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Wilbur, Richard. “The Three Privations of Emily Dickinson." Literature: An Introduction
to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 11th ed. New
York: Pearson Longman, 2010. 969-970. Print.
In Emily Dickinson’s life, she has dealt with her own sense of privation, and has expressed
it through her poetry. Dickinson had three main privations; she was deprived of a stable
religious faith; she was stripped of love; she was deprived of literary acknowledgement. At
17-years-old, Dickinson refused to become a working Christian seminary after a sequence
of revival meetings at school. Some might say this was a crucial step to becoming the poet
she became, but no amount of pleasure could eliminate the feeling she had for betraying
her lack of grace. In a letter to Abiah Root, she explains how she separated herself from
religious community, from an objective, from the greatness of life. Being a child of
evangelical Amherst, she thought of a courageous life as requiring strong faith, but as she
grew older she refused religious ideas such as original sin, hell, and redemption, and made
it impossible for herself to have the same religious life as her generation. Her privation of
love is one that has become familiar in all her poems and biography. She had few loves
bestowed on her heard but found herself lonely and separated in the greater part in her life.
