livloving → Is it a pet peeve of anyone else's when people post the 'Hope is the thing with feathers' or 'Because I could not stop for Death' poems? And then people always respond with, "Oh I love Dickinson!" Which is great to hear, but it's also like ... she wrote so much more! And I think deeper things. (Actually, this is probably a trite complaint, since I'm sure anyone who loves an artist feels this way).

Trite as it may be I certainly often feel the same. Occasionally I scroll though the Emily Dickinson tag on a hunt for things to reblog and I find myself actually amazed at how many posts are “Hope is the thing with feathers.” My volume of her collected poems is thicker than each of the text books that I used during the last semester I was at university, and yet there are people who see “Because I could not stop for death” and “Hope” as her entire body of work. (If I said that “Hope” was not the thing which sparked my interest in Dickinson to begin with then I would be a liar, so I definitely don’t blame the great amount of people who are attached to it one bit.) I’ve begun to worry that I have become the equivalent of a “music snob” regarding her… I’m a bit ashamed of it sometimes, ha.

Part of the reason I created this blog, I suppose, was in hopes of spreading the word that Emily Dickinson was a wonderful mind and deserves so much more credit than she is usually given.