Isolationism In Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Ever wonder what life would be like if a person hid away from society and isolated itself from the whole community? That is exactly what the well-known poet, Emily Dickinson, did for twenty years, and during that time period, she was writing poems that would later have english scholars thinking about the different interpretations of them for years. Emily Dickinson is from a puritan family who wanted her to follow their beliefs, but she decided to break away from her family and society by focusing on her writing. Dickinson isolating herself from society helped her come up with the theme of isolationism in her poetry, and these years away from her community helped inspire her in creating the plot of her poems. In Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing

First of all, all of Dickinson’s poems were not given a name, so everyone referred to the first verse in her poems to be the title. This poem begins with a metaphor of transforming hope into a bird that is present in the human soul. Most of Dickinson’s poems include a metaphor, which is usually the basis of the poem. Paula Bennett points out that “[w]hile Dickinson’s nature poetry is directed toward representations of the material world, it is also true that she employed metaphors drawn from nature to illustrate the inner life” (116). Bennett talks about how Dickinson uses metaphors a lot, and this relates to this poem because Dickinson’s whole poem is about the metaphor of hope being a bird and how it is present in the human soul. Dickinson begins the poem with “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers-” (Vendler 118). The beginning line is interpreted as explaining to the reader how hope is a bird, and she displays that hope is an actual thing by capitalizing it and putting it in quotation marks. By capitalizing it, it displays its materialistic quality, and this comes back to her fixation on seclusion by hope being her only companion. Since she is alone for so long, her only companion is hope since she is holding onto it through her rough times, which is the plotline of the