January 7, 2021: Hope-full Texts: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”

[If there’s one thing I think we all need as we begin this new year, it’s hope. So this week, I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of cultural works which offer stories and images of that vital emotion—share the texts or voices which give you hope for a hope-full crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]

Emily Dickinson’s “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers” (also known by its numerical titles, 314 or 254) is as complex and challenging as her poems always were. So I’m mostly going to outsource this post to a convincing explication of the poem and its themes of hope from a next-generation AmericanStudier who’s a lot smarter than me (which is the American Dream, natch). Between that reading and a great Dickinson presentation many years back from one of my best FSU students, Ariana Garcia, I’ve learned a great deal about Dickinson’s poem from such younger readers. Which, now that I think about it, is about the best source of hope I could imagine.

Last hope-full text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Texts or voices which help you find hope?