after years and years, this inclination seemed to be her only option of life. Since 1870, she had visited her brother and “Sister Sue” [2]15, who lived at opposite, for only a few times. Emily Dickinson hardly leave Amherst, only for two times to Boston in 1864 and 1865 respectively, because her eyes’ illness. This unfortunately illness could be caused by her long-time psychological intense, from then on, she started to connect with her friends and relatives in letters until her death. She refused to publish her poetry, but she always sent them to her
friends. The poet thought the power of letters was eternal, for this opinion, she had wrote a poem called This is My Letter to the World 35.
3. Unique style of Emily Dickinson’s poetry
3.1 Idiosyncratic language
While opening the collections of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, readers would surprisingly find a strange phenomenon that all the poems are untitled, only in time sequence of number by the editor. Why the poet broke the tradition of titling, which had existed for 250 years, to abandon her poems’ titles? Most of critics view that the poetess never had the intension to publish her work.
3.1.1 Untitled poetry
Actually two critics had researched Emily Dickinson’s untitled feature, and came to the conclusion that she deliberately abandoned titles for exploring poetry, which demonstrated modernism element. From Porter’s view, since Dickinson had no specific purpose or awareness of making some conclusion, there was no need to title her poems. This shortage is a significant mark of her poetic art :
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides；
You may have met him? Did you not
His notice sudden is
… …
But never met this fellow
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone
Though poetry is made up by letters, it doesn’t mean readers only understand poetry though letters. Emily Dickinson thought poetry itself could bring readers strong intuitional reflection, and untitled poems could expend them imaginative space. Like the above poem, a narrow fellow in the grass describes a snake. we can clearly see the fantastic functions of untitled poems. The poet wrote about a snake, but we can not see a letter of snake from the whole poem, instead, she used the words such as fellow, he or him. These words made readers felt a sense of friendly close, but curiosity. Avoiding the letter of snake, the poetess provided us with guessing sentiment, only would we read it carefully, we could find out what she had mentioned about. Because we have any title to refer to the content, we must research the context thoroughly, and Emily Dickinson makes us apprehend them by intuition, not titles.
3.1.2 Unconventional syntax
Omission is one of the modern poetic language features, Samuel Levin claimed that highly condensable language is one of the biggest differences between poetic language and daily language, and the other two are integrity and novelty. He had took Emily Dickinson’s language for example to extinguish those two kinds of languages, Levin thought many omissible words in poetry are non-revertible, and readers could hardly find out the traits of omissible words in the deep structures of sentences, otherwise omission in our daily talk can be reverted by grammar rules [8]39. Non-revertible omission provides a blank of meaning in poems, and adds infinitive glamour to Emily Dickinson’s poetry: (1) Uncompleted grammar structure expends language connotations, and enriches the meaning of poems, makes them more obscured; (2) highly condensable language bring poems an effect of aftertaste for readers.
To gain a sense of music and rhythm, Dickinson had created the omission which was accordant with grammar rules. And she omitted most of auxiliaries, verbs, repeated subjects and meaning-implication pronouns. This omission not only makes the poems sounded neatly, but also avoids lengthiness and verboseness, furthermore makes themes more distinctive. Like her No.754 poem:
Though I may live longer than He (may live)
He must (live) longer than I (live)
For I have but the power to kill,
Without (having) the power to die
(The words in brackets are added by the author)
In the above poem, the poetess had omitted repeated auxiliaries and verbs, which increased poetic effect greatly.
Janel Muller used to called coordinate structure as the infinitive source of new sentences, and it is the core-part of language creation [9].Coordination is another feature of Emily Dickinson’s poetry styles. In her poems, she mostly use simple clause as “subject + predicate + object”. She was good at coordinating with many simple clauses, then pres
ented images that are different space and emotion simultaneously, or put the abstract conceptions and the concrete tings at one time, thus the poetess constituted her unique aesthetic world. Please read her No.754 poet:
My life had stood - a Loaded Gun –
In Corners – till a Day
The Owner passed – identified –
And carried Me away –
And now We roam in Sovereign Woods –
And now We hunt the Doe –
And every time I speak for Him –
The Mountains straight reply –
And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow –
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let it’s pleasure through –
And when at Night – Our good Day done –
I guard My Master’s Head –
‘Tis better than the Eider – Duck’s
Deep pillow – to have shared –
…
In the above poem, the poetess used simple forms to coordinate many images, and provided readers many appreciative perspectives. Reading the whole poem, it is seemed that the poem had a loose structure, but the poetess just put “and” to coordinate those unconnected objects. She wrote a few lines to describe the emotion of a young lady’s longing feelings. In these 16 lines, there are 6 lines headed by “and”, in the first line, the “and” connects three verbs and one object, which is totally fit for grammar rules, the content’s meaning is very prominent, however, from the beginning of second part, the poetess seemed to break out of the restriction, she used “and” to connect the three past-tense verbs (passed, identified, carried) in the first section and present-tense verbs (roam, hunt, speak), then she used the clause And now … And now to state the different things happened in different tenses.
Besides using amount of normal oral words and dialects in her poetry, Emily Dickinson also used some unfamiliar words, even some academic words and foreign words, to strength her words’ expressiveness. While writing different styles of phonetic, meaning and colouring words, Emily Dickinson always used the sequence of from the complicated words to simple words, thus she could express her omnipotent imagination into appropriate words. Let’s discuss this style for the example of No. 675:
Essential oils – are wrung-
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns – alone-
It is the gift of Screws –
The General Rose – decay-
But this – in Lady’s Drawer
Make Summer- When the Lady lie
In ceaseless Rosemary-
First of all, the poetess put a dash between the noun-phrase Essential Oils and verb are wrung. If we read it carefully, we could find this little dash not only spilt the subject and the predicate, but also have the functions as follows: (1) to spilt the word Essential which comes form a Latin word and the words are wrung which comes from Anglo-Saxon; (2) to spilt the words which are capitalized and the words which are lowercased; (3) to spilt the polysyllable and the monosyllable; (4) to spilt the words have same phonemes ( in words of Essential Oils , including the same 165.
Syllepsis is the unique usage in Emily Dickinson’s language, and the so-called syllepsis means one phrase has two grammar functions, which makes the phrase decorated two different things in an unbalanced sentence without repetition or any punctuation. In the poem of He fumbles at your Soul, there are some lines:
He stuns your by degrees-
Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers – further heard –
Then nearer – Then so slow
Your Breath has time to straighten
Apparently, the phrase Then so slow not only modifies the description in the above sentence that the soul heard the slow procedure of hammer’s sound:“ Further … Then nearer- Then so slow”, but also describes the situation of the Death’s coming:“ He stuns … prepares … Then so slow … Deals”. Therefore, the phrase “so slow” played two roles in syntax function. Syllepsis could make poems’ content more fruitful, thus her poems have more explanation, which enriches more implicit style.
3.1.3 Special language d
eviation
Emily Dickinson was good at using innovative way to state familiar and normal stuff, so there were many circumstances of language deviation in her poetry. Through this way, her poetry would achieve a special effect, and form her own unique style. Language deviation refers to the language form of the aberration in linguistic norms [11]4. To poetry, standard language is background, through which poetess deliberately twisted language structure with aesthetic purpose. And language deviation has many forms, such as lexical deviation, phonological deviation, grammatical deviation, semantic deviation and so forth.
When we mention semantic deviation in poetry, we refer unreasonable logic in meaning. It is so important that many poets and critics regard it as the real and only important content in poetry. It includes very broaden types, such as metaphor, conceit and epithet.
For example, in the poem of How Happy is the Little Stone, there is a sentence “ Whose coat of elemental/ A passing universe put on”, which refers the fleeting universe was wrapped by the little stone’s brown coat. In the standard language, it is unreasonable, how could the universe be wrapped by the stone’s coat? By semantic deviation, the poem expresses the information that the little stone influences and changes the boundless universe with profound allegory. In the poem of A Imperceptibly as Grief, “a quietness distilled” means distilled quietness superficially, which seems ridiculous, but expresses gracefully the pureness of quietness under that situation. In the last two lines of I Like a Look of Agony, “The Beads upon on the Forehead/ By homely Anguish strung”, the beads are made up by homely anguish. Although it breaks people’s language mode or even logical thought, it is still accepted in poetry. In the last stanza of A Bird Came Down the Walk, “Than Oars Divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam - / Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon / Leap, plashless as they swim.” The poetess compared the action of birds’ flying to the actions of oars and butterflies in conceit way, which seems bold and innovative. If you can not comprehend the content of language deviation, Dickinson’s miraculous realm could hardly be known.
Grammatical deviation includes some special collocations, such as oxymoron, transferred epithet, syllepsis and zeugma. In There’s a Certain Slant of Light, “Heavenly hurt, it gives us”, this line is a oxymoron, and this poem mainly describes the slant light in winter afternoon influences people’s feeling: the light come from sky seems from heaven, but give people’s soul invisible agony. In the poem of I Came to Buy a Smile – Today), the first line is very creative, it belongs collocation deviation. There are many objects followed “buy”, such as things, goods and commodities, but how could “smile” be bought? “I” has diamonds, rubies and topaz, but still hope make a deal with the buyer for his smile, so we can understand the meaning of “buy a smile”: the poetess wanted to have more sincere communication with surrounded people, unless it would cost “I” greatly.
To transferred epithet, there is an example of the fourth stanza in The Wind Didn’t Come from the Orchard, one line said: “With an occasional Steeple –”. We can comprehend with it’s above two lines, “If He fling Sand, and Pebble - / Little Boys Hats – and Stubble –”. With these two lines, we could comprehend better, as a matter of fact, the poetess means “He … occasionally fling steeple”. The word occasional were supposed to be a adverb and appeared in the front of the word Stubble or in the end of the line, but now it is appeared in the front of the word Steeple as an adjective. This oxymoron makes the poem more brief and original.
Although the graphological deviation in Dickinson’s poetry was not distinctive or famous than E.E. Cummings’ poetry, her punctuation, capitalization, stanzaic variation and spelling have many breakthroughs, which are certain pragmatic effects achieved by using idiosyncrasies.
In her poems’ manuscript, there are many shallow or deep dashes written with different directions, which are regarded as possibly a pause to represent suspense and waiting, or an inflexion to represent micro-meaning discrepancy, or even a new set of notes in music [12]. Indeed, the revised version used commas instead of short dashes in manuscript, and changed its style slightly. For instance, we could try to compare the four lines in The Soul Selects Her Own Society. The lines in manuscript were: “The Soul selects her own Society - / Then – shuts the Door - / On her divine Majority / Obtrude no more –”；meanwhile the revised version are:“ The soul selects her own societ
y, /Then shuts the door; /To her divine majority /Present no more.” In the manuscript, the dashes have a kind of ephemeral pause or a sense of waiting and rhythm, and all these effects are disappeared by replaced commas.
Besides, we can easily find that Emily Dickinson like to capitalize some nouns. Maybe she had viewed those capitalized words as existed and independent individuals, or she just imitated Carlyle and the Germany style. No matter how, Dickinson was very unique in her creative skills, and she can capriciously gain amazing and emphasized result.
3.1.4 Unusual rhythm
Dickinson’s rhythm is full of her personal characters, which was developed on the base of the 19th century’s hymnology. She adopted the romantic way to mix meter and rhythm, which not only strengthened her poetry’s musicality and lyricism, but also increased its expressiveness and rational colour. As many critics noticed, Dickinson indeed inherited the hymnology at a certain level, but she undoubtedly left many sharp-cut personal traits with her own aesthetic habits.
Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers is one of the most representative works in her early creation. The poetess had modified it many times, which illustrated she had written it with great efforts. Potter viewed that he couldn’t find staid rhythm in this poem [13]9. Thereafter, this poem couldn’t embody hymnology, but the poetess used 19th century’s poetic modes, based on foot and enriched with her personal rhythm. Let’s read her first manuscript, the added signs are indicated the sounds’ degrees (“/” refers heavy stress, “x” refers week stress and “o” refers missed stress.)
Safe in their Alabaster chambers - /xx /x/x /x
Untouched by Morning – And untouched by Noon - /xx /x xx/ x
Lie the meek members of the Resurrection - /xx /xxx /x /x
Rafter of Satin – and Roof of Stone! /xx x x/ x/
Grand go the Years – in the Crescent – above tem - /xx/ xx/x x/x
Worlds scoop their Arcs – And Firmaments – row - /xx/ x/xx /o
Diadems – drop – and Doges – surrender - /xx / x/x x/x
Soundless as dots – on a Disc of snow - /xx/ xx/ x/
Dickinson had mixed foot with rhythm, and created a complicated rhythm mode. We can see from the first stanza that odd lines are: trimeter, dactylus, then gradually transits to the last three dactyls and trochees; the even lines are; tetrameter, trochee, iambic and then anapaest. In this stanza, trochee and rhythm changes forms a vertical discipline, the odd lines use the falling tone, but the even lines use rising tone. In the second stanza, the odd lines are; trimeter, choriambic and amphibrach appear alternatively; the even lines are: trimeter, choriambic, in the middle there are trisyllabic word and two-syllable. This stanza is also formed as vertical choriambic mode. Besides that, Dickinson used dashes in the whole stanzas to appear pauses continuously, added with accordant stress, the poem seems has an organized rhythm mode.
This poem’s rhythm sounds its logical meaning. First of all, the change of stress in the first stanza produces a sense of irony. The words Safe and members of the Resurrection are expressed by the falling tone, meanwhile the words which describes tomb are expressed by the rising tone, and the ironic feeling is very obvious. This phenomenon also is very clear in the last line of this poem; the poetess used the rising tone to describe the drop of crown to inspire reader’s association. Maybe readers would ask, whether this king is resurrected or not? Or he had been already forgotten? Secondly, the poetess used vowel’s length and stress to reinforce her poem’s content, she used short vowel and rising tone to describe the pathetic scene of a king’s decay, especially in the last two lines, she started [ai](Diadems) to [au](soundless) to the dental sound [d](Disc) and sibilant [s](snow).
3.2 Psychological description
All poems are the demonstration of the poets themselves, but few poets can express their psychological activities as vividly as Dickinson did. She secluded herself away from the society, hence she wrote dependently on her personal thoughts and feelings. Burst out from the bottom of her heart, her poetry creates a precedent in psychological description of American poetry. Psychological description is a very important modernistic characteristic of Dickinson’s poetry: sometimes she talks to herself, sometimes the speaker of the poetry makes a monologue, and other times several people have a dialogue to express wise, abstract and philosophical thought. In fact, the power of her best poetry comes from the psychological tension.
3.2.1 Dickinson’s vivid psychological description
Dickinson’s poetry on death is almost all psychological ones. In her opinion, the difference between life and death is no more than the one
between movement and silence, continuity and pause of nature and human society. Life is the beginning of death, death is not rebirth, and it is possible to reach immortality. I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain is regarded as the first modern psychological poem of America:
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Keep treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
And when they al were seated
A service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –
… …
In this poem, “I” has been detached from the body to become an observer; another “me” exists in “my brain”, my mind and my soul, and it experiences the whole process of the death of human emotions. The funeral is carried on in the mind, and the mourners go up and down in the church, the drum keeps beating so that “My Mind was going numb –”. The mourners lift the coffin with a creak that goes across my soul, and finally when the box is dropped down, the speaker loses all his conscious. This poem dramatically shows that spirit soul exist after the death of the body.
3.2.2 Ways of Dickinson’s psychological description
Dickinson described psychology by means of some inventive techniques. She disrupted conventional arrangements to create emotional and psychological effects, as in the lines of poem 341, an extended example of this process appears:
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
Temporal dislocation in the content of the poem is integrally related to its syntactic and metrical form. Generally, the order of words in temporal sequence establishes linguistic relationships from which meaning emerge. In this poem, the temporal disruption of the speaker’s psyche extends to the syntax and meter, with incomplete sentences and sudden shifts from pentameter to tetrameter to trimester to dimeter and back. Other phrases in the poem initially seem to form complete sentences but then unravel in subsequent lines that confuse the original meaning, as in the last stanza. There are no periods to mark off any thought as complete, nor even to mark the poem as a complete thought: the final sentence is completely fragmented by dashes.
It is one of Dickinson’s major features as a precursor of modernistic poetry to employ synesthesia to express intuition and psychological feelings. Synesthesia is a combination of different senses and a process of transmitting the experience and feeling of one sense to another by means of psychology.
3.3 Images and symbols
Emily Dickinson had employed a lot of images and symbols in her poetry, and her reasons were bounded with her special writing rules: to use euphemistical way to make people receive truth gradually, otherwise, the bright lights of truths will hurt people’s eyes. So we can see that the poetess liked to express her thoughts by using images and symbols.
3.3.1 Images
It is publicly acknowledged that Emily Dickinson is an expert in applying special and complicated images to poetry. Her poetry abounds in images that are fresh and clear. And she usually expresses abstract ideas by means of metaphors and symbols. In Hope is the thing with feathers:
Hope is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
Hope is considered to be a bird instead of an abstraction. With this “bird”, one can be fearless in spite of cloud and rain.
Moreover, Dickinson likes to set a series of images so that complicated symbolized meanings are demonstrated. Here is a poem written by her:
The cricket sang,
And Set the Sun,
And workman finished, one by one,
Their seam the day upon.
The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do
With hat in hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go.
A vastness, as a neighbour, came, -
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home,-
And so the night came.
This poem is not one of her finest, but can be regarded as fairly typical. Although there are some shortcomings of it, this particular poem shows that her work is extraordinarily rich and alert. With a series of images: cricket, sun, workman, grass, twilight, a sensible or even tangible picture is provided. “vastness” in the final stanza states the poet’s feelings at an instant: the universe is vast and
the wisdom is eternal. It is a best poem to exemplify the rule of Imagism: attaching importance to association caused by visual images and expressing instant intuition and thoughts. No wonder S.M. Wilson says that Dickinson’s complex skills of applying image have become an important part of modern poetry. He also points out that the understanding of Dickinson’s images depends on the reader’s intuition and consciousness of their associated meanings.
3.3.2 Symbols
Symbols refer to the vivid images which are represented or indicated some abstract meaning. Emily Dickinson was famous as the first person of imagism movement for her plenty of images, and her images were regarded as symbolic images.
Dickinson seldom says something directly, as she herself puts it: tell all the truth but tell it slant. As a result, Dickinson employs symbols in her poems. Especially among her poems about religion and death, symbols can often be found. In this poem, it is describing the feeling of death, the stop of a clock symbolizes death, and “noon” symbolizes eternity. In this kind of poem, what it states is inconsistent with what it implies. It throws the shadow of super-realism to realism so that a sense of dream and reality alternately appears. This is a distinct difference between modernistic poetry and traditional one.
4．Contribution
4.1 Influences on modernistic poetry
It is known that American modernistic poets especially emphasize images and symbols, and we are not difficult to find out that Emily Dickinson’s thoughts and principles of writing are well inherited by these poets. Pound claimed that it is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works, and one of the leaders of the Imagist Movement, Amy Lowell admired Emily Dickinson very much who also learnt her poetry. W.C. Williams had created a specifically American poetic style based on the rhythms and colorations of American speech, thought, and experience, which could be found out as the benefits from Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
4.2 Dickinson’s dedication
The expanding wealth of Dickinson art and scholarship allows readers to delve into the mind and works of one of American’s finest poets. In the view of her legacy, Dickinson’s unique style not only enriched succeeded poets, but also had great influences on music, dance, movie, and plan fields. She is no longer misunderstood as a mousy, reclusive spinster who wrote poetry in her spare time, instead, Emily Dickinson has come to be appreciated as a courageous pioneer of a bold and modern poetic style that commands an international readership.
5．Conclusion
As one of the greatest American poets, Emily Dickinson is also the most original one. Living in complete obscurity in the small town of Amherst, she created the purest poetry in language. Her untitled style, unconventional syntax, special language deviation, unusual rhythm and unique art values, illustrates the fact that one could take a single household and inactive life, and make enchanting poetry out of it.
Dickinson’s poems have established her as the most widely recognized poetess to write in the English language and as an inspiration to modern poets. As a voice of New England’s Protestant and Transcendental cultures and as an avatar of poetic modernism, Emily Dickinson now stands with Walt Whitman as one of America’s two preeminent poets of the 19th century and perhaps of our whole literary tradition.
Acknowledgements
I avail myself of this opportunity to express gratitude to all the teachers who have given me direct and indirect assistance in the course of writing this thesis and who have managed to find time from their busy schedules to read my thesis.
Particularly, I thank my supervisor, Miss. Han Xiaoya who has given me inspiring suggestion and great support during my writing of this thesis. I’m grateful to her for her patient guidance and valuable instructions I received when preparing, drafting, and revising this thesis.
I am also grateful to my dear classmates Miao Pin, Yue Zhaolin, who had offered me their selfless help in finishing this task, I have benefited a great deal from them.
The remaining weakness and possible errors of the thesis are entirely my own.
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