On Children's Perspective In Emily Dickinson's Poetry

As one of the most shinning stars in history of world poetry, Emily Dickinson has inaugurated a new era in American poetry and played an important role in American literary history, and had great influence on poetic creations in other nations as well. Her works focuses mainly on the themes of nature, death, love and religion, often adopting child perspective to survey the world around her. The author of the thesis analyzes the three dimensions of child perspective in Dickinson's poetry, using some concepts in art of painting, such as two-dimension and three-dimension, and discusses the three-layer nature of the perspective. In the coordinate system of child perspective created by Dickinson's poetry, child's feelings and child's imagination correspond to the transverse and longitudinal dimensions respectively. The three-dimension perspective is finished with child's vision as the center and the crossing point. The three factors mentioned above often co-exist in one aesthetic object and blend and mix with one another. For example, child's emotion exists and contains in child's imagination. Being the foundation of the other two factors, child's vision can not exist independently, but are involved in child's feelings and child's imagination. The three layers constitute a complete three-dimensional space of child perspective, contributing much to Dickinson's poetry a perfect work of art.The essay works on the textual analyses of Dickinson's poetry to the effect that some poems are toned with tragic sense as the poetess interprets death and pains from child's perspective. Other poems are tinged with humor and comedy when she, with child's heart and emotions, communicates with the flowers and birds. Still other poems are saturated with a mixture of comic and tragic feelings due to the fact that she reflects the reality of people's living condition by dealing with cruelty and misery with sense of humor. The thesis centers its discussion on how child's viewpoint and mode of thinking present themselves in a poem, and on their unique embodiment in specific groups of poems and in the poetess' specific creative stages. More importantly it taps the psychological stimuli and object of this mode of thinking and creative strategies. That is, this strategy shows Dickinson's unique understanding of life. Her object goes against the irrationalities of society, camouflaging pains and reality with a coat of flamboyance. Through its child's eyes, we can read the emotional states behind the poems, unique, sincere and plain, which forms the major spiritual core of her poetry.The essay consists of three chapters.Chapter one discusses the first dimension of child perspective in Dickinson's poetry which shows an actual world. The writer makes definition of child perspective and analyzes some themes as beauty of nature, life actualities and religious world in her poetry, and explains the reason for her using of this narrative perspective.Chapter two explores the second dimension of child perspective in her poetry which shows the spiritual world in child's feelings. Three conditions including curiosity of probing into the nature, loneliness of child, and indifference to the world are discussed in her poetry from child perspective.Chapter three interprets the third dimension of child perspective in her poetry which displays the image domain in child's imagination. The method of personification, the quality of imagination, and the meaningful images consist of a three-dimensional poetic space. The image domain in child imagination manifests itself in three groups of images, namely, self imagination (robin and small stone), imagination of love (fresh flowers and bee), and imagination of life (heaven and grave).Last chapter probes into the significance of adopting child perspective in Dickinson's poetry. On the one hand, the writer makes poetry beautiful and looks at the world around her by using child perspective as metaphor, on the other hand, the writer wants to express her deep feeling of individual living and to form her unique narrative in poetic writing.