Introduction

For my final assignment I knew that I wanted to focus on Emily Dickinson because I had the most fun reading her poems and letters throughout the course of the semester. After much deliberation, I finally decided on Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Your Riches — taught me — Poverty”. I selected this poem in particular for a number of reasons. The first reason is that this is one of the few Emily Dickinson poems that I actually studied in high school; however, during high school I studied it without the greeting and salutation lines that indicate that it was a letter. I had no knowledge of who Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson was or her significance in Emily’s life. I remember my teacher briefly mentioning that the poem originally appeared as a letter to her sister-in-law but it was nothing more than a comment in passing. When I learned about the true history of Susan and Emily through Open Me Carefully, I realized that the nature of their relationship completely altered the lens with which I had previously analyzed her poems.

The second reason that I selected this specific Emily Dickinson poem is more complex. When I was first exposed to Dickinson’s poems, I was reading the poems that were released much later and were actually not as big of a portion of her work. I was reading the poems that focused on death, sadness, religion. These poems were very moving and emotional and easily drew a reaction from a reader, but they were not the whole essence of Emily Dickinson. This poem does not contain the dark contents and imagery that are present in many of her poems, in fact it has a light rhythm and the lines seem to bounce off of each other with energy. Beyond the message, I wanted to dissect this poem because there were so many different concepts being strung together that I wanted to better understand the connection between them all.