Emily Dickinson Research Paper

Victoria Vu
Professor Kim McDonald
America Literature
10 November 2016
American Poets Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson are two among many other known American poets. They both have had similar and different experiences during their lifetime. Frost and Dickinson both suffered from depression and were quiet known during their lifetime except that most of Emily Dickinson’s works were published after her death. Emily Dickinson lived to the age of 55 where she died in Amherst, Massachusetts. She lived a very secluded life and the communities she lived in also found her quiet erie especially because of her white attire. Dickinson's poems vary a great deal in their themes, styles, and content. Robert Frost lived to the age of 88. Frost worked

While Frost’s tone flows together and seems a bit more soothing and calm, Dickinson’s seems to have hidden agendas and meanings. She also generally wrote short poems that included themes of love, death, and loneliness. An example of how there are hidden meanings is as follows in Apparently with no surprise , “To any happy Flower The Frost beheads it at its play --In accidental power --The blonde Assassin passes on --“ Most likely Dickinson is talking about death, however, the the style and tone she uses could indicate that it is something entirely different. This poem can also coincide with Frost’s poem Nothing Gold Can Stay in lines 1-4, “Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour.” A big similarity between Frost and Dickinson is the themes they set in their poems. Most of the poems have a theme of death and about the power of nature. Both of these poems portray nature as happy and pure. This may indicate the happy joyful times of their youth or just high times in life. These ‘’happy’’ times don’t last forever in these two poems. They both end in death, but similarity it seems that in the two poems death occurs from natural

Frost’s poems does very well with depicting certain details to help the reader make sense of what is going on in the poem and bring it to life. In Frost’s poem Design makes a very good example of that, “ I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth.” In the poem the moth is trapped in the spider’s web. This could have been how Frost was internally feeling at the time he was writing this poem. Although the moth is stuck it can see and interpret everything that’s going on around it. Emily Dickinson also uses description but in a different way. She can often make you second guess the meaning if the whole poem. In A Bird, Came Down the Walk- ,”A Bird, came down the Walk - He did not know I saw -He bit an Angle Worm in halves And ate the fellow, raw.” Both of these poems as you can see in the examples use animals as the focus in these poems. For Frost he puts more description into the creature. This may be because he wants the focus on the object unlike Dickinson who makes minor descriptions on the bird. I believe she does that on purpose so that her reader doesn’t get too drawn into the character and focuses on the big picture at the end of the poem. The symbolism of the animals can be the way we live life. Frost and Dickinson may be looking at the human race as a bunch of animals thriving to stay alive and to fend for