Emily Dickinson
Poetry has been around for many years. Poems are a piece of literature that use rhythm, or beautiful language to express imaginary or elevated thoughts of one’s life. Poetry is a piece of someone mind. Most poets will write about life or emotions. This is entertaining because it allows ones to think upon their own life. Emily Dickinson does just that in many of her poems. She used many different styles of writing to allow the reader to express themselves in her writing. Emily Dickinson uses variety of different devices to express herself, and wrote in first person, this can be understood by looking at her life experience and her ability to write, you will see this by analyzing her poem “I’m nobody who are you”. Emily Dickinson lived an unusual life this may be the reasoning for her colorful poems. Emily was born in Amherst Massachusetts where she would
…show more content…
She would write about music, herself, law, and religion anything that she might be feeling that day she wrote. This allows the reader to see what Emily might be like. Using different devices allows the reader to express themselves in different ways, it also opens a door to a larger selection of readers. Emily did enjoy writing about her mood and her our life experiences. She probably did this to express herself and to allow her readers to understand what she was feeling.
Most of her poems are written in first person, but this does not mean that she is talking about herself. She wanted the reader to put themselves in the poems that she created. She wanted the reader to feel what she was feeling. This style of poetry is so important it allows people to feel a poem in different ways. When we read something, we put ourselves and our own experience in mind when reading. For instant “I’m nobody who are you”, many people could get something different out of this
“I dwell in Possibility-- / A fairer House than Prose . . .” (Dickinson) Poetry in its most basic form predates literacy. In fact, poetry was first utilized as a technique to assist in keeping an oral record of things like history, stories, genealogy and in some cases, even law. Most people have come to believe that poetry was so widely used due to the fact that it was far easier to memorize then prose, and during the time of texts like the Odyssey, oral recitation was the number one way of relaying information from one individual to another. So it is needless to note that poetry has undergone a lot of changes over the course of history. With the oldest surviving poem being the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, dated around 4500 B.C.E, and the most recent being typed out on someone’s laptop right now, it is no wonder that things have had to shift. Each and every poet has their own opinions on poetry, what it is as well as what it means. These ideas all vary, pulling their definitions from the modern world as well as the historical world. Three poets have managed a nearly impossible task of defining poetry through example, Wallace Stevens in His Text Of Modern Poetry, Archibald MacLeish in His Text Ars Poetica And Marianne Moore in Her Text Poetry.
Emily Dickinson is a well-known poet known for her unique poems. Some famous works of hers include: I taste
Reading a poem by Emily Dickinson can often lead the reader to a rather introspective state. Dickinson writes at length about the drastically transformative effect a book may have upon its’ reader. Alternating between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, Dickinson masterfully uses the ballad meter to tell a story about the ecstasy brought by reading. In poem number 1587, she writes about the changes wrought upon the reader by a book and the liberty literature brings.
Emily Dickinson had an interesting life, and is a profound woman in the history of America and literature. Emily wrote many poems. Some are titled, and many are given chronological numbers instead of headlining the main theme. I am interpreting Poem #315.
Emily Dickinson was a different type of poet that has people thinking of things people would never think about in another author’s work. Dickinson was born and raised with the rich life with only two siblings. Her work was inspired by her much of her childhood and the people she interacted with. An example of Dickinson’s different type of style is, “ So I conclude that space and time are things of the body and have little or nothing to do with ourselves. My Country is Truth,”(Berry) Emily Dickinson did not share hardly any of her writing when she was alive. According to Berry,” With the exception of six poems that appeared in newspapers at various times, and another that appeared in a collection of stories and poems in 1878, Emily Dickinson never published her work,” (Berry) Even though Dickinson wrote differently, does not mean she had a different lifestyle compared to most people today. Dickinson was an outstanding American poet where her childhood, family and friends, religion, and education inspired most of her poetry.
Emily Dickinson was a polarizing author whose love live has intrigued readers for many years. Her catalog consists of many poems and stories but the one thing included in the majority of them is love. It is documented that she was never married but yet love is a major theme in a vast amount of her poetry. Was there a person that she truly loved but never had the chance to pursue? To better understand Emily Dickinson, one must look at her personal life, her poems, and her diction.
Thomas Higginson said that “the main quality of her poems is that of extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor, which was all her own'; (78).
Time is and endless phenomenon that has no beginning or end, therefore making it infinite. Emily Dickinson proves this point in her poem, Forever – is Composed of Nows, referring to “nows” as more significant than the future (Wilbur 80).
Literary Analysis of Emily Dickinson's Poetry. Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous authors in American history, and a good amount of that can be attributed to her uniqueness in writing. In Emily Dickinson's poem 'Because I could not stop for Death,' she characterizes her overarching theme of Death differently than it is usually described through the poetic devices of irony, imagery, symbolism, and word choice. Emily Dickinson likes to use many different forms of poetic devices and Emily's use of irony in poems is one of the reasons they stand out in American poetry. In her poem 'Because I could not stop for Death,' she refers to 'Death' in a good way.
In the other hand, Emily, despite having an unusual self-imposed private life, her poems were very conservative and structured. She mostly wrote ballad stanzas, which has four distinct lines with her own unique placement of punctuation and unusual grammar. She makes use exclusively of short, repetition, simple lines. An example of it is taken from a ballad poem “A still-Volcano-life”.
Emily Dickinson, a radical feminist is often expressing her viewpoints on issues of gender inequality in society. Her poems often highlight these viewpoints. Such as with the case of her poem, They shut me up in Prose. Which she place herself into the poem itself, and address the outlining issues of such a dividend society. She is often noted for using dashes that seem to be disruptive in the text itself. Dickinson uses these disruption in her text to signify her viewpoints on conflictual issues that reside in society. From the inequality that women face, to religion, to what foreseeable future she would like to happen. All of her values and morales are upheld by the dashes that Dickinson introduces into her poems.
Emily Dickinson, who achieved more fame after her death, is said to be one of the greatest American poets of all time. Dickinson communicated through letters and notes and according to Amy Paulson Herstek, author of “Emily Dickinson: Solitary and Celebrated Poet,” “Writing was the way she kept in touch with the world” (15). Dickinson’s style is unique and although unconventional, it led to extraordinary works of literature. Dickinson lived her life in solitude, but in her solitude she was free to read, write and think which led to her nonconformity and strong sense of individualism. Suzanne Juhasz, a biographer of Dickinson, sums up most critics’ idea of Dickinson ideally: “Emily Dickinson is at once the most intimate of poets, and the most guarded. The most self-sufficient, and the neediest. The proudest, and the most vulnerable. These contradictions, which we as her readers encounter repeatedly in her poems, are understandable, not paradoxical, for they result from the tension between the life to which she was born and the one to which she aspired” (1). Dickinson poured her heart and soul into over 1,700
Summation of Poem Emily Dickinson explains a common belief regarding words: they die as soon as they leave lips or pens. She then juxtaposes this idea with her own: words begin their lives upon their creation. The six-lined poem balances both ideas with the opposing opinion comprising the first three lines, and her own opinion taking up the rear in lines four through six. She furthers her point by using the word “say” or “said” in lines two, three, and four instead of “believe” or another word. By physically speaking her opinion, she gives life to its words.
To be a great poet like Emily Dickinson, on needs to be strikingly unique and innovative. During her existence, it was difficult for writers to go against and break societal traditions, however Emily ignored the traditions. In her Pocket poems she uses simple language different from other poets like Walt Whitman, who uses pretentious and strenuous language, which makes it difficult to understand, yet still very captivating writing. Emily poems are mostly eight lines or less with much meaning in every line. She also uses many off rhyme and peculiar punctuations to get the reader’s attention. Also, in some of the poems the writer builds up small themes where she returns to multiple times throughout the book; several significant themes are love,
The diction that Robert Browning uses is quite interesting. Only once in the poem does the author use a word suggesting he is writing in first person. The first person word occurs in the fifth line when the author says, “As I gain the cove with pushing prow”. The poem would not be as effective if Browning had continuously used words such as “I” and “my.” Without these words the poem is able to draw in the reader, he or she is able to feel what the speaker is feeling and connect it to their own lives rather than looking in on someone else’s.