How would you describe the tone of the poem? Is Collins making fun of Dickinson
Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes
Billy Collins
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Collins’ poem references a number of images and ideas in Dickinson’s poems, including Dickinson poems we read for class. Identify at least two lines in Collins’ poem that allude to Dickinson poems. Name the Dickinson poems and explain how the Collins’ lines allude to the Dickinson poems.
In the fifth stanza, Collins describes “[t]he complexity of women’s undergarments / in nineteenth-century America.” Why might Collins have chosen to use the metaphor of “a polar explorer… sailing toward the iceberg of her [Emily Dickinson’s] nakedness”? How might this metaphor reflect important historical achievements by adventurers in the 1800’s, as well as what we know about Dickinson’s personal life?
How would you describe the tone of the poem? Is Collins making fun of Dickinson? Is the poem pornographic? Is the poem sexist? Is Collins a misogynist?
Does the speaker literally want to undress Dickinson and have sex with her? How might “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” be read as a metaphor? What does the speaker actually want to “undress”?
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