Students of literature can learn a great deal from the careful study of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. This template for breaking the class into small groups, assigning them specific poems and suggested discussion topics, and bringing the class together again for group presentations could be used for the study of any poet.

Project Emily Dickinson

(originally created for an 11^th grade American literature class, AP-level)

In 1992, the centennial of Walt Whitman’s death, I went to a reading/lecture at the New York Public Library by the poet Galway Kinnell. Kinnell chose to read and discuss poems by both Whitman and Emily Dickinson for the event. He said (more or less), Walt is our father, Emily our mother, and young poets can learn more from our mother. Students of literature, I believe, can also learn a great deal from a careful study of Emily Dickinson. Hence Project Emily Dickinson.

Here is the procedure:

I have divided the Dickinson poems in The Mentor Book of American Poetry into six groups by theme; each of six groups of students will be responsible for one group of poems.

Day One you should come into class prepared to discuss all the poems your group has been assigned (more if you wish!). That means you should have looked up any unfamiliar words, tracked down any allusions, and written down your questions and theories about the poems. Discuss the poems in your group and decide on one poem that you want to teach the class as a whole.

On Day Two, concentrate on planning your presentation on the poem you have selected (two if they are very short or you want to show contrasting treatments of a theme). When you present your poem, you will read the poem aloud, discuss it, ask and field questions about the poem, etc. Maybe you want to dramatize it or to write and read an answer to the poem in Dickinson’s style. Whatever you decide to do, your presentation should answer these questions: How does Emily Dickinson make the familiar unfamiliar, the ordinary extraordinary? What twists of language and poetic devices does she employ to impart this “newness” to her themes? In addition, all group members should play a role in the presentation.

Group 1

Success Is Counted Sweetest (186), I Should Have Been Too Glad, I See (190), Before I Got My Eye Put Out (191), I Dreaded That First Robin So (192), I Had Been Hungry All the Years (198), While We Were Fearing It, It Came (202)

Group 2

One Dignity Delays for All (186), I Should Not Dare to Leave My Friend (188), I Felt a Funeral in My Brain (189), There’s Been a Death in the Opposite House (194), I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died (196), The Heart Asks Pleasure First (198)

Group 3

It Was Not Death, For I Stood Up (197), The Heart Asks Pleasure First (198), Because I Could Not Stop for Death (199), The Last Night That She Lived (201), My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close (203), The Distance That the Dead Have Gone (204)

Group 4

New Feet Within My Garden Go (187), I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed (188), A Bird Came Down the Walk (192), The Wind Tapped Like a Tired Man (195), A Narrow Fellow in the Grass (200), The Sky Is Low, the Clouds Are Mean (201), There Came a Wind Like a Bugle (203), The Saddest Noise, the Sweetest Noise (204)

Group 5

Surgeons Must Be Very Careful (187), Hope Is the Thing with Feathers (187), What Soft Cherubic Creatures (194), Much Madness Is Divinest Sense (195), I Died for Beauty (196), I Never Saw a Moor (201), Of God We Ask One Favor (203)

Group 6

I’m Nobody, Who Are You (190), The Soul Selects Her Own Society (190), No Rack Can Torture Me (193), This Is My Letter to the World (196), I Started Early, Took My Dog (197), I Laughed a Crumbling Laugh (199)

(Two or more classes should be allotted for the presentations.)