I Cannot Dance Upon my Toes

Thi is a bas-relief scupture with a figure on one side and a poem on the opposite side. The sculpture is inspired by the poem I Cannot Dance upon my Toes by Emily Dickenson. This is one of fifteen sculptures that are part of the Greg and Fay Wyatt Sculpture Garden that celebrate dance and poetry.

Dickinson was a prolific writer, her only publications during her lifetime were 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems, and one letter. The poems published then were usually edited significantly to fit conventional poetic rules. Her poems were unique for her era. They contained short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends, and also explore aesthetics, society, nature and spirituality. A complete, and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955.