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Emily Dickinson's Poetry And Parallel Themes

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Halley Richardson Professor Orobello AML2020 04 February 2018 Midterm Essay Exam: American literature has had a large impact on our society for a long time. The two poets I have chosen for this paper are highly known in early American Literature. I am going to speak about how their lives may have influenced their works and why this played an important factor. II. Emily Dickinson For this part of the essay I have decided to analyze four of Emily Dickinson’s poems and discuss parallel themes, motifs, and symbols that I’ve found. The four poems are: “Unto Me” I do not know you, A Day! Help! Help! Another day!, “Hope” is a thing with feathers, and “Why do I love” you, sir. The themes I have found that run through these poems include love, the …show more content…

The last verse talks of her love of God, and how she sees him move through the world with strength and love. (Dickinson) “The Sunrise—Sire—compelleth Me— Because He 's Sunrise—and I see— …show more content…

The poems I have chosen are “O Captain! My Captain!”, “Adieu to a Soldier”, and “A Noiseless Patient Spider”. “O Captain! My Captain!” is a poem, which basically tells a story about the death of the captain of a ship men crew. The narrator of the poem is a sailor in the crew of a ship. He mournes grievously about the death of his respected captain. Gloom and dread are vividly painted throughout the poem, as the sailor laments his captain’s death. The whole poem is an metaphor for Lincoln’s death. Lincoln is the “captain” and the “fearful trip” is the American Civil War. The captain is “fallen cold and dead” refers to the fact that Lincoln was shot and killed as a result of the

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Emily Dickenson “519” poem depicts the process of a decaying body by using specific words and phrases. The poem gives a description of different stages a body goes through as it dies. The use of syntax helps create distance between the speaker and the dead body, the specific words and phrases also help in creating an eery, cold tone. She becomes curious with death, she does not see the body as a person who she is grieving for, and instead the body just becomes a decaying frozen river bank.

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“The Raven” and “O Captain! My Captain!” Are some of the most famous poems in the world, both are about death, loss, grief, and undying devotion. “The Raven” written by Edgar Allan Poe about his grief of his wife who was struck with illness while “O Captain! My Captain!”

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Maria Marginean Thesis: Although Emily Dickinson never Denies the Existence of God, she criticizes the Suffering “He” causes and the negative effects “He” has on the Individual’s sense of self regarding Death and the Afterlife. (Note: She emphasizes that the individual is powerful perhaps more so than the perceived notion of a “God”, and that he individual should focus on enjoying their life at the moment rather than stressing about the afterlife. It seems as though she doesn’t want to die, go to Heaven.)

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The Closet Perspective Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson represented two talented and relevant poets of their time. They are most often recognized for their patriotism and their influence on starting a transition between transcendentalism and realism. Their works reflected themes of love, life, nature and death among other things. Whitman and Dickinson did subtly advocate for their sexuality in their writings. Adding a sub-section to the “Whitman and Dickinson” header in our course could more completely depict Whitman, Dickinson, and their influence on American culture and writing.

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This poem illustrates traits of aspiration. At the beginning of the poem, Dickinson has a darker tone. She discloses that people adjust to the dark. Literally, our eyes adjust to different shades of light, but also figuratively. What she proposes in lines 7-8, where she says “Then - fit our Vision to the Dark / And meet the Road- erect” (7-8), is that the darkness is the unknown and the road is our future.

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Emily Dickinson is perhaps the most mysterious and most scrutinized author in the history of American Literature. Just as many of her poems are riddles to be solved, her lifestyle and personality remain an enigma even today. She has been described as a recluse, a hermit, an agoraphobic, and even said to be insane. Was she mentally ill in some way or simply so tainted by life, life experiences, and just culture that she consciously chose to shut herself away. Perhaps society may never know the truth.

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Both poets are very similar to each other in a way that both of them lived in the nineteenth century. "The two giants of 19th-century American poetry who played the greatest role in redefining modern verse are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (Burt)". Both Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are considered as the founders of today’s modern American poetry, whose they put the keystone, and which was further developed by other poets over the years. The poetry has been redefined. The modern poetry becomes more discreet which uses the topics of everyday life.

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Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are both influential foundational poets in American literature. Their works were unconventional and controversial at the time, challenging American ideology. While Walt Whitman is often referred to as the father of free verse with poems that express an enlarged vision that encompasses the universe in a broad way, in expansive outward gestures such as I hear American Singing and Song of Myself. Dickinson's poetry is more personal dealing with her states of mind, and in my opinion, is more interesting compare to Whitman’s writing style. Emily Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization

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Dickinson’s life, like many women was already planned for her. She was to be married, raise children, and spend her days giving her life to her family. One of the most remarkable things about Emily Dickinson is she did the complete opposite and chose to not comment about anything regarding her, which is why she was underrated during her lifetime. She made an impact on the people around her and wrote privately refusing to publicize anything. A literary critic named Herbert Leibowitz once said, “No American has conversed with his or her soul as Emily Dickinson did, by listening to her own soul, Dickinson taught us something about ours” (Shmoop editorial

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In the second stanza she capitalize the word “Heart” implying that ‘thee’ hold a special place in her life, that his importance in her life was compared to the importance of a heart to a body. Showing how she cannot live without him. The poem continued with Dickinson “rowing in eden”, this phrase contrasted the calm like sea with the stormy sea on the first stanza. Along with the word ‘eden’ that has the denotation of innocence in paradise which juxtaposed to the the sexual tone of the poem. The “Ah” followed after, can be viewed as a face expression when one sigh, a content feeling.

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The poem that stood out the most while reading this assortment of Emily Dickinson poems, was her poem numbered 656/520. This poem used imagery in numerous ways throughout in order to show the audience the important themes and the overall meaning of this work of literature. The poem’s main theme was about a walk on the beach that the poet encountered in the early morning. Although the poem is about a beach it can also give the audience contextual clues into other aspects of life.

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Dickinson and Whitman have revolutionized poetry eternally. Emily Dickinson’s writing shows her introverted side, she found comfort in being reclusive. Her writing clearly depicts that certain works of her will not be meant for everyone, rather

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Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are the most representative and brilliant poets of the nineteenth century and in the American literature in general. However, we can also say that, between them, they have the most different styles of writing they can have, just as well as their lives. For example, as Christenbury (n.d.) stated, firstly that Walt Whitman was someone “[…] who struggled to get his poems published and who developed a broad admiring audience during his lifetime. In contrast, the reclusive Emily Dickinson died unknown to the world of poetry, leaving a box full of unpublished poems”. Nevertheless, we can find some similarities in their lives, for example, both of them lived in a difficult historical period: on the one hand Emily Dickinson, who was born the 10th of December of 1830 and on the other hand, Walt Whitman, who was born the 31st of May of 1819, lived the period of the American civil war.

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This line also includes four dashes, which creates a song effect by wanting to sing the lines. The song effect allows the reader to picture itself as the bird, which is done by Dickinson’s attention to detail since she had so much time with being away from all humanity. Another example of syntax relating to her fixation on seclusion is shown in the last line of stanza one: “And never stops- at all-” (Vendler 118).

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The only certainty in life is death. It is something that shows up in every single art movement and style. This includes the work of Dickinson who lived when death would have been an ever present reality. She dealt with the death of family members as well as close friends. However Dickinson 's references to death tend to swing between the usual almost fear of it and this seeming picture of death as an almost kind figure that is not to be feared.

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