Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 53

The Creation of Emily Dickinson’s Heaven on Earth Through a Poetic Body
Dawid Kedra • MA in English, Keele University
In her youth, Dickinson claimed heaven as a “garden we have not seen” (Farr, 13).
Educated within a limited system, complimentary to female studies of the pastoral
world, Dickinson’s isolated mind allowed her to travel beyond her Homestead walls
and into a world ran by her views, hopes and expectations. The journey into a world
challenging the need to declare for patriarchy, religion and societal values failed to
trap her mind and instead made her question, searching for the powerful within the
natural around her; a force stereotypically connected with the feminine proving equally
as unexplainable as religion and the patriarchal God. While creating a world of her
own, Dickinson manipulated geographical places she has never visited, creating a
sense of “my Geography” within her text (Dickinson, Online Source). “Maps and
geographical facts were of interest to her not only for themselves but as she could use
them symbolically to identify and order the more subtle elements of the mind’s world”
(Patterson, 141). Perhaps Dickinson herself, accepting Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s
nickname for her as “Daisy,” saw herself as tied by the Victorian limitations and wished
to imagine herself as the free roaming flower venturing into different countries she
could not physically visit: in ‘In lands I never saw – they say,’ the speaker is “Meek at
whose everlasting feet/ A myriad Daisy play” (Farr, 39). Delving into a world created
by Emily Dickinson, my research will focus primarily on a singular mind, a poet
historically remembered as trapped and isolated, which gained liberation from the act
of reading and creating, learning and altering, analysing how emotion, as a
philosophical concept within itself, is portrayed through the written, poetic body of
Emily Dickinson and how this body can be celebrated and adapted by university
students.
Keywords: 19 th Century Poetry, Gender and Poetic Expression, Artistic Singularity, Comparative UK-US
Poetry, Emily Dickinson
Introduction
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