Death In Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Although Emily Dickinson was a complete recluse and was not recognized in her own time, she is now recognized as one of the most influential poets in American Literature. Emily’s work has left a strong mark on today’s writers. Dickinson began writing as a teenager with influencers of her own. Leonard Humphrey, principal of Amherst Academy, and a family friend named Benjamin Franklin Newton, who sent Dickinson a book of poetry by Ralph Waldo Emerson, impacted and encouraged her private works. (Emily Dickinson's Biography) While Emily’s work was brilliant, very few of Dickinson’s work was published in her lifetime, nor was it heavily publicized at the time of her death in 1886. However, her sister discovered most of her poetry shortly after her

There is a common theme of death that strings her poems adequately together; The majority of Dickinson’s poems revolve around the idea of death. This recurrent theme goes hand in hand with the fact she lived fifteen years of her youth next door to the town cemetery and could not ignore the frequent burials that later helped provide powerful imagery to her poems. (Emily Dickinson Museum) Emily was extremely religious, and her religious attention focused on being prepared to die, which rendered recurring themes and images in her poetry. (Academy of American Poets) Her poetry ranges from many themes, but most fall into the categories of love, nature, the mind, and death. While the idea of death was frequent in her life, it soon became one of the foremost themes in Dickinson’s poetry. While Emily included the theme of death in her poetry, no two poems have exactly the same understanding of death, however. Death is sometimes soft, sometimes threatening, and sometimes simply inescapable. In “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –,” Emily describes and explores the physical process of dying. In “Because I could not stop for Death –,“ she embodies death, and introduces the process of dying as the simple realization that there is eternal life, and a heaven after one’s journey of life has ended. (A Short Analysis of Emily Dickinson's 'Because I Could Not Stop for Death'.)
Throughout Emily’s

Although Emily’s work was not fully recognized in her lifetime, her use of universal themes, including love and death, has established her as a lasting influence on modern American poetry through her innovative use of diction and imagery. Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous authors in American literature, and this is attributed to her uniqueness in writing, and her use of poetic devices. Emily Dickinson remains as one of the top influencers on American poetry today, and she did this by challenging the definition of poetry by experimenting with expression through nearly inescapable limitations. Emily Dickinson even inspired many women of the time in America by being one of America's early female poets, which aided in the women's rights movements.() Emily Dickinson is known for introducing a new style of writing. In many of her writings, she openly expressed and wrote about her emotions and feelings to her readers. This instructed future writers and poets to use their own feelings in their writing. Her use of personal emotions was a key example of being successful. She is also remembered for her unconventional broken rhyming meter and uses of dashes and random capitalization. (The Literature Network) Emily Dickinson employs subtle imageries, striking emotions and morals, and erratic punctuation to ultimately produce