The Theme Of Loneliness In Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830. She was born in a Puritan New England town and had to undergo seeing many deaths of friends and relatives at a young age. She wrote hundreds of different poems, reflecting events and situations happening in her lifetime. Dickinson was a keen observer of nature and an extremely wise interpreter of human passion. A lot of her poems are about death, loss, and pain. Many of her poems also have to do with isolation and the idea of helping others. She was alive during the Civil War which was a huge period of segregation and racism. Medicine and other practices weren 't as advanced at the time and it was also easy for people to get certain illnesses. This was a major reason for some of her poems having to do with sadness and being very gloomy. Multiple authors from Biography, a website who does research and biographies on poets and

Poets.org is an organization dedicated and focused on past and present poetry around the world. Authors from Poet.org (2015) said, “Dickinson lived in almost complete isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely” (Poets, 2015). An example of this would be in her poem, “The Loneliness One Dare Not Sound.” The kind of loneliness that Dickinson is talking about is the kind that is afraid to admit it or face it. Dickinson considers the worst loneliness one can suffer is the refusal to plumb one’s own depths and to ignore the bettering of one’s self. In the third stanza she says, “The Horror not to be surveyed, but skirted in the dark. With Consciousness suspended, and being under lock.” The author is saying that the horror of loneliness cannot be looked over but avoided by not knowing it exists and locking it away. She uses the word “horror” to show that it is extremely hard to deal with and terrifies