...: Zaharat Islam ID : 082073015 Course : ENG 222 A short biography about an American poet Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her home and visitors were few. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she first met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure gave rise to the heartsick flow of verse from Dickinson in the years that followed. While it is certain that he was an important figure in her life, it is not clear that their relationship was romantic—she called him “my closest earthly friend.” Other possibilities for the unrequited love that was the subject of many of Dickinson’s poems include Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, and Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican. By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost complete isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. She spent a great deal of this time with her family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother, Austin, who attended...
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...quote by Emily Dickinson, she is trying to tell us that if “you find excitement in life then the pureness and simpleness in you is going to find joy.” Emily Dickinson was one of the best poets in the 19th century. Her quotes helped a lot of people. Her quotes told people what life was and how exciting it was. Emily Dickinson was an important figure in American history because her poets helped inspire a lot of people throughout the century. Who was Emily Dickinson? Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Emily Dickinson was born to Edward Dickinson(Father)and Emily Norcross Dickinson(Mother)on December 10, 1830. Emily Dickinson wasn’t the only child in the family, she had 2 siblings. One older brother(William Austin Dickinson) and one younger sister(Lavinia Norcross Dickinson). Emily and her siblings all attended Amherst Academy. The Amherst Academy wasn’t just an ordinary school but a school full of family traits. The district primary school that it seems most likely the Dickinson children attended as youngsters was built on land that belonged to their grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson. The school Emily attended was...
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...“Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” “I Heard a Fly Buzz,” and “Death, Be Not Proud” speak on death. Emily Dickinson wrote both “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “I Heard a Fly Buzz.” John Donne composed “Death, Be Not Proud.” These poems, written over 200 years apart, show how people continually try to understand and process death. Dickenson and Donne used different rhyming patterns to express their thoughts on death. It seems that the only similarities that these authors share appears to be that they wrote about death and were both poets. Emily Dickinson wrote “Because I could not stop for Death” in 1863. Dickinson's poem was not published until 1890, twenty-seven years after it was written and 4 years after Dickinson died. Emily Dickinson spent her life living in isolation. Some consider this Dickinson's most famous poem. In this poem, Dickenson looks at death and the journey that “Death” goes on. Death passes a schoolyard, fields of grain, and the setting sun as it heads toward eternity....
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...I think Emily Dickinson can be described as an idiosyncratic poet. Her work is perhaps the most instantly recognizable of all poetry due to her untenable economy of expression. It cannot be denied that startling, thought provoking and unusual imagery coalesced with her original point of view aggrandise her poetry. These moments are elicited by her work and are perhaps the essence of her reputation and image as one of the greatest, but also one of the most eccentric poets of all time. The reader gains great insight into her imagination through the medium of her poetry. She conveys moments of utter elation in poems such as “I taste a liquor never brewed to profound experiences of utter despair and depression in poems such as “I felt a funeral in My Brain”. What distinguishes her the most for me is her gift for figurative language, imagery, metaphors and similes. She had the ability to immerse herself in English literature and produce beautiful, ravishing and beauteous material through the medium of aesthetic language. Her archetypal flood subject was immortality and she often wrote about death. For me, the most thought provoking evocation of immortality and death, is her poem “I felt a Funeral in my Brain”. Dickinson’s poems on the Hereafter are probably among her best known. She was clearly deeply interested in the process of dying, and returned to it again and again in her writing. In this poem, the poet seems to have died sometime in the past and is now looking back or...
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...Emily Dickinson spent a large portion of he life in isolation. While others concerned themselves with "normal" daily activities, Emily was content to confine herself to her house, her garden, and her poetry. Due to her uncommon lifestyle, she was considered odd and was never respected as the great poet she is now recognized as. Living life as an outsider, her poems are written from a perspective we are not used to seeing in our popular culture. Even so, her works contain such themes as human nature/behavior, independence, the meaning of life, and optimism in a grim world. After reading and studying Emily Dickinson's works I have noticed many similarities between her beliefs and mine. I believe that most people would have to agree she was far more intelligent than anybody would have even considered and that one comes to understand our world better after contemplating her works. The most numerous type of poem that Dickinson wrote was that which dealt with human nature. In "Success is counted Sweetest," she points out that the people who can truly enjoy success are those who have felt the pain of failure. Most of the pleasure of success comes from subconsciously knowing that since you have succeeded you don't have to feel the pain of failure. Throughout my life, especially in regard to athletics, I have won many times in big situations and lost many times in big situations. Every time I've won, without really thinking about what I was doing, and only for a very brief time, I've...
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...Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are two of America’s greatest poets. They both wrote about death, life, and God. They also both had a love for nature and included it in their works. They led drastically different lifestyles and their writing styles were very different but the messages they presented through their writing were actually fairly similar. Their Life Dickinson and Whitman had very different upbringings. Dickinson came from a very wealthy family, attended an elite school, and also attended college. She lived a very introverted and reclusive life. She made few attempts to publish her work, choosing instead to share them privately with family and friends. During her lifetime only 7 of her poems were published only because she wrote them to others who had them published. Dickinson's youthful years were not without turmoil. Deaths of friends and relatives, including her young cousin Sophia Holland, prompted questions about death and immortality. Since her house was located near the town cemetery, Dickinson could not have ignored the frequent burials that later provided powerful imagery for her poems. Not having conventional religious views may have also contributed to her isolation. She did have a belief in God but it was different than the views held by her peers. Although Dickinson's friends, sister, father, and eventually brother all joined the church, Emily never did. In her later years, Dickinson increasingly withdrew from public...
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...Emily Dickinson’s poetry ‘This is my letter…’, ‘What myster pervade a well’, ‘I had been hungry all the years’, ‘I gave myself to him…’, Alejandro Innatritu’s film Babel (2006) and Franz Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis (1912) collectively explore ideas of belonging. (ADD ANSWER TO DIRECT QUESTION). They represent how belonging and exclusion from society contributes to shaping one’s sense of self and identity to determine their position in the larger world. The texts highlights how belonging to people and places within both social and cultural contexts, is dependent on the choices we make to feel accepted or remain an outsider, as voluntary social isolation affected deaf-mute protagonist Chieko psychologically and emotionally negatively however it became a catalyst for Dickinson’s creativity. The composers of both texts have represented the concept of belonging to challenge readers to consider if we feel we belong to the larger world today. Dickinson’s poetry elucidates the tension between her estrangement from society and her inherent need to belong, which is instigated by her voluntary social isolation. This paradox gives insight into her spirituality and notions concerning the human condition, highlighted in ‘This is my letter…’ as the first line “This is my letter to the world” serves as a declaration establishing distance between the singular pronoun “my” and the vast expanse of “the world”. It ends as a plea “judge tenderly of me” reflecting the persona’s inability to maintain...
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...Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson's unusual character and style has made her become one of the world's most famous poets. Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10,1830 to a prominent family, her father Edward Dickinson was both a lawyer and the Treasurer of Amherst College. Emily"s mother was Emily Norcross Dickinson. Emily had one older brother, William Austin and a little sister, Lavinia. She was educated at the Amerherst Academy, the institute that her grandfather helped found. She also spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but had left because she did not like the religious environment. For a woman of this time, this much education was very rare. Emily Dickinson was a very mysterious person as she got older she became more and more reclusive too the point that by her thirties, she would not leave her house and would withdraw from visitors. Emily was known to give fruit and treats to children by lowering them out her window in a basket with a rope to avoid actually seeing them face to face. She developed a reputation as a myth, because she was almost never seen and when people did catch a glimpse of her she was always wearing white. Emily Dickinson never got married but is thought to have had a relationship with Reverend Charles Wadsworth who she met in the spring of 1854 in Philadelphia. He was a famous preacher and was married. Many scholars believe that he was the subject of her love poems. Emily probably only saw Wadsworth...
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...Holly Pryor 372 After great pain, a formal feeling comes- The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs- The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’ And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’? The Feet, mechanical, go round- A wooden way Of ground, or Air, or Ought- Regardless grown, A quartz contentment, like a stone- This is the Hour of Lead- Remembered, if outlived, As freezing persons, recollect the Snow- First – Chill- then Stupor- then the letting go I believe Emily Dickenson is talking about the toll that a severe pain, possibly death, and how it makes you feel stiff, restless, and cold. Starting with the nerves you may feel “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs,” explaining how nervous and anxious feelings can arise from pain. She says “The stiff Heart questions,” which can be relatable to how deep, sincere pain can make your heart feel stiff, and sad, and all the many questions you may ask yourself after losing someone close to you. She says “This is the Hour of Lead – Remembered, if outlived, As a freezing persons, recollect the Snow-“ touching base with the fact that no matter what, you will always remember this feeling of pain, like a person stuck in the snow will always remember the snow. Next she says “First – chill- then Stupor- then the letting go” , describing, basically, the whole process of losing someone you love. First you feel cold, stiff hearted, hurt, and next you go into a slump of stupor or sadness, and then there comes the part where...
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...the more complex poems that I have read. I do have a slight idea of her meaning of the poem and what the characters mentioned represent. I read the comments made by other people and their interpretations and have a better understanding on the poem. Biography Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson never lived anywhere but Amherst and lived the last years of her life a recluse, writing poetry. After her death, her sister found hundreds of poems Dickinson had written, got them published, and Emily Dickinson's reputation grew from there, making her one of literature's most renowned poets. Although Dickinson is highly deemed as one of the most prominent poets in the field of American literature, during her lifetime she was chiefly known as a gardener rather than as a poet She never married She wore only white dresses for almost her entire adult life Although she was alleged to be a recluse, in reality, she was very much sociable. She frequently entertained guests at her home during her 20s and 30s She wrote nearly 2000 poems, most of which were published posthumously. During her lifetime she published only 7 poems Dickinson never named her poems; the titles were given by the early editors of her...
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...province, Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Like the Concord Transcendentalists whose works she knew well, she saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded. The literary marketplace, however, offered new ground for her work in the last decade of the nineteenth century. When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through eleven editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830 to Edward and Emily (Norcross) Dickinson. At the...
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...- - - - - - - - - - - - - Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. She died in the same place on May 15, 1886. Today people know her as a fascinating, talented writer. Most of the pieces Emily wrote were poems. Emily was a very isolated individual. She rarely ever got out or had any contact with anybody outside of her home. Along with writing her poems she wrote letters to the people that she did have contact with. In the letters that she would write there would be poems somewhere within them. Emily wrote a total of 1,775 poems in her lifetime. Even though she wrote these poems she never let it be known that she had the capability to write poems with such elegance. All of the poems that she would write she kept hidden somewhere in her room. She would hide the poems in places like her window, under her bed, in corners of the room, and lots of other places. After Emily’s death the truth would be told about her secret talent. Emily’s sister, Lavinia Dickinson found around 900 of the poems Emily had hidden in her room. Her sister decided that the poems were good enough to be published. She went to a friend of the family where she would get help in editing and publishing the poems. Lavinia’s friend, Mabel Loomis Todd and a friend of hers, Thomas Wentworth Higginson began to put a lot of Said 2 effort of getting the poems published. In the year 1890 they accomplished in getting 115 of Emily’s poems published. After...
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...When someone dies, is the experience frightening or peaceful? One can argue that it is not death that is scary; it is the fact that it is unknown. Emily Dickinson is known for her poems on death. The poem Because I could not stop for Death argues on this topic. According to Dickinson, death is a peaceful experience. She emphasises this theme with the use of style, characters, and imagery. Emily Dickinson uses tender diction, and repetition to emphasise the theme of death being a peaceful experience. In the poem, the reader is continuously bombarded with the peaceful vocabulary. Words such as “kindly,” “slowly,” “civility,” “setting sun” and others are used to make the tone quite mild and smooth. These words provide encouragement to the previously established image in the readers mind. This is significant because it helps emphasize the theme even more. Next, Emily Dickinson uses repetition in her work to help support the theme. She constantly repeats the word “We,” that symbolises the fact that she1 and death are together, with no pain. If there were some sort of tension between the personified death, and the speaker, Emily Dickinson would have used a word that shows separation between the two distinct characters. By using the style of diction and repetition Emily Dickinson supports her theme. There are two (and a minor one)2 major characters in the poem that all share the show the element of peace. The kind characteristics of the speaker, death and the horses’ highlight...
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... Jealousy has A cunning face. Jealousy can live Without a mind, Without a heart, Without a soul, Even without God. Human jealousy And divine Ecstasy Are eternal strangers. Jealousy Is an aggressive boxer, A repulsive dancer, A hopeless singer And a useless storyteller. Jealousy, Before you entered Into my life, I was the world's Richest prince. Now that you are in me And I am for you, I have become The poorest street-beggar. Jealousy, You are my constant Nightmare-mind. You are my constant Love-absence-heart. Shortest is the distance From jealousy to hell. Jealousy, You are your own Ultimate Self-destructive-indulgence. HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS By: Emily Dickinson "Hope" is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I've heard it in the chillest land And on the strangest sea, Yet never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me....
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...Still in the Gilded Age There are many things in life that appear attractive on the outside, but turn out to be quite the opposite on the inside. The forgotten fruit that was left to rot on the kitchen counter, the empty promises of a government body, the two-faced colleague at work… there are many of examples of beauty being only skin deep. Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” explores this theme of the gilded side of humanity. Roethke opens “My Papa’s Waltz” through the eyes of a small boy, lending an initial tone of naivety and innocence. This mood is reinforced through his use of rhyme scheme, which adds to the childish effect. However, this feeling is quickly subverted, as a more sinister interpretation can be seen midway through the poem. The boy describes, “The hand that held my wrist/Was battered on one knuckle;/At every step you missed/My right ear scraped a buckle.” (9-13), leading the reader to question what the actual meaning behind this “waltz” is. The minor mentioning of the unhappy mother, as well as the phrase, “But I hung on like death:” (3) is suddenly relevant; it suggests that the father may be an abusive alcoholic, deviating from the prior assumption that he was simply a happy drunk spending time with his son. This shift in reader interpretation can also be attributed to Roethke’s unique word choice. Take for example the word “waltz,” which is used exclusively in the beginning and ending stanzas...
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