Few great American writers resist classification into eras, styles, and schools to the extent that nineteenth century poet Emily Dickinson does. While some readers cite her recurrent themes of nature and death in order to pigeonhole her work in the Romantic era that coincided with the years of her short life, others want to associate her with the end of Puritanism or the emergence of new, distinctly American, or even feminine, voices. Still others become mired in psychological interpretations related to the poet’s reclusive life. Yet, each characterization of this unique poet is, as Dickinson once wrote of a fly, a kind of “uncertain stumbling Buzz.” Dickinson’s poetry seems simultaneously behind, anchored in, and ahead of her time. Much has been made of how Dickinson’s meter replicates the meter of Protestant hymns, especially those of Isaac Watts, who composed in the early 1700s. Her punctuation and capitalization, so bizarre by modern standards, reflects what she learned at the local Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and, to some degree, letter-writing conventions of her time. Her many uses of weapon imagery are consistent with the Civil War that raged during one of the most prolific eras of her output. Yet, the treatment of her themes is sometimes wholly modern, as when she dispenses with the grand gestures of death, God, and eternity to elevate the arrival of a fly. Indeed, there is a peculiarly modernist sensibility at work in a poet who interrupts death with the irritating buzz of a filthy pest, especially in an era that set so much store by the dignity of final words and parting gestures. There is even a kind of modern minimalism to Dickinson, who works single words and single marks of punctuation harder than any farmer ever worked a farm animal in a field. But no matter how she reaped or how she sowed, her work, like the effects of the speaker in “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—,” is not wholly “Assignable.”

1. All of the following are mentioned in the passage as characteristics of Dickinson’s work EXCEPT:

(A) unexpected punctuation.
(B) arms imagery.
(C) muted naturalism.
(D) unorthodox capitalization.
(E) modernist tendencies.



2. Which of the following statements can most reason ably be inferred from the passage?

(A) “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” is Dickinson’s best known poem.
(B) Words in a Dickinson poem typically evoke a multiplicity of meaning.
(C) Dickinson sought to preserve the punctuation patterns of literary correspondence of her day.
(D) Dickinson’s copying of the meter of Christian hymns has contributed to her reputation as a less than original poet.
(E) The categorization of poets into specific schools, styles, and eras is typically misguided.



3. The author intersperses quotations from Dickinson’s work in order to

(A) illustrate the scope and variety of Dickinson’s major themes.
(B) contrast selected word choices with the Puritanism with which Dickinson is sometimes associated.
(C) compare selected word choices with minimalist expressions in modern poetry.
(D) exemplify the bizarre punctuation and capitalization that characterize Dickinson’s work.
(E) provide telling bits of poetic evidence that help present and prove the writer’s thesis.



4. Which of the following best expresses the main idea of the passage?

(A) Historical influences from Protestant hymns to Puritanism to the Civil War combine to define Dickinson’s poetry.
(B) Dickinson is at the height of her powers when she reverses traditional expectations for poetry.
(C) To interpret Dickinson’s work along narrowly psychological lines is patently wrong.
(D) Dickinson’s work is a label-defying mix of what Dickinson knew and the new ground that she broke.
(E) Although Dickinson’s work has been called “feminist,” Romantic is a more apt label for the work