Emily Dickinson 's Poem, A Fairer House Of Poetry

The Bustle in a House is a poem by Emily Dickinson about the painful loss one feels after the death of a loved one. Dickinson was quite familiar with the kind of pain expressed in her poem. Her father, mother, nephew, and three close friends, all died within an eight-year period. It is no small wonder that a common theme in Dickinson s poetry is death. She uses many literary devices, including structure, imagery, figurative language, sound devices, and capitalization; to convey the hurt one experiences when a loved one passes on.

The poem is littered throughout with examples of personification and metaphors as personifications can be said to be a type of metaphor. Cases of this can be seen in each stanza such as in stanza one with the poem stating, “It was the house that suffered most” (Stevens 1) showing the house having human emotions. In Stanza two another instance is “The house came to miss the shouting voices” (Stevens 9). The personification isn’t limited to just the house, Stevens also personifies rooms in stanza three writing “rooms declared their loyalties” (13). By understanding what schizophrenia is, the challenge of finding meaning to these examples is simplified. Schizophrenia is defined as “a mental disorder that is characterized by disturbances in thought, perception, and behavior” (Merriam-Webster). It can then be inferred that the house acts as the brain as schizophrenia is a mental disorder, while the rooms could be different people the person hears, each retreating to their section or “loyalties. These instances of personification provide images that the reader can draw upon and Stevens provides even more powerful imagery throughout the poem.

Emily Dickinson, a unique poet of over 1,700 poems is considered to be one of the most gifted poets in American Literature (Great American). In her poems qualities of nature, love, immortality and death are expressed through her words (Great American). Dickinson was born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her Puritan spirit, wrote very little until the early sixties as a result of the chaos of the Civil War. In 1862, she decided to send out her poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in response to his call to do so in article titled “Letter to Young Contributor” that he published in the Atlantic Monthly (American Authors). Higginson soon became Dickinson’s mentor and was able to validate her as an authentic poet (American Authors). Her writing never truly became famous until after her death (Great American). Looking in depth to her poetry one can lead to paraphrasing, notice use of literary devices and utilization of themes and morals.

Even though we do not know in entirety what Emily believes, we do know from analyzing this work and the joyful and calming experiences of the narrator in her carriage after death, that Dickinson did explore if not entirely believe in some form of joyous eternal afterlife, or heaven. Making this work not an eerie account of death but a calming description of the narrator’s personal heaven, and a testament to Emily Dickinson’s

Lloyd schwartz’s sonnet,“In Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom,” describes the image of and the feelings evoked by Emily Dickinson's metaphoric bedroom. The author develops the description by first saying “ a chilly light pervades the empty room,” to illustrate the coldness and most likely loneliness; he then uses metaphor to compare Dickinson’s room to her personality, “ the grass outside—brittle, brown, as if it wanted to avoid the sun,” which is similar to her recluse characteristics; he also uses hyperbole when he says “Any clue—under the wide floorboards, behind the blocked entrance—to the haunted chambers of a heart?” which implies that Emily Dickinson’s heart is buried somewhere within the room; and finally, he says “finally these shadows still

Emily Dickinson understood that a poem could not just succeed in content or form alone. If the content is rich and full of information but its form is lacking, it could not convey its message properly. On the other hand, if the form is perfect but the content is lacking, it wouldn’t have a message to convey at all. There needs to be a delicate balance between the two and Dickinson achieves this balance. There is always a contextual reason for her form and it aids in the effectiveness of her poems. One such example is how her poems do not have a title because she never intended for anyone to read them and, therefore, were an honest reflection of her thoughts. However, because her poems never really clarified any themes or messages, there is

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) and Walt Whitman (1819-1892) are both considered as founder of the modern American literature. The essay will be focused on an extract of the Chant 33 from the 1881 edition of “Song of Myself”. In “Song of Myself” we see that Whitman wants to combine the democracy and the individual but in his 1855 's preface, he advocates simplicity: “Nothing is better than simplicity.”1 This essay will also analysed the poem 668 extracted from The Complete Poems Of Emily Dickinson published in 1975. So the poem studied here is:“ 'Nature ' is what we see”. Most of her poems deal with death, religion, immortality and nature. In the poem 668 with see how the speaker is in awe of the nature all around her.

The poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” by Emily Dickinson provides an immense depth of imagery and metaphors which makes the reader feel sorrow for the speaker. The title itself is a metaphor in the way that Dickinson uses funeral to represent the speaker’s death within themselves. In the beginning, the speaker is sought to be lost with themselves, full of madness and sadness with a lingering possibility of hope that the darkness will fade. The title of the poem does not due the speaker justice as the brain is not representative of their whole dying self.

Emily Dickinson’s poems “They shut me up in Prose” and “I Dwell in Possibility” on the surface may seem similar, both having the same structure, three-four lined stanzas, and punctuation. However, they convey different messages. Typically Dickinson writes dark, meditative and defiant toned poems about death, gender and poetry itself, often challenging social beliefs and traditions. Each poem sticks to these pre-modernist views and styles, but place the emphasis on different aspects of her common themes. Although the poems are similar in form and their uses of metaphors, the focus of these poems are different, “I dwell in Possibility” focuses on the limitless possibilities of poetry and the power associated with it, while “They shut me up in Prose” discusses the role of a female poet being free of social restraints in a mans world through poetry, together these individual themes convey Dickinson’s emphatic view of poetry’s ability to free women from social prejudices.

Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s I dwell in Possibility (No. 657) and The Soul selects her own Society (No. 303)

Emily Dickinson a modern romantic writer, whose poems considered imaginative and natural, but also dark as she uses death as the main theme many times in her writings. She made the death look natural and painless since she wanted the reader to look for what after death and not be stuck in that single moment. In her poems imagination play a big role as it sets the ground for everything to unfold in a magical way. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. She turned increasingly to this style that came to define her writing. The poems are rich in aphorism and dense

At first Glance, “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” by Emily Dickinson is puzzling, even meaningless. However, upon further analysis it is clear that the poet has made several deliberate choices to assist the reader in discerning the poems meaning. Her deployment of poetic devices correlates to the narrative she is writing, allowing the reader to deeply perceive the poems message. Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” provides commentary on an individual’s ability to decide who can enter the most intimate parts of her life, which the reader can empathize with through figurative language, repetitive sounds, and enjambment.

Emily Dickinson is a well known poet who has written many poems. “I Dwell in Possibility” is the title for this particular poem because it is the first line. Because she died before she was really famous, most of her poems had no title so people named her poem by the first line.

In this poem, on page four hundred and fourteen of the hymnal, Emily Dickinson’s speaker talked about the freedom of the soul and how it chose to shut the door to the world. This belief ultimately led the reader to feel locked inside a room full of sadness and solitude. The soul, obviously feminine was conveyed as an active object. It was ultimately the subject of the poem which caused such feelings in the reader. This particular poem, The Soul Selects her own Society was summarized rather ingeniously edited by Marie Rose Napierkowski and Mary Ruby in their overview of the poem titled Overview: “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” when they said, “While it might seem that the Soul is hiding behind a closed door, there is evidence that the poem’s speaker believes her to be exercising the power of personal choice. Chariots paused at her gate; emperors cane to visit, but she would not let them in. She was indifferent to these symbols of wealth, romance, and power. The poem’s speaker told us that the soul has closed her attention to everything except ‘One.’ The ‘One’ that she has chosen might be interpreted as her own creative vision” (Napierkowski&Ruby) Clearly, those two have spent a lot of time looking over that poem, but even by reading that summary, the emotion of depression and closure to the world was felt. Only someone who was truly set in

Summary: Bennett in the introduction describes how female poets had to overcome a lot of criticism from literary scholars, and how it took years to highlight all their talents. She then highlights Emily Dickinson and discusses how this book will entail how Emily Dickinson rose above the limitations imposed on women’s poetry by their oppressors. She then says that Dickinson retained a positive sense of womanhood while she sought a better life for female poets. The book entails how she did this and the effect it had on her poetry.