Emily Dickinson's The Brain Is Wider Than The Sky

Throughout the vast majority of the Romantic Movement, Emily Dickinson’s work was the center of attention. This idea of romanticism; thinking outside of the box, questioning reality and challenging perception was all so foreign that readers and audiences everywhere could not help but begin to question their own awareness of the world around them. Similar to that of many other writers during the Romantic Movement, poet Emily Dickinson wrote all about her ideas that challenged actuality and the natural world. She wanted to explore human intellect, and exactly just what the mind was capable of doing. Throughout literature, writers have struggled with capturing the idea of man and his or her perceived place in society. Not to discredit how these fiction or nonfiction characters are portrayed, but as mankind, we too have struggled with observing and learning our surrounding reality. This is simply because the boundary between our consciousness, mind, and soul and the actual, physical, concrete world around us is pretty blurry. However, this sublime consideration was encouraged by Romanticism in the late 18th century, when the exploration of this “emotional adventure” began. Strategically enough, this time

As complex as the words and punctuation may seem, I chose this particular poem because of it’s underlying simplicity. What I’ve interpreted from the text is that the overall theme from this, and many of Dickinson’s other works, is illustrating the complicated and beautiful relationship between our minds and what we depict as the natural world. What Dickinson describes in the poem above is so interesting in that it actually uses these characteristics of nature to explain the capacity of the human brain; to absorb the depths of the great oceans, to grow to the wide length of the sky and to interpret the freewill given to us by