Truth and Its Variability in Emily Dickinson's Poetry Veronika Mikec College

Truth is something that can never be thoroughly understood or known at all, thought Dickinson. She used poetry as a way to look for it, only to have more questions pop up every time she thought she had found it. That is the thing with truth, she believed – it is everchanging, and it is impossible to ever fully know it. Looking for a universal understanding of it, she wrote a few poems in which she vaguely discusses the truth’s varying nature, letting the reader make sense of it on his or her own.

Dickinson’s view of the truth transcends this particular theme, and shows up in her other poems as well. The constant shifting understanding of it is seen in how she approaches her other subjects in writing – never applying the same techniques or perspectives to any of her themes, and always finding new ways to introduce a topic, showing all the different facets of the gem that is her poetry. Making her way through these different topics, she investigated the truth in ways that have not been done before, ultimately making up her own versions of Truth.

She explores the theme of truth in a poem titled “Tell All the Truth But Tell It Slant—”, in which Truth (capitalized, as Dickens often did with nominal words in her poetry, perhaps to...