by Dr. Greta Colombani
Greta Colombani on the strange and powerful poetry of Emily Brontë.
During her short, private life, Emily Brontë agreed to share with readers outside her family only twenty-one of her poems, which appeared in the first book published by the Brontë sisters under pseudonyms and at their own expense: Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846). Far from spontaneous, this act of sharing was prompted by a violation that had at first infuriated her. Charlotte had come up with the idea for the collection after discovering the notebooks where Emily had been secretly transcribing the poems she had been writing since her teenage years.
While the book ended up only selling two copies one year after publication, Emily’s poetry continues to attract and captivate readers today as a possible window into the soul of one of the most elusive and mysterious figures in English literature. This lecture will offer a journey through the lyrical depth, visionary intensity, and rich variety of Emily’s published and unpublished poems, from her fierce confrontations with loss, confinement, and her own mortality, to her evocations of the sublime, solitary wildness of the moors, to the several tales of violence, passion, and betrayal set in Gondal, the mythic country that she had invented with Anne as young adolescents and that never ceased to haunt her imagination.
Set text: Emily Brontë, Complete Poems, ed. Janet Gezari (Penguin, 1992). Greta will focus on particular poems from this volume; details will be sent to everyone who books.
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