Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Robert Frost

The three authors that I chose were Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), TS Eliot (1888-1965), and Robert Frost (1874-1963). I chose them because first they all were born in the eighteen century and most of their writings dealt with death and dying. I do not believe the elements that Emily Dickinson would be a good source for me to incorporate into my writing because with her writings I found them very hard to understand, possibly because of the timeline or the fact that she wrote in such a secretive code with words. If we have some familiarity with these means, or formal elements of poetry, our understanding and enjoyment of the poem will be greatly increased (Charters page 762).

There were very few of her poems that I could understand or even enjoy reading, I felt a sense of bleakness, despair, loneliness in most of the poems that she wrote. In her poem “She died—this was the way she died. There was the use of eye rhyme (Charters page 764) when she used the word spied and ended the poem by saying “upon the mortal side”. Also in her poem I’m nobody! Who are you? Sounds as if she also had a low self esteem by stating that she was a nobody.

Today, in the 20th century if a person wrote words as such they would probably be diagnosed with depression with suicidal ideology, mostly because of the poems “I felt a funeral in my brain, and There’s been a death in the opposite house” all very bleak and gloomy. The best poem of Emily Dickinson to me would be the one “I never saw a moor” because I like the rhythm of the poem and can completely agree with the direction that the poet is taking the readers and once again I can see eye rhyme (Charters Page 764) with the words Heaven and given within the poem. I actually really enjoye...

... middle of paper ...

...ll become old and to remember our youth, don’t take it for granted.

Also, his poem “To Earthward” was a mixture of lyric poetry (Charters page 811), ode (Charters page 815) and alliteration (Charters page 762). The examples of this mixture would be the use of the words: musk, dusk, honeysuckle, knuckle, salt, fault, love, clove, hand, sand, enough and rough. His writings were not as dreadful and bleak as Emily Dickinson’s poems. The poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was easy to read with a constant rhythm, and there was no question what he was talking about. I believe if I was to choose any of the above writers and incorporate their unique form of writing into my own would be Robert Frost because of his direct approach, the tone that he used, and the rhythmic way he put his words together to make it work for the poem and the audience.