Emily Dickinson is known as one of the greatest poets of all time, writing 1,775 brief poems in her lifetime! She is famous for her vast sense of style and theme. Author David Porter said, "by mapping the themes in a poet's oeuvre we seek in a standard way to classify and thereby broadly comprehend the writer . . . we want to know what besides the book binding and the author's name holds the poems together" (Grabher 183). Despite her vast sense of style and subject, one may conclude by looking intently at her biography and lifestyle that Emily Dickinson carries a theme of loss throughout her poems.
             Dickinson reveals her loss of loved ones, most commonly through death, in many of her poems. Students meeting Dickinson for the first time, and even critics, may misinterpret her as being morbid. Frank D. Rashid, a teacher of Dickinson's poetry, expresses, however, that "some understanding of Dickinson's life . . . can make her concern with death much more understandable" (Gibaldi 137). Living in a time period where technology was not as advanced as it is today, disease and death were not foreign in people's daily lives. There was a constant threat of tuberculosis; "the Norcrosses ([Dickinson's] mother's family) were particularly vulnerable to the disease, as were many of her schoolmates" (137). The role of women, and young girls, as "watchers of the dying" made them especially aware of death (137). "[Dickinson's] memorable visit, at age thirteen, to the deathbed of her friend Sophia Holland was not unusual" (137). Dickinson, herself, was constantly in bed with the 'deadly' flu (137). Her personal awareness of death and the loss of her loved ones through such circumstances are revealed in such poems as "I heard a Fly buzz," "Because I could not stop for Death," and "I felt a Funeral in my Brain." ...