Emily Dickenson
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 famil
" One of the most famous is "Because I could not stop for Death":Because I could not stop for Death- He kindly stopped for me- The Carriage held but just Ourselves- And Immortality. But it is evident that her experiences with the loss of love "bore her an identity of soul and taught her the ways of immortality" (Poetry Criticism 92). "I woke and chid my honest fingers,-- The gem was gone; And now an amethyst remembrance Is all I own. 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). We know she once had positive experiences in love by looking at her poems "Wild Nights-Wild Nights!":Wild Nights-Wild Nights! Were I with thee Wild Nights should be Our luxury!Futile-the Winds- To a Heart in port- Done with the Compass- Done with the Chart!Rowing in Eden- Ah, the Sea! Might I but moor-Tonight- In Thee! (1-12)Other poems such as "I held a jewel in my fingers" express her loss of love:I held a jewel in my fingers And went to sleep. McDermott concludes that Dickinson suffered from a host of what would today be seen as brain disorders, including a seasonal form of depression, bipolar disorder, and agoraphobia (Szegedy-Maszak 52). Still later, critics "treated all the clues in the poems and in gossip as fictive strategies" (28). Such awareness of death and loss through loved ones, some believe, drove her to isolation and the loss of her mind (Poetry Critics 76). One thing she often did was question God. Richard Wilbur claims in his essay "The Three Privations of Emily Dickinson" that she formed such questions as "Why is a fatherly God so sparingly of His presence? Why is there never a sign that prayers are heard? Why does Nature tell us no comforting news of its Maker?" (1132). In fact, "[Dickinson] never did make the required profession of faith" (28). Dickinson reveals in her poems her loss of faith. In fact, some psychiatrists believe that her creativity was actually a symptom of serious, undiagnosed mental illness (52). Emily Dickinson experienced much loss of love in her lifetime.
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Acceptance Essays
