essay about emily dickinson

10 of the Best Emily Dickinson Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

So it is that we’ve taken it upon ourselves to suggest the ten best Emily Dickinson poems to begin with, as a way into her unique and wonderful world. Follow the title of the poem to read it – the top two links also provide an analysis of the selected poem. What do you think is the greatest Dickinson poem?

1. ‘ I’m Nobody! Who are you? ’.

I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

A glorious celebration of anonymity, this poem beautifully showcases Dickinson’s individual style. It is actually quite nice to be a Nobody rather than a Somebody, and anonymity can actually be preferable to fame or public recognition.

This is a personal favourite and, to our mind, one of the finest Emily Dickinson poems in her entire oeuvre. Follow the link above to read the full poem and learn more about it.

2. ‘ I heard a Fly buzz – when I died ’.

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air – Between the Heaves of Storm –

One of Dickinson’s best-known poems, this is one of several poems on this list which takes death as its theme. Death never seems to have been far from Emily Dickinson’s mind, and this poem, which muses upon the moment of death with everyone gathered around the speaker’s deathbed, also features a Dickinsonian favourite: the mysterious fly. Follow the link above to read the full poem.

3. ‘ Hope is the thing with feathers ’.

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all –

In this poem, Dickinson likens hope to a singing bird, a ‘thing with feathers’ which ‘perches in the soul’. Hope, for Dickinson, sings its wordless tune and never stops singing it: nothing can faze it. Like ‘I’m Nobody!’, another oddly affirmative poem. Follow the link above to read this glorious Emily Dickinson poem in full.

4. ‘ The heart asks Pleasure – first ’.

The Heart asks Pleasure – first – And then – Excuse from Pain – And then – those little Anodynes That deaden suffering –

And then – to go to sleep – And then – if it should be The will of its Inquisitor The liberty to die –

Its title memorably borrowed by composer Michael Nyman for his soundtrack to the 1993 film The Piano , this poem examines what one’s ‘heart’ most desires: pleasure, ideally (or first), but failing that, relief from pain. And if the ‘anodynes’ don’t work, then sleep or unconsciousness is desirable – and, failing that, death (yes, death again).

5. ‘ I felt a Funeral, in my Brain ’.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading – treading – till it seemed That Sense was breaking through –

This poem focuses on a different kind of death: the death of the mind, or the fear of going mad. It is, if you like, an elegy for the (imminent) death of reason, using the funeral as a powerful extended metaphor. This Emily Dickinson poem is about going mad, about losing one’s grip on reality and feeling sanity slide away – at least, in one interpretation or analysis of the poem.

In the first stanza, the poem’s speaker uses the metaphor of the funeral for what is going on inside her head (we will assume that the speaker is female here, though this is only surmise: Dickinson often uses male speakers in her poetry). Her sanity and reason have died, and the chaos inside her mind is like the mourners at a funeral walking backward and forward.

The insistent repetition of ‘treading – treading’ evokes the hammering and turbulence within the speaker’s brain. Follow the link above to read the poem in full.

6. ‘ I died for Beauty – but was scarce ’.

I died for Beauty – but was scarce Adjusted in the Tomb When One who died for Truth was lain In an adjoining Room –

He questioned softly ‘Why I failed’? ‘For Beauty’, I replied – ‘And I – for Truth – Themself are one – We Brethren are’, He said –

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night – We talked between the Rooms – Until the Moss had reached our lips – And covered up – our names –

In this short poem, reproduced in full above, Dickinson takes up the Keatsian double-act of Truth and Beauty, using – again – the speaker’s death to convey its central idea.

The speaker died for Beauty, but was placed in the tomb beside another person, who died for Truth. They are both the same, they conclude. A fine enigmatic poem, this.

7. ‘ 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.

Yes, death again. Or rather, Death – the Grim Reaper, who calls to visit the speaker of this macabre poem. Death is not to be feared, the poem seems to say. Eternity isn’t so bad. This is a wonderfully surreal glimpse into Dickinson’s world – and, consequently, one of the finest Emily Dickinson poems.

This is a long poem by Emily Dickinson’s standards, so follow the link above to read it in full and to read our analysis of it.

8. ‘ My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun ’.

My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun – In Corners – till a Day The Owner passed – identified – And carried Me away –

The image of the ‘Loaded Gun’ is used in this poem as an extended metaphor for bottled-up rage that builds up within, eventually finding an outlet. This anger has the power to kill, but not the power to die: once one gives vent to one’s rage, it is very difficult to suppress it.

‘My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun’ may have arisen out of Emily Dickinson’s attitude to her father, and the sense that she felt compelled to write her poems in secret (as is well known, very few were published during her lifetime).

The poem’s central metaphor of a loaded gun to describe the speaker’s life suggests pent-up rage, as does the reference to Mount Vesuvius, the volcano whose eruption in the year 79 famously wiped out Pompeii.

9. ‘ A narrow Fellow in the Grass ’.

A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides – You may have met him – did you not His notice sudden is –

The ‘narrow Fellow’ is, of course, a snake – seen from a child’s-eye view. Along with D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Snake’, it’s one of the greatest poems about our reptilian friends: the snake in Dickinson’s poem appears and disappears suddenly, is apt to be mistaken for other things (e.g. a whip), and eludes our understanding.

Given that the poem is partly about something being mistaken for something else, it’s remarkable just how deftly Emily Dickinson makes  us  as readers mistake one word for another.

So not ‘Upbraiding’ – nothing so indignant – but ‘ Un braiding’, in a curious neologism. Not ‘ stopping  to secure it’, but ‘stooping’ to do so – but in doing so, inviting  us to stop and do a double-take, and secure the meaning of Dickinson’s line. Follow the link above to read the rest of this fine Emily Dickinson poem (and our discussion of it).

10. ‘ This World is not Conclusion ’.

This World is not Conclusion. A Species stands beyond – Invisible, as Music – But positive, as Sound – It beckons, and it baffles – Philosophy – don’t know – And through a Riddle, at the last – Sagacity, must go – To guess it, puzzles scholars – To gain it, Men have borne Contempt of Generations And Crucifixion, shown – Faith slips – and laughs, and rallies – Blushes, if any see – Plucks at a twig of Evidence – And asks a Vane, the way – Much Gesture, from the Pulpit – Strong Hallelujahs roll – Narcotics cannot still the Tooth That nibbles at the soul –

There is more to lived experience than the world around us, Dickinson proclaims in this poem, reproduced in full here; yet we cannot grasp this greater reality, though philosophers and theologians have tried. Dickinson ends with a characteristically idiosyncratic image, of a tooth nibbling at the soul.

Continue your poetry odyssey with these Emily Dickinson quotations , our selection of great poems by Hilda Doolittle , this pick of the  best short poems by women and these classic Sylvia Plath poems .

6 thoughts on “10 of the Best Emily Dickinson Poems Everyone Should Read”

You’re are quickly becoming my favorite blog page! <3<3<3<3

Thank you! :)

I agree with your choices! Thanks for posting them all in one place, and for the notes which are welcome to this particular English major, out of college for too many years!

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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. 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 sister, Lavinia, also lived at home, and she and Austin were intellectual companions for Dickinson during her lifetime.

Dickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town, which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity. She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning , as well as John Keats . Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumors of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886.

Upon her death, Dickinson’s family discovered forty handbound volumes of nearly 1,800 poems, or “fascicles,” as they are sometimes called. Dickinson assembled these booklets by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, who removed her annotations. The current standard version of her poems replaces her dashes with an en-dash, which is a closer typographical approximation to her intention. The original order of the poems was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her intended order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures, and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued that there is a thematic unity in these small collections, rather than their order being simply chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) is the only volume that keeps the order intact.

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Emily Dickinson’s Contribution to the US Literature Essay

Poets and authors create their works of literature considering the cultural tendencies of the epoch and personal experiences. Thus, each writer has a unique and differentiating style that allows recognizing him or her among others. Emily Dickinson is an extraordinary poet because she isolated herself from society and was in seclusion starting from the early adulthood period. Even though she was not very popular during her lifetime, most of her poems were found and published after her death. Emily Dickinson was one of the most prominent American writers who mainly focused on nature, religion, and death themes which fit the period of the Later Romantics.

As Dickinson was irritated with human society, she found her refuge in nature, which was reflected in her poems. Contrasting to other writers of the Romanticism period, she used the rat, the mushroom, the bat, the fly, the frog, the snake, and the stones as symbolic representations of nature (Amitabh 215). Nevertheless, those elements were usually avoided by romantics and ignored by moralists Dickinson plunged into the parallel world when it concerned nature, adored all its manifestations, and compared it with the human essence. In fact, “nature became the link between herself and the external world” (Amitabh 216).

Her works affirm that peace in the world is possible only when the powers are balanced. It correlates with the themes of feminism in the author’s pieces of literature. At the end of the nineteenth century, women were underprivileged and usually oppressed, while men enjoyed all the benefits. Therefore, most of Dickinson’s poems were heavily edited to conceal their true meaning.

Another prevalent theme utilized by the author concerns religion, gospels, and spiritual practices. Emily Dickinson comes from the Puritan family whose ancestors migrated from England to the United States several centuries ago. The Puritans are characterized by rigorous religious discipline and the purity of worship. Their practices also influence other spheres of life and impose restrictions on common activities.

Such traditions are also incorporated in the author’s works where Dickinson questions the mission of each human in the world and the separation of body and soul. The poet turns to the Christian tradition of the eternal life pursuit by the Calvinists and Transcendentalists (Song and Chen 53). Owing to the Calvinism philosophy, Dickinson “learnt about the survival of the soul and was curious to know how that was possible” (Alqaryouti and Sadeq 20). Therefore, the theme of religion often intersected with the motives of death.

The poet’s obsession with death is evident in many literary works, which can be explained by the tragic events Dickinson encountered in her life. Even though she was isolated from society, spent most of the time in the parental home, and communicated with friends mostly with the help of letters, it was difficult for her to pass through numerous losses. That is why Dickinson describes various emotional responses to death and enables the reader to view it from a different perspective (Alqaryouti and Sadeq 16).

The poem I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died explains that there is life after death. Another literary work Because I Could Not Stop for Death illustrates death in a romanticized way, indicating its patience and respect (Alqaryouti and Sadeq 17). Dickinson usually emphasized that death was not something tragic, but it is the time for a soul to transfer to another dimension and continue the path of eternal life.

Apart from unusual themes, this author can be characterized by a unique writing style. Typically for that period, some passages in Dickinson’s works “offer apt illustrations of the romantic tendency to indulge in the hyperbole of emotionalism” (Amitabh 217). She used conventional language in her works to describe abstract concepts with simple words. That is why it was easy to grasp the idea of each poem, but some names and notions remained symbolic, allowing the reader to elaborate on the interpretation. Moreover, Dickinson did not provide titles to poems as she was convinced they had no sense.

There is no doubt that Dickinson made a significant contribution to American literature. Some experts consider that she could control the English language as well as Shakespeare did (Song and Chen 51). Furthermore, her poems are a recollection of tranquility which corresponds to the popular concepts of the Romanticism period (Amitabh 213). Dickinson was not obsessed with popularity but rather wanted to express her thoughts and feelings in the literary works. That is why she published only several poems during her life, while most of them were found and edited after the poet’s death.

Even though Emily Dickinson is associated with the period of Late Romantics, her works comprise characteristic features. The author preferred seclusion and minimal social interactions, which was also reflected in her literary masterpieces. She incorporated the themes of nature and religion in the poems but was strongly obsessed with death in poetry. This subject was prevailing in Dickinson’s poems because of numerous tragic events that happened to her family members and friends. The author also used conventional language to describe complex notions with simple words, which made her writing style unique.

Works Cited

Alqaryouti, Marwan, and Ala Eddin Sadeq. “Vision of Death in Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems.” Asian Social Science , vol. 13, no. 5, 2017, pp. 16-23.

Amitabh, Roy. “Emily Dickinson as a Poet of Nature and Love.” International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities , vol. 3, no. 4, 2015, pp. 212-219.

Song, Mengqi, and Liping Chen. “On Characteristics of Emily Dickinson’s Death Poems.” International Journal of Secondary Education , vol. 5, no. 4, 2017, pp. 51-55.

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IvyPanda. (2021, May 22). Emily Dickinson's Contribution to the US Literature. https://ivypanda.com/essays/emily-dickinsons-contribution-to-the-us-literature/

"Emily Dickinson's Contribution to the US Literature." IvyPanda , 22 May 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/emily-dickinsons-contribution-to-the-us-literature/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Emily Dickinson's Contribution to the US Literature'. 22 May.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Emily Dickinson's Contribution to the US Literature." May 22, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/emily-dickinsons-contribution-to-the-us-literature/.

1. IvyPanda . "Emily Dickinson's Contribution to the US Literature." May 22, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/emily-dickinsons-contribution-to-the-us-literature/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Emily Dickinson's Contribution to the US Literature." May 22, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/emily-dickinsons-contribution-to-the-us-literature/.

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The Civil War

A Smithsonian magazine special report

AT THE SMITHSONIAN

Walt whitman, emily dickinson and the war that changed poetry, forever.

The two titans of American poetry chronicled the death and destruction of the Civil War in their poems

David C. Ward

Part of Emily Dickinson’s traditional mystique derives from her supposed isolation from the world. The image persists of her as a reclusive genius, living in her big house in the sleepy little western Massachusetts town of tending to her garden, and writing out her hundreds of enigmatic little poems on scraps of paper.

Her writing seems to have come from nowhere and her verse was like nothing else both in her own time and in American literature. Yet despite her apparent physical and cultural isolation, careful study has found the tracings of the wider society threaded through her mysterious and elliptical poems. Questions of faith and salvation predominate, but current events pop up as well, none more than the Civil War.

Dickinson started writing in the late 1850s and there is a sense of a hush in many of her poems as the impending crisis turned into a full-blown war; studies have linked her writing to the effects achieved in landscape painting by the “luminists” and their sense of a foreboding, American sublime. Later her verse would reflect the battle being joined—she saw the dead and casualties being returned to her town; she may have seen illustrations of the battlefield—and then the awful aftermath. In the first stanza of one poem, she laid bare how the reality of war exposed the hollowness of the rhetoric that was used to instigate and justify it:

My Triumph lasted till the Drums Had left the Dead alone And then I dropped my Victory And chastened stole along To where the finished Faces Conclusion turned on me And then I hated Glory And wished myself were They.

Dickinson may have intended her poem to quietly turn upside down the emotional tone of Walt Whitman’s frenetic “Beat! beat! drums! –Blow! bugles! blow!/Through the windows–through doors–burst like a ruthless force.” Whitman concludes with the dead as well, but only to point out how they are ignored when the ferocious war music sweeps us along, out of ourselves.

Dickinson shows us the aftermath and the regret not only for the loss of life but of what war does to the living. Dickinson and Whitman show us two ways of working through the problem of how to mourn and how to gauge the effect that the war was having on Americans. Their point of view—Dickinson distant, Whitman near the front in Washington—inflected their writing, as did other factors such as gender: Dickinson’s is a more private grief; Whitman’s is a poem about propaganda. But both small poems reflect how, to adapt Lincoln’s words , “the war came” to American poetry.

Literary historian Edmund Wilson's influential 1962 book, Patriotic Gore, shows how the war shaped American literature. He writes, in particular, about how the war, in the need for orders to be terse, concise and clear, had an impact on the writing style that would characterize American modernism. To stretch a point, you can trace Ernest Hemingway’s famously terse, descriptive style back to the orders written by generals like Grant or Sherman. But things were still in balance during the war itself as new ways of thinking and writing—the “modern,” if you will—contested with older styles and habits of feeling—the Victorian and sentimental. Yet the boundaries were not clearly drawn at the time. Dickinson inhabited a world of Victorian sentimentality, but infused its musty conventions with the vigor of her idiosyncratic point of view and elliptical style. “My triumph. . .” in lesser hands could have been overwrought and bathetic instead of the carefully calibrated gauge of morality with which Dickinson infused it. Similarly, Whitman, supposedly the preeminent harbinger of modern sensibilities, oscillated between the old and newer cultures. Famously, he wrote two mourning poems for his hero, Abraham Lincoln and they are very different. “ O Captain, My Captain ” is a fine piece of Victorian melodrama and sentimentality, much anthologized and recited on patriotic public occasions, but read the lines of This Dust was Once the Man:

This dust was once the Man, Gentle, plain, just and resolute—under whose cautious hand, Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age, Was saved the Union of These States.

Whitman would recite the poem at the conclusion of his public lecture “ The Death of Lincoln, ” and he grew weary of it. If “O Captain, My Captain” was rooted in the poetic vocabulary of mid-19th-century conventionality, Whitman’s second Lincoln poem, “ When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, ” vaulted American poetry toward the future, creating a decisive break, both linguistically and in its cast of mind, with the time in which he wrote. It is a hallucinatory work that is as close as an American poet has ever gotten to Dante’s journey into the Underworld:

Passing the visions, passing the night; Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands; Passing the song of the hermit bird, and the tallying song of my soul Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering song, As low and wailing yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night . . .

Dickinson and Whitman were two of the most sensitive intelligences in the making of American poetry. That they were conflicted and pulled between the past and the future, only indicates the complexities that were in flux due to the war. Among other writers, from established authors to Americans who turned to poetry as a form of solace in a time of need, older patterns of expression continued to predominate. The over-stuffed furnishings of Victorian literature was a recourse and a comfort to people in great need. Later, Mark Twain, among others, would lampoon that culture and kill it dead in the 1884 " Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." (The wreck of the steamboat Sir Walter Scott in the novel is Twain's pointed comment on the end of the sugar-spun world of the romance.)

The violence of the war sloughed off all the over wrought, emotionally dramatic Victorian proprieties that evaded the immediate impact of the thing itself. As Americans recoiled from the reality of war, there was a sense of taking stock that in our literature and poetry would result in a more chastened and realistic language, one better suited to assess and describe the world that the War had created.

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David C. Ward | READ MORE

David C. Ward is senior historian emeritus at the National Portrait Gallery, and curator of the upcoming exhibition “The Sweat of their Face: Portraying American Workers."

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The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson

Karen Sánchez-Eppler is L. Stanton Williams 1941 Professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College and serves on the boards of the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation and of the Emily Dickinson Museum. Her first book, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the Politics of the Body (1993), included work on Dickinson. Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2005) initiated her turn to childhood studies. She is one of the founding coeditors of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth and past president of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor at the University at Buffalo SUNY. She has published broadly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. Her books on Dickinson include Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (1987), Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (2012), and the edition Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them (2016), winner of the Modern Language Association’s Best Scholarly Edition Prize. She serves on the editorial advisory board for the Emily Dickinson Archive and is currently coediting a new complete letters of Emily Dickinson with Domhnall Mitchell. Among other work on modernist poetry, Miller is founder and director of the Marianne Moore Digital Archive .

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The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson is designed to engage, inform, interest, and delight students and scholars of Emily Dickinson, of nineteenth-century US literature and cultural studies, of American poetry, and of the lyric. It also aims to establish potential agendas for future work in the field of Dickinson studies. This is the first essay collection on Dickinson to foreground the material and social culture of her time while opening new windows to interpretive possibility in ours. The collection strives to balance Dickinson’s own center of gravity in the material culture and historical context of nineteenth-century Amherst with the significance of important critical conversations of our present, thus understanding her poetry with the broadest “Latitude of Home”—as she puts it in her poem “Forever – is composed of Nows –”. Debates about the lyric, about Dickinson’s manuscripts and practices of composition, about the viability of translation across language, media, and culture, and about the politics of class, gender, place, and race circulate through this volume. These debates matter to our moment but also to our understanding of hers. Although rooted in the evolving history of Dickinson criticism, the essays in this handbook foreground truly new original research and a wide range of innovative critical methodologies, including artistic responses to her poetry by musicians, visual artists, and other poets. The suppleness and daring of Dickinson’s thought and uses of language remain open to new possibilities and meanings, even while they are grounded in contexts from over 150 years ago, and this collection seeks to express and celebrate the breadth of her accomplishments and relevance.

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Major Characteristics of Dickinson’s Poetry

Using the poem below as an example,  this section will introduce you to some of the major characteristics of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

Sunrise in the Connecticut River Valley near Amherst.

I’ll tell you how the Sun rose – A Ribbon at a time – The steeples swam in Amethyst The news, like Squirrels, ran – The Hills untied their Bonnets – The Bobolinks – begun – Then I said softly to myself – “That must have been the Sun”! But how he set – I know not – There seemed a purple stile That little Yellow boys and girls Were climbing all the while – Till when they reached the other side – A Dominie in Gray – Put gently up the evening Bars – And led the flock away – (Fr204)

Theme and Tone

Form and style, meter and rhyme, punctuation and syntax.

Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems

By emily dickinson, emily dickinson's collected poems essay questions.

Compare and contrast the two death scene poems, “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died,” and “Because I could not stop for Death.”

These two poems are both fixated on death, and in fact, both poems describe the day that the speaker died and the speaker’s death itself. However, where “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died,” is completely focused on the physicality of death, such that the speaker loses all sight of any spiritual light, “Because I could not stop for Death –“ is focused on death purely as a spiritual journey from life to afterlife. Both poems, however, present the existence of an afterlife, for the speaker is dead and yet still has a voice.

Propose a theory to explain why Dickinson may have chosen to use strict, traditionally religious stanza forms, when she was so anti-conventional in her forms otherwise?

A great majority of Dickinson’s poems use traditionally religious stanza forms, although her other formal choices, like her rhyme schemes and her punctuation, are very unconventional. This is likely an embodiment in the form of her poems of what she does in so many of them—finds her own path to God, to spirituality and faith, and doesn’t follow the conventional. Religion and faith are very essential to her poetry, but she is not going to follow religious conventions without judging them first. By using a traditional hymn form, she has the structure of religious poetry, while rewriting what that means.

Compare and contrast two poems that deal with success or failure, “Success is counted sweetest” and “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

These two poems both are concerned with showing that success is not purely good. In “Success is counted sweetest,” this is because the minute one has success, the ability to appreciate it is lost, and thus one becomes a successful person, but lacks the emotional intensity of the unsuccessful. In “I’m Nobody! Who are you?,” success is “dreary” because it is success in a world that does not appreciate true talent, and this success requires the selling out of one’s own identity.

How is “I dwell in Possibility –“ a feminist poem?

In “I dwell in Possibility,” Dickinson turns poetry into an open house, infused with nature. The house, though, the work required to keep it running, is what oppressed Dickinson more than anything else in her life. So by using this metaphor, she has enacted a transformation of the oppressive home, the setting of all appropriate and allowed female labor, into an open, limitless house, thanks to her poetry. Thus, even if society constrains her to her home, they cannot prevent her from freeing herself with poetry.

Examine how nature and faith are connected in “A Light exists in Spring.”

The light described in “A Light exists in Spring” seems to represent some kind of connection to God. This light, like God, is unable to be measured by science, and its powers of illumination are far above mundane light—it illuminates not just everything the speaker sees, but everything she knows. The setting without this light is compared to a sacramental scene that has been encroached upon by trade, by the very not-divine. Thus nature is given the power to bring the speaker closer to the divine, but it does not always do so.

Provide an example of a poem where the speaker’s intentions differ from the poem’s, and explain how it works.

In “Behind Me dips – Eternity,” the speaker’s intention seems to be that death is not actually so threatening. She presents life as a brief interruption in an eternal lifelessness, with eternity before it and immortality after, thus death becomes just a quiet slipping back to the status quo. The poem itself, however, seems to belie this—the stanza dealing with this immortality, this miracle that is before the speaker, seems to doubt this afterlife. Without this comfort, the dark image that closes the poem becomes much more threatening.

Explain how “The Bat is dun, with wrinkled Wings –“ is a religious poem.

“The Bat is dun, with wrinkled Wings –,” uses a portrait of a small, ugly, seemingly useless animal, to show the how truly inscrutable God is. This poem points out that fact that not all of nature is beautiful, or marvelous, or even obviously useful, and yet, it is all created by God. The inability to understand the bat and its purpose is closely tied to the human inability to comprehend God and his purpose. Yet the speaker trusts in the bat’s goodness, and thus, though she may not understand him, she trusts God.

Explain how Dickinson instills doubt in the speaker’s stated philosophy in “Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant –“

“Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant –“ is very direct in its orders to the reader, and it claims that not following these orders will end in all men going blind. Dickinson often shows, however, how tenuous the truth is, and has doubts in even her most impassioned directives, and this is no exception. Two examples to show that she has some trepidation of the honesty of telling the truth “slant,” are her use of a doubtful metaphor—“kind” explanations to children are in reality often lies—and the use of the word “lies.”

Compare and contrast how “They shut me up in Prose –“ and “I dwell in Possibility –“ deal with the problem of the female poet or artist.

“They shut me up in Prose –“ and “I dwell in Possibility” both deal with the freedom inherent in poetry. In “They shut me up in Prose –,” the attempt to keep the speaker writing in her female world, for correspondence and not for art, is unsuccessful, because no one can control her mind. In “I dwell in Possibility,” on the other hand, Dickinson uses the metaphor of the house to define poetry, and thus poetry is transformed into the realm where women rule, not men.

Give an example of a poem in which a formal feature reflects the poem’s subject or meaning.

“To fill a Gap“ is a poem about spaces, and the difficulty in filling them. In this poem, to fill a gap, to answer a question, one must ask more questions—the work of poetry, thus, in trying to answer questions, is never done. It is essentially a poem that highlights all that poetry cannot answer. This is reflected in the line breaks in the poem—it alternates between long and very short lines, which highlight the empty spaces following the short lines, thus emphasizing all that cannot be said.

Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

How is Autumn picturized in Emily Dickinson’s nature poetry ?

It would be useful if you had a particular poem in mind.

A Thunderstorm

Did you have a question? If not... thank you for sharing.

Thunderstorm

Did you have a question about Dickinson's, A Thunderstorm ?

Study Guide for Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems

Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems study guide contains a biography of Emily Dickinson, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems
• Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems Summary
• "Because I could not stop for Death" Video
• Character List

Essays for Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems

Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Emily Dickinson's poems.

• Faith Suspended
• Death: Triumph or Tragedy?
• The Vision of Heaven in Emily Dickinson's Poetry
• Emily Dickinson's Quest for Eternity
• The Source of Eroticism in Emily Dickinson's Wild Nights! Wild Nights!

Lesson Plan for Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems Bibliography

E-Text of Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems

Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems e-text contains the full text of Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems.

• PREFACE TO FIRST SERIES
• PREFACE TO SECOND SERIES
• PREFACE TO THIRD SERIES
• This is my letter to the world
• Part One: Life 1. Success is counted sweetest

Wikipedia Entries for Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems

• Introduction
• Publication
• Modern influence and inspiration

Poetry & Poets

Explore the beauty of poetry – discover the poet within

How to write an essay on emily dickinson?

Emily Dickinson is considered one of America’s greatest poets. She was a very private person, and only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime. Even so, her work is widely known and respected. If you’re asked to write an essay about her, there are several things you can do to ensure a successful result.

There is no one definitive way to write an essay on Emily Dickinson. However, a few important elements to focus on in an essay about her would include her unique and often suggestive use of language, her reclusive lifestyle and her fascination with death. Other important aspects of her life and work to consider would be her relationships with the people around her, her religious beliefs and her views on love and marriage.

What is Emily Dickinson’s writing style?

Emily Dickinson’s writing style is most certainly unique. She used extensive dashes, dots, and unconventional capitalization, in addition to vivid imagery and idiosyncratic vocabulary. Instead of using pentameter, she was more inclined to use trimester, tetrameter, and even dimeter at times. This made her writing very difficult to read for some, but also very intriguing. It’s no wonder she’s considered one of the most important American poets.

Dickinson’s seclusion was beneficial to her as a poet because it allowed her to focus on developing her poetry. Her poems often addressed emotional and psychological states such as loneliness, pain, happiness, and ecstasy. Death was often personified in her poems, as were religious and moral concepts. Love, both found and lost, was another common theme in Dickinson’s poetry.

How would you describe Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson is one of the most important American poets of the 19th century. She is known for her bold and original verse, which is characterized by its epigrammatic compression, haunting personal voice, and enigmatic brilliance. Her work is often considered to be ahead of its time, and her influence can be seen in the work of many later poets.

Emily Dickinson is one of the most celebrated poets in American history. Though she was a prolific writer, only ten of her poems were published during her lifetime. Emily was born into a prominent family— her father was a United States Senator— but she preferred a life of solitude and spent much of her time in her bedroom. Botany was a passion of hers, and she was known to have a vast collection of flowers. It’s believed that Emily had several mysterious love affairs, though she never married. Her reclusiveness and the secrecy surrounding her personal life have only added to her legend.

What are the main themes of Emily Dickinson poetry?

Like most writers, Emily Dickinson wrote about what she knew and about what intrigued her. A keen observer, she used images from nature, religion, law, music, commerce, medicine, fashion, and domestic activities to probe universal themes: the wonders of nature, the identity of the self, death and immortality, and love.

Emily Dickinson’s poems often employ short stanzas, usually quatrains, with short lines. The poems often rhyme on the second and fourth lines. Other stanzas employ triplets or pairs of couplets, and a few poems employ longer, looser, and more complicated stanzas.

What was Emily Dickinson’s inspiration?

What are some of the benefits of taking an online course?

Some of the benefits of taking an online course include the ability to learn at your own pace, having access to course materials 24/7, and being able to take the course from anywhere. You also have the ability to rewatch lectures and review materials as many times as you need.

If you have hope in your soul, it will never die. Hope is the one thing that can never be taken away from you. It is the thing with feathers that perches in your soul and sings the tunes without the words. It never stops at all.

How do you analyze an Emily Dickinson poem

New and surprising language is one of the most exciting things about reading poetry. Don’t worry if you don’t understand every word or phrase – part of the pleasure of reading poetry is the opportunity to encounter new and unfamiliar language. It’s also worth revisiting poems to see how your understanding of them changes with time.

Dickinson’s poetry is often characterized by its use of compressed language and unusual syntax. This can make her poems challenging to read, but it can also be rewarding to try to “fill in the blanks” and make sense of the language.

What influenced Emily Dickinson poetry?

Emily Dickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England. The Metaphysical poets were a group of poets who used unconventional metaphors and images to explore complex ideas about God, humanity, and the natural world. Dickinson was also influenced by her reading of the Book of Revelation, which is a book of the Bible that describes the end times and the battle between good and evil. Finally, her upbringing in a Puritan New England town encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity.

Emily Dickinson is unique in that she has a couple of different tones in her poetry. She has death and suffering poems in which she is quite pessimistic and depressing, very dark and gloomy. But she also has some poems that read like tiny essays with a cognition above and beyond all other poets.

Why did Emily Dickinson write about death

Though Dickinson lost some important people early in her life, she didn’t let it stop her from living. She turned to writing poetry as an outlet for her sorrow and used it to explore her fascination with death. This led to her becoming somewhat reclusive, but she didn’t let that stop her from living her life to the fullest.

Dickinson’s use of ambiguous imagery, enjambment, and dashes allows her to explore the uncertainties of life and death. By using these devices, she creates an atmosphere of mystery and suspense, which encourages readers to look beyond the literal meaning of her words.

What makes Dickinson’s poems hard to understand?

Her poems are often difficult to understand because they are compressed, have unconventional grammar, use strange words, and have figures of speech that are difficult to understand. In addition, her poems often contain symbols and allegories that are not easy to interpret.

Dickinson artfully uses symbols such as a child, a field of grain, and a sunset to establish the cycle of life and its different stages. The child represents the beginning of life, while the field of grain represents growth and abundance. The sunset, meanwhile, represents the end of life. Dickinson utilizes the example of the busyness of the speaker and the death of the sun to establish the inevitability of death.

What was the impact Emily Dickinson had on society

She introduced the world to a new kind of writing and poetry. Emily wrote odd poems that were different from other people’s and she expressed her feelings differently in them. It changed the way people think about things and how they feel about them.

There is scholarship that suggests that Emily Dickinson had a lifelong love affair with her childhood friend Susan Gilbert. The two women lived next door to each other throughout their adult lives. Gilbert married Dickinson’s brother Austin, but the relationship between the two women remained close. Some scholars believe that the intensity of Dickinson’s poetry was in part inspired by her love for Gilbert.

Final Words

To write an essay on Emily Dickinson, you will need to choose a focus for your essay. You may want to focus on her poetry, her life, or her influence on American literature. Once you have decided on a focus, you will need to do some research on Dickinson and her work. After you have done your research, you will need to write a thesis statement. This will be the main argument of your essay. After you have written your thesis statement, you will need to develop your argument. You will do this by discussing Dickinson’s work in relation to your chosen focus. Be sure to support your argument with evidence from Dickinson’s work. Finally, you will need to conclude your essay by summing up your argument and discussing the significance of Dickinson’s work.

In conclusion, to write an essay on Emily Dickinson, one should first research the poet and her work, and then develop a thesis statement around a chosen theme. Once the thesis is developed, the essay can be written, focusing on evidence from Dickinson’s work that supports the chosen theme.

Minnie Walters

Minnie Walters is a passionate writer and lover of poetry. She has a deep knowledge and appreciation for the work of famous poets such as William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and many more. She hopes you will also fall in love with poetry!

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The Emily Dickinson Collection

Overview and History

Houghton Library holds the papers of many American writers, including those of the 19th-century Amherst poet Emily Dickinson.

Houghton's Dickinson Collection is the largest in the world. In addition to preserving more than 1,000 poems and some 300 letters in her hand, the library also holds the poet’s writing table and chair , the Dickinson family library including the poet's bible , as well as Dickinson's herbarium .

At the heart of the collection are 40 hand-sewn manuscript books, or fascicles, in which the poet copied her poems. These manuscripts record the variations in word choice Dickinson considered. Unfortunately, these fascicles were disbound by the poet’s earliest editors. None survive as Dickinson left them, although in a few cases the thread used to sew the folded sheets does survive. 

For those interested in how the collection ended up at Harvard, researchers can consult the introduction to the 2006 facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium .

Emily Dickinson Archive Online

Emily Dickinson Archive provides access to images of nearly all of Emily Dickinson’s extant poetry manuscripts.

A collaborative effort across many institutions, the archive provides readers with images of manuscripts held in multiple libraries and archives, and offers an array of transcriptions of Dickinson’s poems. It also features digital tools that support exploration and scholarship. The site allows users to:

• browse images of manuscripts by first line, date, or recipient;
• turn the pages of and zoom into the manuscripts;
• search the full text of six editions of Dickinson’s poems;
• browse Emily Dickinson’s Lexicon , a resource indexing Dickinson’s word choices along with their contemporary definitions; and
• create an account to make notes on images, save transcriptions of poems, and create new editions of her poetry.

The Dickinson Room

The Dickinson Room is located on the second floor of Houghton Library . It displays family furniture (including the poet's writing table and chair), family portraits, a portion of the family library, and a number of personal belongings closely associated with the poet. The Dickinson Room is included in free public tours of Houghton Library every Friday at 2 p.m. and can be seen at other times by appointment. To request a tour of the room, contact the library . 

Emily Dickinson’s Black Cake 

“2 Butter. / 19 eggs. / 5 pounds Raisins.”

Those are some of poet Emily Dickinson's lesser-known lines.

Dickinson’s manuscript recipe for black cake, included in Houghton's Dickinson Collection, was sent along with a bouquet of flowers to Nellie Sweetser in the summer of 1883.  Read more about the recipe, and watch a video of Houghton staff recreating the cake .

Dickinson-Related Collections at Houghton

The following collections constitute the bulk of Houghton Library's Emily Dickinson Collection:

Emily Dickinson Poems and Letters

• Emily Dickinson Poems : The fascicles, as well as poems on loose sheets, addressed to Susan Dickinson and other family members. The appendix includes a useful concordance of Johnson numbers, Franklin numbers, and Houghton call numbers. Color digital facsimiles available in open access.
• Emily Dickinson letters and poems sent to the Austin Dickinson family : Color digital facsimiles of poems available in open access; color digital facsimiles of letters by Emily Dickinson restricted to the Harvard network.
• Emily Dickinson poems and letters to Maria Whitney : Color digital facsimiles of poems available in open access; color digital facsimiles of letters by Emily Dickinson restricted to the Harvard network.
• Emily Dickinson letters to Josiah Gilbert Holland and Elizabeth Chapin Holland : Includes some poems. Color digital facsimiles of poems available in open access; color digital facsimiles of letters by Emily Dickinson restricted to the Harvard network.
• Emily Dickinson Letters to Lucretia Gunn Dickinson Bullard : Complete color digital facsimiles available; access restricted to the Harvard network.
• Emily Dickinson letters to various correspondents : Color digital facsimiles of poems available in open access; color digital facsimiles of letters by Emily Dickinson restricted to the Harvard network.
• Emily Dickinson miscellaneous papers : Includes materials that entered the Houghton collections after 1950. Largely letters, but a few manuscripts, and the recipe for black cake. Color digital facsimiles of poems available in open access; color digital facsimiles of letters by Emily Dickinson restricted to the Harvard network.

Because of their extreme fragility, the following items cannot be accessed in the original. All are available digitally, linked to their respective catalog records below.

• Emily Dickinson. Herbarium, ca. 1839–1846 : Compiled by Dickinson when she was a student at Amherst Academy. Complete color digital facsimile available without access restrictions. Additionally, published in facsimile as Emily Dickinson's Herbarium . Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. The Herbarium is searchable by both common (e.g. dandelion, lily) and scientific (e.g. Jasminum, Calendula) plant name.
• Emily Dickinson. Herbarium, [18--] : Unfinished; nothing is known of its history. Complete color digital facsimile available without access restrictions.
• Botanical specimens received by Emily Dickinson : Pressed botanical specimens sent to Dickinson, most of which are labeled with geographic locations in the Middle East. It is possible that some or all of the labeled specimens were sent to Dickinson by Abby Wood Bliss, a schoolmate from Amherst Academy, who went to the Middle East as a missionary wife in 1855. Complete color digital facsimile available without access restrictions.

Dickinson Family Artifacts and Papers

• Dickinson family artifacts : Portraits, furniture, jewelry, and household objects, many on display in the Dickinson Room. All objects have been photographed. Color digital facsimiles are available without access restrictions.
• Dickinson family library : The titles in the Dickinson family library are also listed in HOLLIS and can be browsed using this canned search ; those records should be consulted for fuller bibliographic information than is found in the finding aid. More than half the volumes in this library have been digitized. Color digital facsimiles are available without access restrictions.
• Dickinson family papers: Some images available; no access restrictions.
• Dickinson family contracts and correspondence : concerning publication of the works of Emily Dickinson: No images available.

Photographs

• Dickinson family photographs, ca. 1840-1940 : Some images available; no access restrictions.
• Reproductions of the Emily Dickinson daguerreotype: Shows the stages of alteration to the Amherst daguerreotype done by Laura Coombs Hills. Some images available; no access restrictions.

Dickinson Family Circle

• Mary Adèle Allen correspondence concerning Emily Dickinson : Images available; no access restrictions.
• Martha Dickinson Bianchi letters to Theodore Longfellow Frothingham :  No images available; no access restrictions.
• Martha Dickinson Bianchi papers : Some images available; no access restrictions.
• Martha Dickinson Bianchi publication correspondence : No images available; no access restrictions. 
• Samuel Bowles letters to Austin and Susan Dickinson : No images available; no access restrictions.
• Alfred Leete Hampson correspondence concerning Emily Dickinson's papers : No images available; no access restrictions.
• Thomas Herbert Johnson correspondence with Theodora Van Wagenen Ward, 1950–1958 : No images available; no access restrictions.
• Theodora Van Wagenen Ward notes and correspondence concerning Emily Dickinson : Some images available; no access restrictions.

Other individual items, such as silhouettes of the Dickinsons , a drawing of Susan Dickinson , a transcript of the evidence given in the Dickinson-Todd trial , and manuscripts by friends of Dickinson such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson can be found through HOLLIS.

• Virtual Open House Tour of the Dickinson Collection at Houghton Library given by Curator Leslie Morris hosted by the Emily Dickinson Museum on April 14, 2021
• Making Emily Dickinson’s Black Cake video by Houghton Library staff baking Emily’s cake from December 2015
• Lecture by Helen Vendler, “Emily Dickinson and the Sublime” with introduction by curator Leslie Morris on March 31, 2011

Accessing These Materials

There is no single database that can be searched for online versions of material in the Dickinson Collection. Patrons should use both HOLLIS and HOLLIS for Archival Discovery to locate material.

Due to the fragile nature of many items in the collection, researchers are required to use the facsimiles of Dickinson manuscripts and letters that are available. All poetry manuscripts are available online in color digital facsimile in the Emily Dickinson Archive as well as through the library's finding aids. The fascicles have also been published in facsimile. Dickinson's autograph letters are available in color digital facsimile in the Houghton Reading Room.

Some books in the Dickinson Family Library contain markings, and in 2010 Houghton Library embarked upon a program to stabilize and digitize these fragile volumes. The volumes are restricted because of their condition, and other copies of the same editions are held by the Houghton Library or in Widener Library. Readers are expected to use these alternate copies.

Permission to consult the original manuscripts or letters by Emily Dickinson, or books from the Dickinson Library, must be approved in advance.

Reproductions and Permissions

For permission to quote from or reproduce from manuscript material of Dickinson, contact the library . 

For permission to quote from published editions of Dickinson's work that are still in copyright (such as the Johnson and Franklin editions of the poems), and for all commercial uses of Emily Dickinson texts, contact Harvard University Press's Permissions Department .

• email: Email
• Phone number 617-495-2440

Related Collections

Woodberry poetry room comprehensive recording collection, access materials at houghton library, use harvard library's special collections and archives.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain Summary & Analysis by Emily Dickinson

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

Emily Dickinson wrote "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" in 1861, the beginning of what is regarded as her most creative period. The poem employs Dickinson's characteristic use of metaphor and rather experimental form to explore themes of madness, despair, and the irrational nature of the universe. Dickinson depicts an unnerving series of events based around a "funeral" that unfolds within the speaker. Starting out deep within the speaker's mind, the poem gradually expands to probe cosmic mysteries whose answers only come in the form of silence.

• Read the full text of “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”

The Full Text of “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”

1 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

2 And Mourners to and fro

3 Kept treading - treading - till it seemed

4 That Sense was breaking through -

5 And when they all were seated,

6 A Service, like a Drum -

7 Kept beating - beating - till I thought

8 My mind was going numb -

9 And then I heard them lift a Box

10 And creak across my Soul

11 With those same Boots of Lead, again,

12 Then Space - began to toll,

13 As all the Heavens were a Bell,

14 And Being, but an Ear,

15 And I, and Silence, some strange Race

16 Wrecked, solitary, here -

17 And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

18 And I dropped down, and down -

19 And hit a World, at every plunge,

20 And Finished knowing - then -

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” Summary

“i felt a funeral, in my brain” themes.

• See where this theme is active in the poem.

The Nature of Despair

The Irrational Universe

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “i felt a funeral, in my brain”.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro Kept treading - treading -

till it seemed That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum - Kept beating - beating -

till I thought My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box

Lines 10-12

And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

Lines 15-16

And I, and Silence, some strange Race Wrecked, solitary, here -

Lines 17-18

And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down -

Lines 19-20

And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing - then -

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” Symbols

• See where this symbol appears in the poem.

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• See where this poetic device appears in the poem.

Alliteration

Polysyndeton, stream of consciousness, parallelism, “i felt a funeral, in my brain” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”

Rhyme scheme, “i felt a funeral, in my brain” speaker, “i felt a funeral, in my brain” setting, literary and historical context of “i felt a funeral, in my brain”, more “i felt a funeral, in my brain” resources, external resources.

Biography of Dickinson — An extensive biography of Dickinson on the Poetry Foundation website.

Emily Dickinson Museum — Biographical information on Dickinson and other resources from the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.

Visual Interpretation of the Poem — An attempt to visualize the poem through stop-motion illustrations on a white board.

Dickinson's Original Manuscript — Photos of Dickinson's original handwritten manuscript, followed by scholarly excerpts about the poem.

A Reading of the Poem — A recitation of Dickinson's poem from Poetry Out Loud.

LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson

A Bird, came down the Walk

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –

A Light exists in Spring

A Murmur in the Trees—to note—

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

An awful Tempest mashed the air—

As imperceptibly as grief

A still—Volcano—Life—

Because I could not stop for Death —

Before I got my eye put out

Fame is a fickle food

Hope is the thing with feathers

I cannot live with You –

I cautious, scanned my little life

I could bring You Jewels—had I a mind to—

I did not reach Thee

I died for Beauty—but was scarce

I dreaded that first Robin, so

I dwell in Possibility –

If I can stop one heart from breaking

I had been hungry, all the Years

I have a Bird in spring

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

I like a look of Agony

I like to see it lap the Miles

I measure every Grief I meet

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

I started Early — Took my Dog —

I taste a liquor never brewed

It was not Death, for I stood up

I—Years—had been—from Home—

Like Rain it sounded till it curved

Much Madness is divinest Sense -

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun

Nature is what we see

One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted

Publication — is the Auction

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers

Success is counted sweetest

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

The Bustle in a House

The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants

There came a Wind like a Bugle

There is no Frigate like a Book

There's a certain Slant of light

There's been a Death, in the Opposite House

The saddest noise, the sweetest noise

The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean

The Soul has bandaged moments

The Soul selects her own Society

The Wind – tapped like a tired Man –

They shut me up in Prose –

This is my letter to the world

This World is not Conclusion

'Twas the old—road—through pain—

We grow accustomed to the Dark

What mystery pervades a well!

Whose cheek is this?

Wild nights - Wild nights!

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Personality — Emily Dickinson Personality

Emily Dickinson Personality

• Categories: Personality Poetry Women's Rights

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Words: 415 |

Published: Mar 16, 2024

Words: 415 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Introspective nature, fierce independence and nonconformity.

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Emily Dickinson Poetry Essay

Emily Dickinson’s poetry has been a source of inspiration for many people. Emily was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830 and died there on May 15, 1886. Emily wrote over 1800 poems during her life that were discovered by her sister Lavinia after Emily’s death. Emily publicly shared fewer than a dozen of these poems during her life. Emily wrote in a style of poetry called “fugitive poetry” which Emily used to express her feelings and emotions with the use of metaphors and imagery.

Emily’s poems were often about love, death, and immortality among other things Emily Dickinson considered important throughout her life. Emily was known for wearing white when she went out (due to an inherited condition that makes skin extra-sensitive to sunlight) and only saw family members when absolutely necessary; Emily also never married or had children. Emily is admired by many people today for her strong sense of self, her unique writing style, and ability to be herself without conforming to society’s norms.

Emily did not publish any more of her work after Emily was 22. Emily Dickinson’s poetry is still widely read today and Emily is considered one of the most significant poets in the English language. What Emily Dickinson’s poetry means to me: Emily Dickinson has inspired many people through her poems, with their clear imagery and powerful messages. Emily showed all people that they should not be afraid to be different, especially if they are confident in themselves like Emily was.

Emily lived out her life as she wanted by staying true to herself, writing what she felt without censoring herself, and keeping her inner circle tight-knit; this way of life truly resonates with me because I try to stay true to myself through my actions (not cutting class); words (I would never gossip about others); and the things I like (I only buy items that I really like or find necessary). Emily Dickinson’s poetry helps me stay strong in my beliefs and keep pushing forward because Emily showed all people, through her poems, that it is okay to be different.

Emily also taught me that everyone has a lesson to teach us if we are willing to listen; Emily’s lessons for me would be that you should not conform to society’s views of how you should act or dress, but rather do what makes YOU happy; another lesson Emily teaches is don’t underestimate yourself because great accomplishments can often come from those who are underestimated by others (such as Emily herself).

Her satirical approach to the subject of faith in “Faith” may have been a result of this strict religious upbringing. In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Success Is Counted Sweetest,” Emily Dickinson speaks to the people who are living in her time about how successful they are in life, but she warns them that true happiness is not found by seeking out worldly things. Emily discusses how success can be misleading because ultimately it does not bring you happiness and it can lead to sorrow and despair.

Emily’s message was for people who were becoming too caught up with success that they then became obsessed with money and power. Emily Dickinson uses enjambment throughout this poem by using run-on sentences so readers could follow along better with what she was trying to say. Emily Dickinson also uses sound devices through alliteration and assonance in this poem. Emily Dickinson’s rhythm is inconsistent throughout the poem which could be why she chose to use enjambment because Emily wanted readers to focus more on what she was saying instead of how it sounded when read aloud.

Emily Dickinson’s “Success Is Counted Sweetest” is a short, but powerful poem that discusses how success can bring you down if you are not smarter with your money and power. “I dwell in possibility” Emily Dickinson may have been speaking about her life specifically or possibly for everyone who struggles with depression or mental illness, although there is no evidence to prove either one without critical review of the entirety of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Emily Dickinson was often reclusive and spent most of her life in her room writing poetry, rarely socializing with anyone else.

Emily’s poem “I dwell in possibility” made it seem like Emily spent most of her time living in the past or possibly even the future because Emily speaks about dwelling on what has already taken place instead of focusing on what is taking place right then, which could be seen as strange for someone who wanted to live in the present. Emily Dickinson uses internal rhyme at the end of each stanza within this poem which helps make this poem flow more smoothly while also giving it a musical sound when read aloud.

Emily Dickenson’s rhythm is once again inconsistent throughout this poem; she changes the way the sentence is structured each time which keeps readers on their toes. Emily Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility” could be interpreted as Emily struggling to focus her energy on what was happening at that very moment instead of dwelling on what has already occurred. Emily could also be speaking metaphorically about living inside one’s own head and thoughts; Emily believed she was always thinking about things that she would never say out loud to anyone else because they were too personal.

Emily Dickinson uses an agricultural metaphor throughout the poem “A— twill live till it’s sere—” where Emily is talking about life but also referring to death, making this poem eerily somber. Emily Dickinson begins by describing how flowers are beautiful when they are in full bloom, but Emily speaks about how quickly these beautiful flowers turn brown and die which Emily views as tragic. Emily Dickinson then continues on with the agricultural metaphor by continuing to compare life to a flower.

Emily uses personification when she is talking about how “frost shall freeze the pretty flowers” making it seem like Emily believes that frost will actually intentionally kill these flowers. Emily goes on to say how there is nothing you can do once this has happened because the only way out of this is death; death is slow unlike nature where things move swiftly throughout Emily’s poem. Emily ends her poem with another personification saying “A— twill live till it’s sere—/ And yet not live—” Emily Dickinson’s “A twill live till it’s sere” is a poem where Emily speaks about life and death in an agricultural metaphor.

Emily Dickinson personifies nature by using words such as “frost” and “flowers” to make what Emily was saying seem more powerful because it makes you think, giving the reader time to contemplate Emily’s words. Emily Dickenson uses repetition throughout this poem which gives the reader a sense of suspense because Emily keeps bringing up death but never actually says that she is going to die at any moment in her poem.

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