Emily Dickinson
The poetry of the Imagists is short, simple, and quite literal in its meaning in order to create a vivid picture in the reader's mind. When they describe an object, it means just what they say. A tree is a tree, a flower is a flower, and a bird is a bird. Imagists have little use for abstract words or ideas, and tend to shy away from them as much as possible. Emily Dickinson doesn't fall under the same category as the Imagists, as she doesn't use the same techniques as the Imagists. Dickinson's poems center on very vivid images, with very different takes on them. They very often contain abstract concepts, which are often given concrete principles and are incorporated as part of her images. She implants deeper meanings behind her images, and tends to rely on a different technique than the Imagists. The majority of her work relies heavily on a different type of imagery - symbolism. One of the poems where this symbolism is most evident is "My Life Had Stood - A Loaded Gun." This poem is obviously based around a strong metaphoric image, as Dickinson is comparing herself to a gun belonging to someone else. In the poem, she uses the gun as a symbol to show her role in the patriarchal society she lived in. The first stanza
The following stanza seems to ask the question of where the fork was dropped from. In this poem, the speaker creates the image of a funeral in her head, suggesting that someone she once was has passed away. Each of these poems contains a different theme, and revolved around different images. In "I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain," Dickinson uses a recurring theme in many of her poems, death, in a different way. In the last stanza of the poem, Dickinson echoes the same theme of needing a man to access her power. Whatever is being buried and mourned over in the speaker's mind was preventing her from developing her common sense, and as time passes, she is gaining a new sense of what is. And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down - And hit a World, at every plunge, And finished knowing - then - The first line describes the pallbearers carrying the coffin off, when a board breaks and the coffin plummets down into the reaches beneath the floor. However, the description becomes only half the poem, as she goes deep into metaphor and abstract ideas. This stanza suggests that the person being buried is perhaps the speaker's innocence. This poem closely resembles the poems of the Imagists, as she makes a short description of a lighting strike. Rather than using symbol to show her view of the roles of women, she uses it to pose a question to the reader without explicitly asking one. Her poems are all heavily based around images, and she has an amazing talent for describing them. Like the Imagists after her, she liked to paint pictures in the reader's mind with her words, but what made her stand out was the deeper meaning she laid beyond those images. After her fall, she now has a new grasp of reality and knows more than she had before.
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Acceptance Essays
