Finding common ground: 'Paint', politics, people, and the poet (The 1850s as formative years for the writer Emily Dickinson)

Our initial glimpse at the poet Emily Dickinson provided by Mabel Loomis Todd is that of a secluded spinster withdrawn and isolated from the real world. Her poetry was published as an exploration of the mind wrestling with the notions of love, death, and religion. These preliminary interpretations became the standard until the 1950s. Scholars have since been reconstructing her portrait. This dissertation seeks to further expand our notion of the worlds of this poet to include her observations and engagement with the political climate and the national issues of her day, especially those which contributed toward the Civil War. With the slavery controversy, the influx of immigrants, the extension of the railroad linking major parts of the country, and the political power play between states rights and federal government, the mid 19th century was a volatile time. Emily Dickinson was not only an astute spectator of the sectional confrontations but found in the intensity of the 1850s a direction for herself and a rich source of raw material for her writing. She spent those years astutely reading and observing the tensions of the country while also dabbling with an increasingly rich palette of linguistic phrases and ideas. Interested by the narrative speculation found in some of these accounts of "every day", she declared an affinity between herself and history. Therefore, it is not surprising that her writing took on an urgency in the ensuing years. By the early 1860s, her prolific output became a direct result of some of the habits she acquired the previous decade during her formative years as a writer. This dissertation reviews those critical years of her maturation and demonstrates that Emily Dickinson taught herself during these pressure filled years of career development to carefully mine the "witchcraft" of the times for her production of "gems".