Emily Dickinson Research Paper

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Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost are two well-known modern American poets who both suffered loss and depression in their lifetime and they both write the poems based on their life experiences. However, while Robert Frost achieved great success as a poet, Emily Dickinson’s reputation came largely after she died. Although they both write the poems about death, dark and nature, Dickinson is such a unique poet that it is very difficult to place her in any single tradition. Even though they do have some resemblance in poem subjects; to a certain extent, the themes they focus on writing about still have some differences and their writing styles are quite different too. The following paragraphs will compare the writing of the themes and differences …show more content…

An English professor of Georgetown University, Judith Farr notes that Dickinson’s poems and letters “almost wholly concern flowers and those allusions to gardens often refer to an imaginative realm ... wherein flowers are often emblems for actions and emotions.” Although Dickinson writes poetry with the theme like flowers and gardens. Many of her work focus on the topic that is quite depressing, due to her loss of her friend and she suffers from depression. Death is an unpleasant stuff to talk about, but many of Dickinson’s poems deal with it, loss of friend and suffering from depression are the causes. Her poems allude to death by many means such as crucifixion, drowning, hanging, suffocation and so on, which for some readers is not always enjoyable to …show more content…

When it comes to writing styles, the structure, which means the format of the poem, is the point. Emily Dickinson published very few poems during her lifetime and all of her poems are untitled. To fit in the conventional rules of poem writing, the poems that were published at that time were usually altered much. Dickinson hates it because she thinks that it alters the meaning of her poems. In 1981, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson was published. It is the first time that using the original papers that the poems were intended to be published in their original order. She tends to use short lines, dashes, unconventional punctuation and capitalization and slant rhymes in her poems extensively, and the characteristic vocabulary and imagery. According to Wikipedia, these make her works are “far more various in its styles and forms than is commonly