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Emily Dickinson Influences

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Although Emily Dickinson was a complete recluse and was not recognized in her own time, she is now recognized as one of the most influential poets in American Literature. Emily’s work has left a strong mark on today’s writers. Dickinson began writing as a teenager with influences of her own. Leonard Humphrey, principal of Amherst Academy, and a family friend named Benjamin Franklin Newton, who sent Dickinson a book of poetry by Ralph Waldo Emerson, impacted and encouraged her private works (Emily Dickinson Biography). While Emily’s work was brilliant, very little of Dickinson’s work was published in her lifetime, nor was it heavily publicized at the time of her death in 1886. However, her sister discovered most of her poetry shortly after her …show more content…

Throughout her reclusive lifestyle, she secretly wrote poetry and hundreds of letters. These works of writing later created a long-lasting effect on American literature. While Emily enjoyed writing poetry and letters, her health was poor throughout most of her life. As her sickness started to expand, and worsen, shen soon increased her withdrawal from normal social situations. This isolation from society rendered powerful marks on her poetry (Emily Dickinson Museum). Emily Dickinson's poetry reflects the isolation and alienation that she herself felt as she composed her prose. Dickinson was said to have an anxiety condition that encompassed her unique style and her desire not to publicly publish her poems during her lifetime (Emily Dickinson Museum). Emily selected whom she spoke with carefully and gingerly. This caused her to become abnormally concealed from the rest of society. Like her poetry, her relationship to the world was intensely introverted. During the last twenty years of her life, she rarely left her home. Although she lived in almost complete isolation from the outside world, she actively maintained communication with select family and oftentimes read widely in the comfort of her home by the town …show more content…

While Emily’s poetry often hinted at an unknown lover, her preserved letters give a sombre reflection. Until Dickinson was in her mid-20s, her writing mostly took the form of letters. These letters she sent out consist of a surprising number of those that she wrote from age 11 onward that have now been preserved. She often sent to her brother, Austin, or to her own female friends, including Abiah Root, Jane Humphrey, and Susan Gilbert. Susan would later marry Emily’s elder brother, Austin. These honorable communications overflow with humour, story telling, intellectual interest, and dark reflection. Throughout her letters, one could infer that Emily Dickinson had given and demanded more from her correspondents than she had received. She frequently construed that her correspondents’ lack of response as confirmation of abandonment or even disloyalty. Nonetheless, the loss of friends, whether through death or declining interest, became an underlying commodity for Dickinson. Much of Emily’s writing, both poetic and the form of letters, seems premised on a feeling of abandonment and a matching attempt to oppose, overcome, or reflect on a sense of loneliness. There are very few letters that remain today. Emily had previously asked that her

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