Impact Of Emily Dickinson On Poetry

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Recommended: The role of Emily Dickinson in the development of American poetry

IMPACT OF EMILY DICKINSON ON POETRY

Impact of Emily Dickinson on Poetry
Minyue Dai
Shenzhen Middle School

? Emily Dickinson is an American poet, born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her aristocratic family provided high-quality education and living standard for her, but in fact she lived an isolated life in most years. According to Bianchi, Martha Dickinson, 1970, Emily Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Many of her poems relates to themes of immortality and nature, two recurring topics in letters …show more content…

According to I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain (Emily Dickinson), ?Then Space -- began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race.? This could be metaphoric of a ringing in the tellers? ears which can provide the unbearable affliction of headache. Sound is of specific importance in this poem, as the majority of the imagination used is aural. In the first part of this poem, this treading of that mourners can be visual symbol and also aural imagery. As the aural imagery in this lines exemplifies, sound is an essential part of what allows a poem to be ?living?. The music of poetry is part of what makes it an art form. In this poem, Dickinson uses a large number of poetic devices connected to sound to describe the feeling of a headache in terms of a funeral. Also, in ?My Mind was going numb -- And then I …show more content…

And creak across my Soul? (Dickinson), the word "creak" sounds as a creaking of the box, and works very effectively in describing a severe headache because every noise, every creak, is extreme and can feel like an excruciating pain. This technique is called onomatopoeia. Through several rhetorical devices, Dickinson uses the common rituals of a funeral to mark the stages of her mental collapse until she faces a destruction that no words can express. It is not a literal death or a death of the mind into a state of insanity, but rather a chosen separation from the things of the outside world. We might say that the poem is about transformation, moving from one state of existence to another; sanity to insanity, life to death, social to recluse. According to Stocks, Kenneth. 1988, it is strange to notice that although the poem begins with the "feeling" of a funeral in her brain, because there is no feeling on the part of the mourners. She is just narrowing a feeling in her heart, which is a mourner and is not. The ?death? in her poems is more like a mood, a balanced point in chaotic world of thinking. Morbidity associates with more about intrinsic analysis and description rather than life and

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