Symbolic Images: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson Essay

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.

Have you ever taken something too literal. Poetry can be an enigma. Emily Dickinson, a poet who expresses her life through metaphorical poems. Metaphorical poems are poems that are used to apply something that is not literally relevant but resembles something else. In the first poem, “We Grow Accustomed To The Dark” , Dickinson explains how her everyday life frustrates her and she was ready for a change. In the second poem, “Before I got my eye put out”, indicates how much Dickinson appreciated her sight before it went away. In this essay there will be some explanations on how Emily Dickinson expresses her life experience in an descriptive way.

Emily Dickinson is the definition of poetry. Within her poems lies numerous underlying meanings and symbols from her lifetime. When she was just a teenager she left school and became a recluse on her family’s homestead. Where she would begin to write some of the greatest poems in history. It is recorded that she wrote hundreds of little poems on random pieces of paper. Some of her greatest poems were about society during her time period, and they can even relate up to today’s society. Some of her best poems about society are “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” and “Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant”. Both of these poems contain a lot of similarities. However they differ slightly, in saying that, the other really compliments the other within their deeper meanings. Within each of these poems lies metaphors, personification, and inverted syntax.

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.

“I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean” (Socrates). What does it mean to be this type of poet? How can someone accomplish such success in poetry, the answer is just two words Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson spent a large portion of her life in isolation, not because she was forced to or because she was ill, Dickinson simply wanted to be alone and because of her isolation she became one of the greatest female poets of all time. Emily Dickinson set the bar high for other female poets and created some of the most renowned poems in the world. The two poems “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” and “Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant” are drastically different poems that tell two different stories, but there are some aspects that cause them to be similar: Imagery, tone, and the statement that the two poems make.

The emotion of desire cannot be predicted; it seems to reveal itself in moments where one would least expect it. In Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Ethan Frome meets a girl, Mattie, whom he lusts over, but his desire brings about his destruction in an ironic an unsettling end. Emily Dickinson’s poem “405” symbolically parallels Ethan Frome’s sudden change in his life and addresses the ultimate ruination of the Frome household at the end of the book.

The last two lines of the poem are a timid reflection on what might happen “Had I the Art to stun myself/ With Bolts—of Melody!” (23-24). The idea that creation is a power that can get loose and injure even the creator illuminates why in this poem the artist positions herself firmly as a mere spectator. In these first two poems, we meet a Dickinson who is not entirely familiar to us—even though we are accustomed to her strong desire for privacy, these poems can be startling in the way they reveal the intensity of Dickinson’s fears. She is, after all, shrinking from what is dearest to her—nature, one of her favorite subjects, becomes a harsh judge, and poetry, her favored medium of communication, can suddenly render the reader “impotent” and the writer “stun[ned]” (19, 23). The extremity of her positions in shrinking from the small and beautiful things she loves creates the sense that this is just the beginning of a journey by leaving so much room for change.

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

what the author wants to imply past the surface level of the work. In Emily Dickinson’s poem

Emily Dickinson is perhaps one of the most intriguing American poets studied. The remote look in her eyes mirror her life, which she mostly spent secluded in her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. While leading an outwardly reclusive life, she unleashes the faculties of her mind in her powerful poetry. She addresses compelling themes such as death, depression, human despair, individual capability, and the art of poetry. Her feelings on these subjects emerge in her poems, but her exact thoughts are difficult to uncover since her poetry is so highly enigmatic. Likewise, the subject matter of Christianity in her poetry remains one of the most inconsistent of Dickinson’s recurring themes. Emily Dickinson posses an uncanny ability to wrestle down the perfect diction, thus creating worlds of hope, despair, faith, and endless questioning.Through her use of imagery, Dickinson displays her linguistic prowess and the intricacies of language.

As said previously, women in this time period had very limited ways of doing this. However, Emily had something that not many people had the luxury of claiming; she could write. She became a fantastic writer the minute she could create structured sentences. The ability to attain the power she was looking for was already found. Emily had the special ability of being able to arrange words as if they are puzzle pieces whose only purpose is to create an overall picture or concept. An example of this is when she described hope in the form of a bird as it relates to human nature (“’Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers” 123). She also once used a carriage ride to metaphorize the circle of life, immortality, and death (“Because I Could Not Stop for Death” 26). As previously stated, Emily’s power is displayed through her use of diction. Power itself is commonly associated with money or fame. However, money and fame do not equal power. As a young child, Emily comes to this realization along with knowing that her ability to possess an astounding use of diction and metaphors could get her exactly what she desired-powerful authority. However, metaphors and use of diction were not the only two characteristics of writing Emily chose to focus on. She also seemed to choose her themes very carefully. Dickinson repeatedly put a spotlight on thematic things such as death, loss, solitude, authority,

     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.

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

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