Emily Dickinson Poetry Analysis

“Emily Dickinson.” Poets.org: From the Academy of American Poets. Copyright 1997-2012. Retrieved November 21, 2012. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/155

Open Mike Nights take place every Tuesday at six in the evening in Florida Discount Music. The bitter smell of coffee permeates the humid air and the clink of mugs and ceramic plates often accompany the snapping of fingers after a person finishes performing their piece of poetry. However once the next person begins, the place becomes as loud as a morgue at midnight with people anticipating the next reading. Some poems receive better responses than others, confirmed by the louder or more frequent snaps, but nonetheless, the authors continue to present their work to the audience every week. So, what would happen if a poem from a different time period shared his or her poetic genius to a modern group of people? Depending on the century, the

Poetry is defined as “writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm” (CITE) There are many great poets but one of the most highly regarded is Emily Dickinson. Dickinson is considered the recluse of Amherst, little did everyone know, she would turn out to be one of the most influential poets of not only her time but forever. Two of her poems “This is my letter to the world,” and “Tell all truth but tell it slant” both deal with society and people's emotions. In the poem “this is my letter to the world” Emily writes about the feeling she has as she leaves society. “Tell all truth but tell it slant” is a piece about how the truth is not meant for everyone. Emily Dickinson uses poetic devices such as personification, rhyme scheme, and metaphor to accurately convey the unique themes of her pieces.

Emily Dickinson chose not to conform to the madness of society and shut out many of the people that she felt wanted to change her. She wrote a poem called “The Soul Selects Her Own Society,” in this poem she writes about how the soul shuts certain people out and confides in only one person. Emily Dickinson writes “Then- close the Valves of her attention- Like Stone-,”

Poetry has many factors that go into it that help convey the theme and deeper meaning. Some poets like to use capitalization to emphasize what is important, some like to use figurative language, and some like to use characterization. Poetry is a boundless writing tool for self-expression which is why it is important to understand and identify how poets express the theme. One of the most famous poets is Emily Dickinson, she was extremely recluse, intelligent, and wrote some of the best poems known to man. To be able to analyze poetry and connect the bigger meaning behind the words written is to go into some of the greatest minds. When Emily Dickinson died people tried to alter her poems which took the deeper meaning away from them. One of the ways she likes to convey meaning is by using figurative language. Two poems by Dickinson is “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” and “If You were Coming in the Fall”. “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” is about depression and what it is like to have a mental breakdown while “If You were Coming in the Fall” is about the yearning of wanting a loved one to return. Although the theme of these two poems are not similar, the way the theme is being expressed is. In comparison of Emily Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” and “If You were Coming in the Fall,” she uses simile, imagery, and allusion to get the theme of each poem known.

Let’s play a game. Close your eyes. Now, think of some of your favorite poems. Can you remember the poets who created them? Did you name off Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare, and Robert Frost to name a few? I imagine that the majority of people didn’t remember Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson was a talented poet who used her previously devastating personal experiences to enhance her poems.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born December 10, 1830, into an influential family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father helped found Amherst College, where Emily later attended between 1840 and 1846. She never married and died in the house where she was born on May 15, 1886.

In her poem #465, Emily Dickinson’s speaker allow the reader to experience an ironic reversal of conventional expectations of the moment of death in the mid-1800s, as the speaker finds nothing but an eerie darkness at the end of her life.

     Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous authors in American History, and a good amount of that can be attributed to her uniqueness in writing. In Emily Dickinson's poem 'Because I could not stop for Death,' she characterizes her overarching theme of Death differently than it is usually described through the poetic devices of irony, imagery, symbolism, and word choice.

In the poem “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” the speaker takes a more mysterious and shadowy turn when the soul is willing to give up the entire world for a life of self-realization. Using imagery and tone in the poems “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” and “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” , Dickinson shows a strong theme of the individual verse society.

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.

Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul selects her own Society-” is a poem that deals with love and heartbreak. The first line of the poem clearly sums up the meaning that the “soul” chooses which people to let into their life. The opening line represents the overall message of the poem and the rest of the poem elaborates on this line. Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul selects her own Society” is filled with dark and powerful images that represent the isolation that the soul wants to achieve.

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father helped found Amherst College. She had an older brother William Austin and a younger sister Lavinia. Emily liked staying near her home. The only absence, she had was when she went to seminary, ten miles away. Religion was an essential part of Dickinson’s education. However, she always struggled with the idea of a loving God who allowed bad things to happen. Dickinson’s deepest literary debts were to the Bible and British writers. From her twenties until her death, Emily was free to devote her life to her poetry. By the late 1850’s, she had become a true poet. However, very few of her poems were published while she lived. Mable Todd, a friend of Emily’s will not let this last for long. Without Mable Todd, Emily might have been totally forgotten. Mable transcribed many of Emily’s poems. She then persuaded a publisher to publish a volume of Emily’s poems in 1890. The collection was entitled Poems. In the poems “I taste a liquor never brewed,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” and “Apparently with no surprise,” Emily Dickinson uses literary devices such as metaphor, personification, and symbolism to make the theme of death compelling to the audience.

The large amount of poems in Dickinson’s collection containing the theme of death is impossible to be overlooked. Approximately one-third from her entire collection speaks about the subject, something that for many decades has intrigued fans and scholars alike. In order to understand this fixation, one must study the poet’s upbringing and religious conflicts, which are unequivocally at the center of this fascination with the theme of death.

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