Writing Techniques of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson is one of the most interesting female poets of the nineteenth century. Every author has unique characteristics about him/her that make one poet different from another, but what cause Emily Dickinson to be so unique are not only the words she writes, but how she writes them. Her style of writing is in a category of its own. To understand how and why she writes the way she does, her background has to be brought into perspective. Every poet has inspiration, negative or positive, that contributes not only to the content of the writing itself, but the actual form of writing the author uses to express his/her personal talents. Emily Dickinson is no different. Her childhood and adult experiences and culture form her into the poet she becomes.

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father was a well-known lawyer in the New England town (Sage 190). Her father had also retained a job as a treasurer at Amherst College. He, being the well learned man he was, was able to raise Emily to be educated. She also ran her father’s library, enabling her to read and learn for her pleasure (McQuade 1255). Besides providing her the avenue to learn to read and write, which many women were not able to do at the time, Dickinson does not attribute much more of her success to her parents’ help. She claims they never understood her or her writings fully, therefore not aiding her in many regards (Lauter 2970). In reality, though, critics believe her parents’ lifestyle help most Dickinson into the writer she becomes. Her family’s “quiet style of living, their secure economic class, and perhaps even their emotional remoteness allowed the privacy in which to develop her writing” (Lauter ...

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...worth learning on their own. Her pen not only writes songs on the pages, but becomes a type of music itself. The physical task of writing seems to bring inspiration to her just as the content of poems do.

Works Cited

Sage, Lorna. The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

McQuade, Donald. The Harper Single Volume: American Literature. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999.

Lauter, Paul. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.

Eberwein, Jane Donahue. An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia. London: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Dickinson, Emily. “This is my letter to the World.” Poem 441. “Wild Nights, Wild Nights.” Poem 249. P1411.

Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary. Merriam Webster, Inc., 2015.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/