"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers

Dickinson’s poetry is a unique monument on the landscape of American literature. The form and content of her poems are often idiosyncratic enough to immediately identify it as Dickinson. These idiosyncrasies, however, do not overshadow all of her influences. Dickinson is writing at the tail-end of American Transcendentalism—a continuation of Romanticism in the 19th century, starting in New England where Dickinson lived—and in the midst of a Protestant religious revival. Both of these movements have left traces on Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”

The description of the landscapes in this poem, and particularly the strange locales of the “chillest land” (Line 9) and the “strangest Sea” (Line 10), draw on the romanticism of the Transcendentalists. European Romantic poets, who influenced transcendentalism, often described strange, far-away places in their works. The Romantics lived in Europe during a time of limited mobility, and they so often, like Dickinson, invented imaginary landscapes that they surveyed through their writing. Both the Romantics and the Transcendentalists also had a reverence for the natural world and tried to raise everyday plants and animals to the level of the divine. In Dickinson’s poem, a similar desire expresses itself in the way she depicts the “little Bird” (Line 7).

The Protestant religious revival that swept across the United States in the mid-1800s is likely responsible for Dickinson’s deep study of biblical texts. Though “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” was written after Dickinson expressed skepticism in the church, the poem still employs the form of a religious hymn, constituted by quatrains (four-line stanzas) of alternating iambic tetrameter (a line consisting of four iambic feet) and iambic trimeter (a line of three iambic units of two feet each).