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- Title
Emily Dickinson's Smoking Poems.
- Abstract
This article presents several poems of Emily Dickinson as examples of sexually explicit thoughts and hints at lesbianism in Dickinson's poetry. Emily Dickinson is the perennially inscrutable 20th-century poet who lived in the 19th century, a woman whose poetry was as radical and eccentric as her personal life was cramped and ordinary. Of the 1,800 or so poems that we have, more than half were sent to women, many to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Modern readers have no trouble seeing these poems as those of a woman in love and probalby in lust, but critics have traditionally written them off as characteristically florid declarations of 19th-century "romantic friendship." But the letters and poems belie, at the very least, a fantasy life that was filled with acts of kissing and touching another woman.
- Subjects
DICKINSON, Emily, 1830-1886; LESBIANISM in literature; POETRY (Literary form); WOMEN'S sexual behavior; FRIENDSHIP; LETTERS; DICKINSON, Susan Gilbert; INTERPERSONAL relations
- Publication
Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, 2004, Vol 11, Issue 2, p26
- ISSN
1532-1118
- Publication type
Article