...century America was greatly influenced by the Civil War. There was a great suffrage movement happening at the same time, the Civil War and Reconstruction Era. One type of art used to express feelings is poetry. Emily Dickinson stands out as a poet of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era because her poetry communicated her...
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...“Not knowing when the dawn will come / I open every door.” (Dickinson, Fr7). Born 1830 to a Puritan New England family, her childhood was relatively normal. Her town encouraged a conservative approach to Christianity, and though she held Puritan beliefs all her life, some of that belief making its way into her poems alluding to God, she never joined the church, even after her entire family rejoined the church. This was not purely out of defiance, but that she felt she needed to be true to herself, not trusting herself to be able to give up everything for God were he to call her back. Besides religion, she would do many domestic duties that influenced the topics of her poems later in life, such as gardening, school, reading, writing, and...
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...Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson was a brilliant American poet, and an obsessively private writer. During her lifetime, only seven of her eighteen hundred poems were published. Dickinson withdrew from social contact at the age of twenty three and devoted herself to her secret poetry writing. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830. There she spent most of her life living in the house built in 1813 by her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson. His part in founding Amherst College in 1821 began the family tradition of public service continued by Dickinson's father Edward and her brother Austin. All men in the Dickinson family were attorneys at law and the Dickinson home was a center of Amherst society and the site of annual Amherst College initiation receptions. Growing up in a household with such domineering men took its toll on Dickinson. She wished to be a political figure like her father and brothers, but the only thing that held her back was the fact that she was a woman. Dickinson wanted to have a life of political action and public service but that too was an impossible dream. This however was a perfect drive for her to make herself known and prepared her for her life as a poet. Dickinson's mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, was not as powerful a presence in her life; she seems not to have been as emotionally accessible as Dickinson would have liked. Her daughter is said to have characterized her as not the sort of mother "to whom you hurry...
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...author of the poem knows exactly what they are saying, the reader may decide that it is entirely different for them. Emily Dickinson’s poems are very highly interpreted, due to the fact that she is one of the best loved and most celebrated American poets. Each of her poems is seamlessly woven to create an image that can be both beautifully literal and metaphorical. Her poem [“It dropped so low- in my regard”] is a fine example of this. While literally about a broken piece of crockery, this poem can actually be interpreted as a metaphor for Emily Dickinson’s complicated, lonely love life. To fully understand Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and this poem in particular, we must understand a bit of her life. Emily is known for having been a recluse, her life a deliciously obscure mystery. She was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts to a respectable family. Her early childhood seems to have been a happy one. She was the middle child and rather the pet of her older brother and her lawyer father. Dickinson was always an eccentric, even at a young age. While she attended church regularly with her family, she refused to officially join the church, and she never called herself a Christian. She was reported to be a good student, but she was always sickly, and only spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before having to leave because of her health. She began writing poetry around 1850, and while her poems were originally traditional, she began to experiment with the established form,...
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...Similarity, Differences, Dickinson and Whitman During the Ninetieth century, two critical poets that came about were Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. These two poets are credited with laying the foundation of modern poetry because of the different poetic styles and messages they presented in their work. Dickson and Whitman came from two different types of lifestyles, which can be credited with shaping their core values. The main differences that exists between Dickinson and Whitman were their poetic styles, goals, and concerns. Even though there are many differences between Dickinson and Whitman, these two poets based all of their poems on their life experiences and memories that were made during their lives. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman lived two completely different lives, but both had the same passion when it came to poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts and lived most of her life on her family’s farm. She lived a very secluded life that was based on her father’s...
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..."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 poets Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are considered as the founders of today’s modern American poetry that are tried to revalue the poetry of the last century. Sooner or later, but they succeeded. They put the keystone of the modern American poetry which drifted in the breeze. The poetry has been redefined in a way to be able to get to the modern society's cultural level. The modern poetry becomes more discreet and it uses the topics of everyday life spiced with emotions. The emotions of the human being began to depict a higher quality. By the poets, so to speak, the mankind adjusts to...
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...down, and down— And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing—then— 20 “I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain” If one does not know much about poetry, they might think that a sixteen-stanza poem does not have abundant meaning. Little do they know, although, there aren’t many lines, it can be the most meaningful text. The poem I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain, is a sixteen-stanza poem that uses metaphors to describe a situation or feeling (depending on how the reader or critic interprets the poem). I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain by Emily Dickinson has substantial reviews and critics’ critical information on this poem. Each critic reviews a poem differently and all have a different interpretation on this particular poem. Although all of the interpretations are all on the same poem, they all have something different that critic distinguished. I, personally, viewed I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain, as if Emily Dickinson is mourning on how morose and depressed she is. But at the end she finds happiness (stanza 4) where she lets go of the gloomy funeral inside her brain. I found Emily Dickinson’s poem, I Felt A Funeral, In My brain, quite evasive at first. After picking apart the poem, and reading Dickinson’s...
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...definition as her 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...
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...Emily Dickinson views love with an allegorical neatness created in her poem The Love of Thee—a Prism Be. Dickinson believes that it is the prismatic quality of passion that matters, and the energy passing through an experience of love reveals a spectrum of possibilities. In keeping with her tradition of looking at the "circumference" of an idea, Dickinson never actually defines a conclusive love or lover at the end of her love poetry, instead concentrating on passion as a whole. Although she never defined a lover in her poems, many critics do believe that the object or focal point of her passion was Charles Wadsworth, a clergyman from Philadelphia. Throughout Emily’s life she held emotionally compelling relationships with both men and women. The differences in the prismatic qualities of each type of relationship come through in Dickinson’s prism imagery. Morris summarizes these differences in her essay: In one [male prism] the supremacy of the patriarch informs the rituals of courtship, family, government, and religion; in the other [female prism], the implied equality of sisterhood is played out in ceremonies of romantic, familial, social, and even religious reciprocity. (103) In her poetry, Emily represents the males as the Lover, Father, King, Lord, and Master as the women take complimentary positions to their male superiors, and many times the relationship between the sexes is seen in metaphor—women as "His Little Spaniel" or his hunting gun. The woman’s existence...
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...Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her family had deep roots in New England. Her paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was well known as the founder of Amherst College. Her father worked at Amherst and served as a state legislator. He married Emily Norcross in 1828 and the couple had three children: William Austin, Lavinia Norcross and Emily. Emily Dickinson was educated at Amherst Academy (now Amherst College) and the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She was an excellent student, despite missing long stretches of the school year due to frequent illness and depression. Though the precise reasons for Dickinson's final departure from the academy in 1848 are unknown, it is believed that her fragile emotional state probably played a role. Writing and Influences Dickinson began writing as a teenager. Her early influences include Leonard Humphrey, principal of Amherst Academy, and a family friend named Benjamin Franklin Newton. Newton introduced Dickinson to the poetry of William Wordsworth, who also served as an inspiration to the young writer. In 1855, Dickinson ventured outside of Amherst, as far as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There, she befriended a minister named Charles Wadsworth, who would become a cherished correspondent. Among her peers, Dickinson's closest friend and adviser was a woman named Susan Gilbert. In 1856, Gilbert married Dickinson's brother, William Austin Dickinson. The Dickinson family lived on a large home...
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...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 law school and became an attorney, lived next door with his wife, Susan Gilbert. Dickinson’s younger...
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...Thesis Statement Emily Dickinson’s poem “There is no Frigate like a Book” is a great example of the use of metaphor in poetry. The poem utilizes the theme of escape in describing how a book can carry a person away from reality. In using these metaphors, Dickinson is able to describe in only eight lines the power of literature and poetry on a person’s life. Outline 1. Introduction a. Thesis Statement 2. Theme a. Theme of the poem b. Poem’s setting c. Significance of the title to the poem’s content or meaning d. Mood of the poem e. Narrator of the poem 3. Conclusion Emily Dickinson’s poem “There is no Frigate like a Book” is a great example of the use of metaphor in poetry. The poem utilizes the theme of escape in describing how a book can carry a person away from reality. In using these metaphors, Dickinson is able to describe in only eight lines the power of literature and poetry on a person’s life. The main theme of the poem seems to be that of escape. Escape from reality may be what the author is trying to demonstrate. Books do have a way of transporting the human mind to other places and realities. As such, it makes sense that a book, poem, or other form of literature would be an escape from a person’s present reality. The poem could be literal, but it is situational in style. It is showing the situation of escape through books. “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away” is the opening line in Dickinson’s poem. A frigate is...
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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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...Poetry can have different meanings depending on the reader. I will be analyzing the poem,“I’m ceded - I’ve stopped being Their’s -” by Emily Dickinson. Dickinson’s poem demonstrates the speaker growing through life by the form, theme, and word choices. Maturing is shown within the poem by the words “I’m ceded” at the beginning of the poem then, the words “I choose” at the ending. The form and punctuation Dickinson embraced in the poem also shows the speaker growing through life. Dickinson’s poem shows the speaker growing, gaining pride, and identity with precise word choices. An Archive full of Dickinson’s works shows the exact writing of the poem. I noticed revisions were being made to the paper when looking at the original poem. The poet...
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...Annie Salinas Professor King English 1302 May 3,2012 Literary Research Paper In the late 1800’s there was a great legend made in the history of poetry. Emily Dickinson, a famous American Poet who resided in Amherst Massachusetts, was born to a successful family who was thought of highly by many members of the community. Although, her reluctance to meet and greet people and her reputation of keeping to herself, made people think of her as strange and anti-social. Dickinson studied at the Amherst Academy in Massachusetts. However, even though Dickinson did not have many relationships with friends or people, this did not stop her from making the best out of her career. As a private prolific poet, Dickson was blessed with great success dealing with her poetry. She has had about one thousand eight hundred of her poems published in her life time, including After great pain, a formal feeling comes, and I heard a Fly buzz-when I died-; two poems which Dickinson is popular for today. These two poems strongly illustrate a theme of death and dying, to assist the reader understand and analyze the depth of this theme; Dickinson uses strong symbolism, tone, and figurative language throughout her works. Dickinson’s symbolism throughout these two poems is strong and magnificent. In After great pain, a formal feeling comes the author uses many objects to symbolize feelings having to relate with the major theme of death and dying. “The nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs” (line...
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