‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them’- William Shakespeare’.
What makes a poet great? Is it that they make you laugh every time you read their work? Or maybe you can relate your life to the poems they write. In my opinion, to me a great poet is someone who writes a poem which affects many generations of readers, makes you think about what they have written, allows you to be able to visualise the words you’re reading and is able to make you get lost in the words. When I think of a ‘great’ poet, the first person who pops into my mind is Emily Dickinson. Over her life as a poet, Dickinson developed through phases, writing about different things as she passed through each one. She also used unique mechanisms in her writing such as dashes and capital letters. Dickinson was also renowned for her ideas and the concept of belonging, with her work being based on themes such as immortality, alienation and communication as significant events in her life affected the way she wrote and viewed the world.
Emily Dickinson was born in 1830, during the American Romanticism period (or more commonly known as the American Renaissance) in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she lived her life entire life until her death in 1886. As a young girl, Dickinson and her family regularly attended church but she stood out as eccentric when she refused to join the church officially or call herself a Christian because as she was growing up in a time where newly scientific concepts, especially Darwinism, were clashing with the traditional beliefs. Dickinson struggled with faith and doubt reflect her society's diverse perceptions of God, nature, and humankind (Emily Dickinson Museum , 2009)’. Dickinson first started w...
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... –‘. The poem is written as lyrical, exploring emptions, sensations and the human condition using the word I in the first sentence.. ‘Dickinson reminds a reader that the “I” in her poetry does not necessarily speak of the poet herself: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person” (Emily Dickinson Museum, 2009)’.
Dickinson has written the poem in iambic meter. However, she cleverly hides the rhythm so that it doesn’t interlude on the flow of the poem. The use of her unique punctuation style is the key to the enforced momentum of the piece.
Dickinson can be classed under the definition of a ‘great’ poet. She wrote about small everyday things which resonate globally. Her themes are relevant to our lives and the use of her unique punctuation and the way she plays with words entraps you within the poem.
“Because I Could Not Stop For Death” uses a hymns-like iambic metre. Dickinson's four-line stanzas don’t perfectly rhyme, but they follow a regular metrical pattern. Iambic metre follows a common pattern. The 1st and 3rd line in every stanza has eight syllables.
Emily Dickinson is a well-known poet known for her unique poems. Some famous works of hers include: I taste
Emily Dickinson was an intricate and contradictory figure who moved from a reverent faith in God to a deep suspicion of him in her works. (Sherwood 3) Through her own intentional choice she was, in her lifetime, considered peculiar. Despite different people and groups trying to influence her, she resisted making a public confession of faith to Christ and the Church. (Sherwood 10) She wanted to establish her own wanted to establish her own individuality and, in doing so, turned to poetry. (Benfey 27) Dickinson’s poems were a sort of channel for her feelings and an “exploration” of her faith (Benfey 27).
Dickinson, on the other hand, was a free-style writer. She was carefree of how her writings do not include any type of meter or structure. She did not use standard punctuation. Instead, she referred to the use of dashes, unsystematic capitalization, and broken meter. It is not clear as to why she chose such a unique style of writing, but it worked for her. She was not concerned with correctness but with structure that would include considerate features. In “Defrauded I a Butterfly,” Dickinson left little room for meter or style used from European models in her time being it only consisted on two lines. Also, in “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” the reader may recognize that the she did not use a traditional rhyme scheme that would usually be able to identify in poetry. She used AABC instead of the more noticeable and most often used ABAB or a more rare scheme ABCB.
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.
Although, Emily Dickinson physically isolated herself from the world she managed to maintain friendships by communicating through correspondence. Ironically, Dickinson’s poetry was collected and published after her death. Dickinson explores life and death in most of her poems by questioning the existence of God. Dickinson applies common human experiences as images to illustrate the connection from the personal level of the human being, to a universal level of faith and God. This can be seen in Dickinson’s Poem (I, 45).
Emily Dickinson lived in an era of Naturalism and Realism (1855-1910). She lived in a period of The Civil War and the Frontier. She was affected by her life and the era she lived in. She also had many deaths in her family and that’s part of the reason that she was very morbid and wrote about death.
Emily Dickinson was one of the greatest woman poets. She left us with numerous works that show us her secluded world. Like other major artists of nineteenth-century American introspection such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville, Dickinson makes poetic use of her vacillations between doubt and faith. The style of her first efforts was fairly conventional, but after years of practice she began to give room for experiments. Often written in the meter of hymns, her poems dealt not only with issues of death, faith and immortality, but with nature, domesticity, and the power and limits of language.
Vendler, Helen. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2010. 118-20. Google Books. Google. Web. 5 April. 2014. .
The poem is comprised of six stanzas of four lines each. The poem is long and aligned to the left. The rhyme scheme is ABCB in its first and last two stanzas; however, stanza three and four has different rhyme schemes as stanza three is read ABBC and stanza four is read ABCD. She frequently applies the use of personal pronouns; for example, in the first stanza of the poem, she uses the pronouns "I", "He", "Ourselves". In the second stanza she uses the pronouns "We", "He", "I". In the third stanza she uses the pronoun "We", in three out the four lines composing the stanza. As Harold Bloom, editor of "Bloom's Major Poets ' Emily Dickinson' " says,” When Dickinson declares her "I," these instants become our own" (Bloom 38) The use of pronouns in the poem makes us, as the readers, get involved so deeply into the poem so that we get to feel the protagonist of the poem which is of course the speaker. Most stanzas are composed of a two -beat line but the majority is three b...
We begin to understand the speaker’s uniqueness as we examine the structure of the poem. In Dickinson’s poem, the speaker is proud to be independent. The text says, “I’m Nobody.” This statement ends with a period as if to say, “I’m independent.” Then she says, “Who are you?” She’s having a conversation with another “Nobody”.
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
Emily Dickinson is arguably America’s most well-known female poet. She lived from December 10, 1830 until May 15, 1886. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts to Edward and Emily Dickinson. Her father was a lawyer as well as treasurer for the Amherst Academy which Emily attended and graduated from in 1847. Since her family was very passionate about education, her father sent her to primary school as well Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a year once she’d graduated from Amherst Academy (Wolff 3, 77). Dickinson was the middle child and eldest daughter in an established Puritan family. Her great love was poetry, and her letters home while she was away at school. She had always intended for her work to be just for her eyes. Dickinson
Emily Dickinson once wrote ¨Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break.¨ This is just one part of a piece of the many marvelous writings by Emily Dickinson during her writing years. Born in the year 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily started writing poems at a very young age. Throughout her lifetime, it is recorded that she wrote about 1,800 poems, which were influenced by her family and the circumstances in which she lived through, such as the Civil War. It is also said that she was influenced by both the Modernism and Realism literary Era. She is most famously known for her poems regarding death and romance, such as ¨Because I could not stop for Death,¨ one of her most famous poems involving death.
Many of her poems were a reaction to the rejection of many publishers and other literary critics. This particular poem’s character comes from Dickinson’s reaction to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement that “poets are thus liberating gods.” Here she is challenging the established literati by questioning popular Emersonian views. In particular, this poem is a reaction to Emerson’s belief that “the poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.” Basically, it is a reaction to the idea that the poet is the creator of beautiful words, liberating the common people by giving them words they would not have access to.