Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Janet W. Buell

Critical Essay by Janet W. Buell

SOURCE: “‘A Slow Solace’: Emily Dickinson and Consolation,” in The New England Quarterly, Vol. LXII, No. 3, September, 1989, pp. 323-45.

In the following essay, Buell traces Dickinson's attitude toward death and aging, suggesting that Dickinson came to accept death in her later life and found consolation in nature.

“That Bareheaded life—under the grass—worries one like a Wasp.”¹ In her letter to Samuel Bowles, written during her most productive period, Emily Dickinson expressed a lifelong preoccupation and state of mind. A hovering concern with death harassed, threatened, and sometimes stung her painfully. In 1883, soon after the shattering death of her young nephew Gilbert, she wrote to Mrs. Holland, “is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me it's name!” (L 873).

Emily Dickinson undertook an abiding quest for that name. Beginning with the death of her father in 1874 and mounting until the year of her own...
(read more)