Dissolving Metaphors in Emily Dickinson's Poems About Drink

Abstract:Emily Dickinson grew up amid the rise of the Massachusetts temperance movement. Of her nearly 1800 poems, over twenty poems deal with "drink" and involve drinking or drunkenness, an understudied theme in her work considering such poems account for approximately one out of every seventy-eight poems in her oeuvre. Given her exposure to temperance effort and temperance literature, and given her critical preoccupation with dualities (life / death, nature / God, mind / body, possibility / impossibility), it is not surprising that Dickinson would turn to this complex topic. This paper will explore why Dickinson repeatedly returns to this theme and will attempt to answer questions such as: what does Dickinson get out of returning again and again to write about alcohol? How might these poems be understood within the context of the temperance movement at the time? What kind of work do images of drinking achieve in such poems? And are there multiple angles she brings to this theme?