Emily Dickinson's Influence In Early American Literature

When people think of Emily Dickinson, they think of a white dressed, ghostly woman hidden in the corridors of home, writing poem after poem. They do not think of the actual person Emily was. Emily Dickinson grew up in a rich, social, scholarly environment. She could have chosen many paths that would have led her to a completely different life, but because of circumstances, the social, high energy girl with a sense of humor became isolated by her own choice. Though Emily Dickinson’s depression is romanticized, sickness, social life, and death led her to seclusion and deep poems.

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, 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.

Emily Dickinson, born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, is regarded as one of America’s best poets. After a poor experience at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she was regarded as a “no hope,” her writing career took off in full swing. Although her family was more conservative, regular churchgoers, and socially prominent town figures, Dickinson preferred a socially reserved lifestyle that renounced the traditional values of her day (Baym, 1189-93). The iconoclastic spirit pervasive in Emily Dickinson's poetry reflects her conflict with the traditions of New England society.

Approaching Emily Dickinson’s poetry as one large body of work can be an intimidating and overwhelming task. There are obvious themes and images that recur throughout, but with such variation that seeking out any sense of intention or order can feel impossible. When the poems are viewed in the groupings Dickinson gave many of them, however, possible structures are easier to find. In Fascicle 17, for instance, Dickinson embarks upon a journey toward confidence in her own little world. She begins the fascicle writing about her fear of the natural universe, but invokes the unknowable and religious as a means of overcoming that fear throughout her life and ends with a contextualization of herself within

In her adolescent years, Dickinson didn’t spend a lot of time in school. She attended Amherst Academy for a short period of time. She was a very intelligent student. She later attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She made a few friends, but not many. This is also the time she began writing. Before Dickinson departed from Amherst Academy, she had been influenced by a book of poetry by Ralph Waldo Emerson. She had other influences such as her principle at Amherst, Leonard Humphrey. As a writer, her work escalated when her poems were published in their original structure. She is mostly known for her new way of writing, which was short, but it was very passionate. What she mostly wrote about was her feelings and she was brutally sincere, but she also kept actual poetry intact. Dickinson’s writing was different from other poets’ writings because she didn’t formulate her writing. She wrote what was on her mind

The Belle of Amherst, The Woman in White, or The Most Paradoxical of Poets…who can say which pseudonym is most becoming of the late great Emily Dickinson. By virtue of the multitudinous biographical literary works, moreover the wondrous intimacy of Dickinson’s poetry, one could surmise that as readers we comprehend her entirely: yet the most prevalent experience borne from reading Emily’s work, especially if her poems are read successively, is that we come away feeling as though we know nothing at all. Like no author before her and very few after her, Emily Dickinson divulges her hearts hidden secrets while recording what is inexorably one of the most conscientious explorations of the human consciousness ever attempted. Dickinson is known posthumously for her unusual use of form and syntax, but it was her pervasive themes of immortality, death, and madness in her poems that would canonize her as an indelible American character.

Emily Dickinson concentrates many of her poems on the theme of death, predominantly her own. These “poems about death confront its grim reality with honesty, humor, curiosity, and above all a refusal to be comforted (“Emily Dickinson 1830-1886” 1659). While this was not an out of the ordinary topic during the American Romantic era, Dickinson seemed near obsessive in her focus. Additionally, Dickinson seems questionable in her thoughts on religion, another theme popular during the American Romantic era. Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” both explicitly examine the concept of death, the afterlife, and the author’s obsession with the melancholy.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 10th December, 1830, in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts. As a young child, she showed a bright intelligence, and was able to create many recognizable writings. Many close friends and relatives in Emily’s life were taken away from her by death. Living a life of simplicity and aloofness, she wrote poetry of great power: questioning the nature of immortality and death. Although her work was influenced by great poets of the time, she published many strong poems herself. Two of Emily Dickinson’s famous poems, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “I Heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died”,

Emily Dickinson is the creator of some of the most famous works in American poetry. Throughout the 1800s, the author dedicated her life to poetry. She used metaphors in an advanced way and displayed power through her unique use of diction. Emily’s immense power with words derived from her determination. Dickinson’s determination to achieve individuality and power is exemplified through her complex poetry and derived from the events that occurred in her life.

Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life was arguably a result of her proposed bi-polar disorder. This life and disorder unduly influenced the themes of her poetry. She chose not to associate herself with society and volumes of her poems, published posthumously, examine this idea as well as the themes of nature and death. The clearest examples of these themes are presented in the following analysis of just of few of her

Seventy-five years after the 1890s publication of the premier volumes of Emily Dickinson's poetry, critics still squabble about the poet's possibly lesbian relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Indeed, the specifics of Dickinson's relationship to Susan are ambiguous at best. All of the critical attention that her mysterious sexuality

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

Emily Dickinson was one of the many famous American poets whose work was published in the 19th century. Her writing style was seen as unconventional due to her use of “dashes and syntactical fragments”(81), which was later edited out by her original publishers. These fragmented statements and dashes were added to give emphasis to certain lines and subjects to get her point across. Even though Emily Dickinson was thought to be a recluse, she wrote descriptive, moving poems on death, religion, and love. Her poems continue to create gripping discussions among scholars on the meaning behind her poems.

The controversy surrounding Emily Dickinson is her odd lifestyle and her tendencies to be somewhat of a recluse. She is sometimes considered abnormal because she does things differently from most others. She spends much of her life dressed in white and withdrawn from much of society. Of course, her peers take this negatively, but what they do not understand is that her being so private is more of a meditation to her, instead of a hiding. She just wants to escape the pressures she feels are normally required of women. She does not want to be a servant to sick and elderly. She feels she has more potential for her mind to grow, and those obligations would just be hindrances to her writing (McQuade 1255). Her childhood and her staying out of society as an adult, along with many other aspects known and not known, influence her poems and the style in which she goes about writing the works. Her techniques of writing are completely different from any other writer, whether prose or poetry. Dickinson composes her phrases by marking them off with a dash, placing a space before and after. This small maneuver places more emphasis on her “impress of the mind in its analysis of experience” (McQuade 1256). Her slant thymes and unique form of expression produces more of an oddness to the audience.