Emily Dickinson Research Paper

Can women think? Are women human in any fully serious sense of that word? (Greene) Elsa Greene poses these questions in her manuscript about Emily Dickinson. The general idea that came to mind with feminism was the pledge that women were not treated as equal human beings. All they wanted was to have equal rights and to be treated as equally as men in work, politics, and economics. Emily Dickinson was a very passionate woman who devoted her life mostly to poetry. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley which was a liberal arts college for women. Dickinson wrote many poems about love and life, but all her life she lived with her father and was never married however, some said that she had a lover. She was a part of the Romanticism

They doubted Dickinson’s capabilities and believed that women were meant to inspire poem not write them but she proved them wrong. (pp.62) All of her poems were in the same rank as other male poets such as Hughes. A lot of people loved her poems because they were mysterious and gave little about her. According to Greene, “... well-disciplined people—women and men—have judged Emily Dickinson’s poetry equal to the finest written by anyone at any time in the United States of America.” (pp.63) “She rose to his requirement—dropt” (line 1), Dickinson described her personal life in the poem by indicating that people thought that her poems as a joke. “Playthings” (line 2) referred to her writing, dreams, aspirations, talents, immigration and work. She didn’t think of them that way but that’s how society portrayed women’s work back then. Critics kept on referring to her as a “poetess” which meant that she wrote feminine poems. They believed that she lacked the qualities that a poet was supposed to have in order to write effective poems. “His requirement” (line 1) could’ve either meant society or her father. Society expected a completed submission from women where as it ignores a man’s role in society. Her tone was satirical meaning she was ridiculing the role of a wife and woman in society. The last stanza spoke about how her dreams remains “unmentioned” (line 9) meaning she did put all of her writings out into the world and given the fact that she only publish seven of her