Poetry Essay - "There Is No Frigate Like a Book"

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.

Dickinson, Emily. "I like to see it lap the Miles." Literature; An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry,

This provokes the readers' psyche of a lonesome, fragile individual, standing isolated at the end of an dark, treacherous road. This imagery is successfully used to illustrate a portrait of Dickinson, or even the individual reading the piece themselves, as they’re yearning for their new life, which right now is filled with darkness and sorrow. The poem is comprised of five stanzas, each consisting of four lines. The monotonous nature of the poem is nothing gleaming or eye catching, and this is purposely done for the conspicuous fact that sometimes, precious values and things you love are vaporized. With the abandonment of something important, the world does not stop revolving around you and seemingly mold itself for you. It will continue to revolve in the same way it always has for four and half billion years, but now only seeming to be filled with darkness, difficulty and

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

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.

Poetry is used to express several different mediums through: structure, tone, imagery and rhyme schemes. John Keats’s ode “To Autumn” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” or, a Vision in a Dream” will be critically analyzed, compared and contrasted to each throughout this paper to further dissected the meaning of each poem.

In Dickinson's poem “This is My Letter to the World,” she is expressing her reclusiveness towards the world. What Emily means by this is that she wrote a letter to the world, but the world does not know who she is since she never leaves her home. She also writes about what nature has taught her in hopes to teach other people lessons. In the closing of the poem she asks the readers to not judge her harshly on what she has written. The overall theme of this poem is that if people were to judge, they should judge by the truth. She does not want to be judged harshly for separating herself from the world, she just wants to belong. She uses many devices through all of her poems to help convey the overall theme. In the poem “This is My Letter to the World,” Dickson uses the personification of nature, rhyme scheme, and metaphor to show her overall theme.

For this final essay I selected three literary masterpieces namely the story titled “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara, and two Emily Dickinson’s Poems: I heard a fly buzz and The heart asks for pleasure first. The following essay will explore these works in a greater detail focusing on the elements of literature, such as the theme, the character, settings and conflicts. It will find ways to connect, relate or compare one literary work to two others as well as it will analyze the specific element in the selections with some depth. The paper will support points with appropriate examples from the selections and explain how the examples support those points.

After reading some of the poems through our anthology and watching the clips of the movie “Dead Poet’s Society” it validates my thought that poetry allows people aboard and express ordinary things, feelings or thoughts in many different dimensions and perspectives. Often tend people to forget to think outside of the box and by the effect of reading or writing poetry, the person doing the action can have a deeper relation about the subject that he or she is writing or reading, as professor Keating said, “sometime most beautiful poetry can be about simple things like a cat, or flower, or rain”.

Poetry has the ability to expand minds and put its reader in touch with the world around them. Emily Dickinson attempts to convey the power of poetry in her poem I Dwell in Possibility. She pours her passionate feelings about poetry into this poem and drives her point home with a comparison to prose. Using language, structure, and symbolism, Emily Dickinson’s I Dwell in Possibility effectively articulates how poetry can broaden horizons and provide an escape from the mundane.

Two of Dickinson’s universal techniques are metaphor and the fresh application of language; both techniques result in powerful images, and can be seen in two of her poems that focus on nature themes, “ A Bird came down the Walk” and “narrow Fellow.” She closes the poem, “ A Bird” with a stanza equating flight through the air with movement through water,

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 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.