Emily Dickinson 409 Analysis

Emily Dickinson was an exceptional writer through the mid-late 1800’s. She never published any of her writings and it wasn’t until after her death that they were even discovered. The complexity of understanding her poems is made prevalent because of the fact that she, the author, cannot expound on what her writing meant. This causes others to have to speculate and decide for themselves the meaning of any of her poems. There are several ways that people can interpret Emily Dickinson’s poems; readers often give their opinion on which of her poems present human understanding as something boundless and unlimited or something small and limited, and people always speculate Dickinson’s view of the individual self.

Prompt: Write a unified essay in which you relate the imagery of the last stanza to the speaker’s view of himself earlier in the poem and to his view of how others see poets.

Emily Dickinson, recognized as one of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century, was born December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts (Benfey, 1). Dickinson’s greatness and accomplishments were not always recognized. In her time, women were not recognized as serious writers and her talents were often ignored. Only seven of her 1800 poems were ever published. Dickinson’s life was relatively simple, but behind the scenes she worked as a creative and talented poet. Her work was influenced by poets of the seventeenth century in England, and by her puritan upbringing. Dickinson was an obsessively private writer. Dickinson withdrew herself from the social contract around the age of thirty and devoted herself, in secret, to writing.

“I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean” (Socrates). What does it mean to be this type of poet? How can someone accomplish such success in poetry, the answer is just two words Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson spent a large portion of her life in isolation, not because she was forced to or because she was ill, Dickinson simply wanted to be alone and because of her isolation she became one of the greatest female poets of all time. Emily Dickinson set the bar high for other female poets and created some of the most renowned poems in the world. The two poems “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” and “Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant” are drastically different poems that tell two different stories, but there are some aspects that cause them to be similar: Imagery, tone, and the statement that the two poems make.

The symbolical concepts introduced by Dickinson, in “405”, reflect many characters and their relationships in Ethan Frome. The first line of Dickinson’s poem captures Ethan’s pitiful situation with his wife, Zeena. Zeena’s “hollow” and “high-boned face” reflects her cold and unnerving personality

”(Collins 45-47) are the names of Dickinson’s poems. Emily Dickinson was a poet who remained undiscovered for many years because she had buried her poetry not wanting anyone to know. Her poems express emotions very clearly as we know, Emily Dickinson remained stoic for most of her life. Dickinson’s poetry was her outlet to her emotions and questions, which seemed to be buried deep within her since she lived a very private life. She wrote in an ambiguous style where her words always held depth and another meaning.

Emily Dickinson wrote 320 in a form in a form that is not traditional. It is written in a closed sense given it is written quatrains that frequently rhyme, but it does not fall into a traditional pattern. Dickinson generally follows the pattern of writing the first and third lines of each stanza in iambic tetrameter and the second and fourth lines in iambic trimeter. Other times, she uses Trochees in random times making the form sound choppy. For example, in the first stanza she uses the trochee “certain” and “winter”. Both of these create a rough sentence. The poem goes into pause at many times throughout the poem, thus bringing out the dissatisfaction and difficult time the poem is describing.

In Emily Dickinson’s poem , she describes a soul selecting their own society. First , emily describes the character (the soul) choosing their own group to be around and do everything with and having to choose wisely because hanging with the wrong group can cause trouble. Then , the soul shuts the door , not allowing anyone to interfere with her and to her guardians / parents shows them no more than the friends that she chose to be around with. The next stanza then talks about the soul keeping an eye on the environment around her watching her surroundings closely. Then , she gets a proposal from an emperor in front of her house . The last stanza finally states that all of her family and friends known her as she

Uplifting, longing, and passionate are all feelings that a reader will recognize when he reads one of Emily Dickinson’s poems. When talking about nature, Dickinson uses emotional and exceptional diction to describe what she feels. In her poems, she uses the theme of nature to give her poems a certain feeling that makes the reader never forget about it. Although some critics think that her work expresses her fears, actually Emily Dickinson expresses her unique love for nature that gives her poems an uplifting, longing, and passionate feel that make the reader want to experience the same.

Often times there was a person that people would hear about named Emily Dickinson, who exactly she was nobody knew. Now Emily Dickinson was just someone who wasn't really an outside person she would really just stay in her room all day and just write. She just wrote poems, but she never ever thought they would publish. I guess you can say it was a pastime thing since it was like occupying for her and it would pass by time within her day. Two poems that actually she never expected to become popular became popular and actually got published. The two poems were called “Before I got my eyes put out” and “We grow accustomed to the dark”.

“The Soul selects her own Society” is one of Emily Dickinson’s poems that best exemplifies her life of seclusion. Through this poem she emphasizes the importance of the individual having absolute authority and freedom over their own life. Dickinson promotes these individualistic values in the poem through the use of several literary devices, including alliteration, dashes, imagery, repetition, and simile, and creates a poem that is able to be interpreted in several different ways by the reader.

In at least three different poems Emily Dickinson shows her thinking about being a public person. In “This is my letter to the world,” (519) the speaker says she wants to be private, but to fully understand why she wants this, the reader must look at two other poems. The reader must turn to an earlier poem, “I’m Nobody,” (260) and surprisingly, in order to grasp poem 260, a later poem, “Publication - is the Auction” (788), is also necessary. These three poems have a similar theme of publicity and privacy, and they also use similar elements—rhyme, meter, and punctuation—to express that theme. Therefore, when these poems are taken together, 788 clarifies 260, which itself explains 519. By itself, poem

Emily Dickinson, like most writers, had various styles of writing that she utilized in her work. Among these styles was the way that she created a persona for her poems. She gave a voice to her poems which both brought them to life and gave them meaning. Such is the case in her poem, “A Still-Volcano-Life.”

Emily Dickinson’s poem “632” goes in depth of the potential of the brain through its vast capacity and knowledge. She compares the brain to the sky, ocean, and God to demonstrate the function of the brain. Dickinson divides the poem up in three stanzas that center around the brain and the other subject and compare them.The uses of figurative language and poetic elements to support the theme of how the brain is boundless and can exceed limits beyond three these entities.

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