Emily Dickinson has a characteristic writing style. Dickinson’s use of dashes and “randomly” placed capital letters throughout her work give her a unique style that is contradictory to her time. Many believe that it was her genius that caused this while still others believes it was her illness that contributed to her characteristic writing style. Lyndall Gordon's biography “offers a major revelation: evidence that Dickinson suffered from epilepsy. The author makes her case partly through prescriptions that Dickinson received (the papers still survive) and reinterprets poems such as "I felt a Cleaving in my Mind" to describe the poet's condition. She writes that ‘sickness is a more sensible reason for seclusion than disappointed love.’ Epilepsy carried a stigma, and Gordon explains that because diagnosis was ‘rarely uttered, still less put on paper, there's little chance of explicit evidence’” (Ciuraru). “Gordon makes a persuasive case for the link between epilepsy's visual and cerebral distortions and Dickinson's extraordinary language” (Showalter). By examining the imagery, diction, symbolism and tone in the poems “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain”, “I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind” and “Pain”, the reader can decipher the characteristics of Emily’s illness brought out in her writing.
Through the use of imagery, diction and symbolism in these three poems, the reader can get a sense of the pain and distraught that Dickinson may have felt because of her illness. In “I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind” the speaker talks of how “my Brain had split” (2). The word “Brain” (2) is capitalized to add emphasis on the word. To have one’s brain “split” (2) gives the illusion of one’s brain actually being rendered in two. To have this actually happen wou...
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...is experiencing. Pain is described as “an Element of Blank” (1). “Blank” is nothingness. “It cannot recollect” (2), it cannot remember a time when it was not there. It is difficult and hard to live with. The speaker cannot remember “When it begun-Or if there were/ A time when it was not-“(3-4). The illness has become such a part of the speaker’s life, she cannot remember a time when it did not occur. The speaker “has no Future” (5) with the pain of the illness. The illusion of infinity with the illness and pain is given and reiterated in the next line with “It’s Infinite contain-“(6). The only future the speaker has is “New Periods- Of Pain” (8). Because all the words are capitalized the reader is given the feeling of finality. That this is all there is, nothing more than pain. The dash causes the reader to pause and digest this information and the finality of it.
The dash in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, initially edited away as a sign of incompletion, has since come to be seen as crucial to the impact of her poems. Critics have examined the dash from a myriad of angles, viewing it as a rhetorical notation for oral performance, a technique for recreating the rhythm of a telegraph, or a subtraction sign in an underlying mathematical system.1 However, attempting to define Dickinson’s intentions with the dash is clearly speculative given her varied dash-usage; in fact, one scholar illustrated the fallibility of one dash-interpretation by applying it to one of Dickinson’s handwritten cake recipes (Franklin 120). Instead, I begin with the assumption that “text” as an entity involving both the reading and writing of the material implies a reader’s attempt to recreate the act of writing as well as the writer’s attempt to guide the act of reading. I will focus on the former, given the difficulties surrounding the notion of authorial intention a.k.a. the Death of the Author. Using three familiar Dickinson poems—“The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” “The Soul selects her own Society,” and “This was a Poet—It is that,”—I contend that readers can penetrate the double mystery of Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life and lyrically dense poetry by enjoying a sense of intimacy not dependent upon the content of her poems. The source of this intimacy lies in her remarkable punctuation. Dickinson’s unconventionally-positioned dashes form disjunctures and connections in the reader’s understanding that create the impression of following Dickinson through the creative process towards intimacy with the poet herself.
“Because I could not stop for death,” is a poem written by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson. Dickinson’s style of writing is very different from other poets. She writes down what comes to mind and doesn’t focus her attention on the grammatical errors she has in her poem. She writes in prose, uses many hyphens, and has unconventional punctuations. This, however, is what makes Emily stand out from other poets. Throughout the poem, Dickinson uses free verse, and doesn’t have a pattern of rhyme or meter and most of the lines begin with an unstressed syllable. The last line of each stanza is always short and to the point. Dickinson uses alliteration, as well as, imagery in her poem. Dickinson portrays that although death is a natural stage in one’s life, it is not the end of one’s journey, but a new beginning.
Though in her life she isolated herself from the world, Emily Dickinson has allowed every one of her readers the opportunity to view her most intimate thoughts. Her poems offer insight to her feelings of disassociation from other people, which seem to be a cry for understanding. Her syntax and grammar suggest that she was, indeed, different from everyone else. In "They shut me up in Prose--," Dickinson expresses her longing to be understood.
Emily Dickinson wrote hundreds of short poems in her lifetime. Having read only a very small percentage of her work, it’s clear to me the recognized genius of this woman is well deserved, and that I have more to learn from her. Dickinson’s poetry touches of life, death, nature, religion, sexuality, identity, gender roles, and that’s just the surface.
The life led by Emily Dickinson was one secluded from the outside world, but full of color and light within. During her time she was not well known, but as time progressed after her death more and more people took her works into consideration and many of them were published. Dickinson’s life was interesting in its self, but the life her poems held, changed American Literature. Emily Dickinson led a unique life that emotionally attached her to her writing and the people who would read them long after she died.
Shynn Felarca Mrs. Cox English Honors-Period 5 Due Date: 20 November 2015 Emily Elizabeth Dickinson A while back there were many poems and poets. Like Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, a romantic poet who put many deep meanings behind her poems, even if her poems were all mostly about death. When she was alive she was an unknown poet, but throughout the years she became well known.
The famous well-known poet, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Growing up, she was busy with schooling, religious activities, gardening, baking, and exploring nature. Her family was well known in Massachusetts; her dad was a member of the governor’s cabinet and a US Congressman. In 1840, she attended Amherst Academy. At Amherst Academy, she was an excellent student. Many said she caught much attention and was very original in the way she presented herself. Dickinson’s poetry has a great amount of scientific vocabulary and she gained most of her knowledge about it at this academy. Seven years later, she enrolled in Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. At Mount Holyoke, she was academically successful and was very involved. Like most institutions at the time, Mount Holyoke believed that the students’ religious lives were part of responsibility. Dickinson refused to take part of the school’s Christian evangelical efforts. She had not given up on the claims of Christ, but didn’t think it was an important matter.
Emily Dickinson is one of the most well known poets of her time. Though her life was outwardly uneventful, what went on inside her house behind closed doors is unbelievable. After her father died she met Reverend Charles Wadsworth. She soon came to regard him as one of her most trusted friends, and she created in his image the “lover'; whom she was never to know except in her imagination. It is also said that it was around 1812 when he was removed to San Fransico that she began her withdrawal from society. During this time she began to write many of her poems. She wrote mainly in private, guarding all of her poems from all but a few select friends. She did not write for fame, but instead as a way of expressing her feelings. In her lifetime only six of her poems were even printed; none of which had her consent. It was not until her death of Brights Disease in May of 1862, that many of her poems were even read (Chelsea House of Library Criticism 2837). Thus proving that the analysis on Emily Dickinson’s poetry is some of the most emotionally felt works of the nineteenth century.
Observations: Upon first glance, many literary elements popped out at me. To begin, it was obvious that, in typical Dickinson fashion, there were many dashes. These dashes are used to indicate an interruption or abrupt shift in thought and to add emphasis. More importantly, they are there to remind the reader to stop and take a longer pause to reflect back on what was trying to be said at that point within the poem. These dashes, from simply looking at the poem, also interrupt the rhythmic flow and help lend a hand in helping Dickinson create a unique form of diction. Alliteration is also a key element throughout this poem as there are many ‘s’, ‘w’, and ‘f’ sounds. For example, there is line within the poem that says, “When One died for Truth, was lain…” With this, there is a continuous “w” sound rolling off of the tongue. Assonance is also noticed throughout the poem in that Dickinson uses ‘oo’ sounds with the words beauty, tomb, who, truth, and room. In terms of rhyme and meter, the poem is set with a fixed rhyme pattern that took the form of ABCB. There are also many moments throughout the poem in which words are randomly capitalized. Although they look as if they were capitalized sporadically and without thought, these words were written this way to place emphasis upon the meaning of the words and the messages behind them. The structure of this poem (and most of Dickinson’s poems for that matter) is a closed or fixed form dealing with four line stanzas, or quatrains. Figures of speech used, just by observing the poem, were metaphors, personification, and metonymy. For example, this whole poem focuses on death and truth – two things that are ‘intangible’ objects without life to them. Yet, Dickinson portrays them in a way in wh...
In Dickinson’s poem, she used the speaker to connect to the toll of performance on the self and the mind as seen through the perceptive presented in Sandra Runzo’s paper. Just as she uses in many of her poems, in her poem, “I FELT a Cleaving in my Mind,” Dickinson uses images of the mind and self to connect to the disconnection Dickinson may have felt in her own life. Another aspect of the poem is the performance to maintain this appearance of a “woman” and slowly losing a part of one’s self and mind the more time a person puts on a performance that is not of their true selves. Runzo discusses in “Dickinson’s Transgressive Body” that Dickinson, “in imitation of the body’s transcendence of culturally imposed limits, spaces of confinement permute
Dickinson’s Christian education affected her profoundly, and her desire for a human intuitive faith motivates and enlivens her poetry. Yet what she has faith in tends to be left undefined because she assumes that it is unknowable. There are many unknown subjects in her poetry among them: Death and the afterlife, God, nature, artistic and poetic inspiration, one’s own mind, and other human beings.
One of Emily Dickinson’s greatest skills is taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. In this sense, she reshapes how her readers view her subjects and the meaning that they have in the world. She also has the ability to assign a word to abstractness, making her poems seemingly vague and unclear on the surface. Her poems are so carefully crafted that each word can be dissected and the reader is able to uncover intense meanings and images. Often focusing on more gothic themes, Dickinson shows an appreciation for the natural world in a handful of poems. Although Dickinson’s poem #1489 seems disoriented, it produces a parallelism of experience between the speaker and the audience that encompasses the abstractness and unexpectedness of an event.
Reading the poetry and letters Dickinson has written, it is easy to feel her seclusion and apprehensiveness to be alone. Dommermuth also says that Dickinson would probably have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder known as "agoraphobia" but at the time doctors labeled it as "female nerves." Even so, whatever went on in the mind of Emily Dickinson in turn created poems that are not only beautiful to read, but even more beautiful to understand. "Her seclusion contributed to h...
The average reader cannot help but be affected by Dickinson’s style. The capitalized words draw the reader’s attention. They highlight important key words of the poem. The dashes set apart specific words and phrases, forcing the reader to slow down while reading. The dashes compel the reader to contemplate and ponder over the lines. Thus, whether or not Dickinson had a conscious purpose in her unconventional capitalization and punctuation, they have an undeniable effect on the rhythm of the poem and the perception of the reader.
Guthrie, James R. Emily Dickinson's Vision: Illness and Identity in Her Poetry. Gainesville: University of Florida, 1998. Print.