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The use of language in emily dickinson poetry
The use of language in emily dickinson poetry
The use of language in emily dickinson poetry
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Emily Dickinson is a self-described "Nobody". Although she wrote thousands of poems, most of them were not published during her lifetime. Born in the 19th century, she was extremely well educated for a woman of her time, and she attended school from primary school up to her first year of college, when she ultimately left for unknown reasons. This allowed her to explore her love of the sciences and nature, especially botany. Despite having many friends, whom she kept in touch with through letters, she became a recluse during her later years, which scholars now suspect was caused by mental conditions such as agoraphobia, depression, or anxiety. However, her years of seclusion led to the creation of hugely imaginative and thought provoking poems. One type of figurative language that she uses often is hyperbole, such as in “I taste a liquor never brewed”, in which she exaggerates her love of nature by stating, “Inebriate of air—am I–/ And Debauchee of Dew—”(5-6). Her use of hyperbole highlights how wonderful she believes nature is. After all, one cannot really become drunk on air and dew, but the limitless and giddy way one feels while tipsy transfers to how she feels while appreciating the wonders nature. However, hyperboles are not the only kind of figurative language she uses. For example, in “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”, Emily Dickinson uses several types of figurative language when she compares hope to a songbird, when she writes, “And sore must Oftentimes, she capitalizes words to make them more important or shift their usual connotations. For instance, in her poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”, she infuses new meaning into a word when she exclaims, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (1). Ordinarily, the word ‘nobody’ has a negative connotation—after all, most people desire recognition and appreciation. However, Emily Dickinson renounces these desires and celebrates anonymity, which she clearly experienced during her period of reclusion. By capitalizing the word ‘nobody’, she implies that it is just as important as being ‘somebody’ and makes it more of a respectable title than a pitiful description. She views things from a different perspective, which shapes her insightful style. Similarly, in “Success is counted sweetest”, Dickinson gives importance to a concept through capitalization, when she says, “Not one of the purple Host/ Who took the Flag today/ Can tell the definition/ So clear of victory” (5-8). The ‘purple Host’ may refer to a highly ranked army because purple has come to represent royalty or nobility and the word ‘host’ is capitalized, stressing the group’s importance. However, Dickinson implies they do not really know what victory truly feels like despite ‘taking the Flag’, or winning the battle. The emphasis on the word ‘flag’ may represent the material success one may achieve through endless victories, but it does not
“Although Emily Dickinson is known as one of America’s best and most beloved poets, her extraordinary talent was not recognized until after her death” (Kort 1). Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she spent most of her life with her younger sister, older brother, semi-invalid mother, and domineering father in the house that her prominent family owned. As a child, she was curious and was considered a bright student and a voracious reader. She graduated from Amherst Academy in 1847, and attended a female seminary for a year, which she quitted as she considered that “’I [she] am [was] standing alone in rebellion [against becoming an ‘established Christian’].’” (Kort 1) and was homesick. Afterwards, she excluded herself from having a social life, as she took most of the house’s domestic responsibilities, and began writing; she only left Massachusetts once. During the rest of her life, she wrote prolifically by retreating to her room as soon as she could. Her works were influenced ...
Emily Dickinson was born December 10th, 1830 in her family home on main street in Amherst, Massachusetts to her two parents Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson. The homestead in which she was born was a family home owned by her grandparents who, soon after her sister’s birth in 1833, sold it out of the family. The Dickinson’s held residence in the home as tenants for the next seven years. Once her father’s political career took off, around the age she was nine, they moved to, and bought a new house in the same town. Dickinson was very close to her siblings, her older brother Austin and younger sister Lavinia. She had a strong attachment to her home and spent a lot of her time doing domestic duties such as baking and gardening. Dickinson also had good schooling experiences of a girl in the early nineteenth century. She started out her education in an Amherst district school, then from there she attended Amherst Academy with her sister for about seven years. At this school it is said that she was an extraordinary student with very unique writing talent. From there she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a year in 1847. this year was the longest she had spent away from home. In her youth, Dickinson displayed a social s...
By the mid- 1850’s, her mother became ill with plague for the rest of her life, so Dickinson confined herself to the house. At that time on, she was starting taking her poetry...
Emily Dickinson, who achieved more fame after her death, is said to be one of the greatest American poets of all time. Dickinson communicated through letters and notes and according to Amy Paulson Herstek, author of “Emily Dickinson: Solitary and Celebrated Poet,” “Writing was the way she kept in touch with the world” (15). Dickinson’s style is unique and although unconventional, it led to extraordinary works of literature. Dickinson lived her life in solitude, but in her solitude she was free to read, write and think which led to her nonconformity and strong sense of individualism. Suzanne Juhasz, a biographer of Dickinson, sums up most critics’ idea of Dickinson ideally: “Emily Dickinson is at once the most intimate of poets, and the most guarded. The most self-sufficient, and the neediest. The proudest, and the most vulnerable. These contradictions, which we as her readers encounter repeatedly in her poems, are understandable, not paradoxical, for they result from the tension between the life to which she was born and the one to which she aspired” (1). Dickinson poured her heart and soul into over 1,700
In conclusion, it can be stated the examples of Emily Dickinson's work discussed in this essay show the poetess to be highly skilled in the use of humor and irony. The use of these two tools in her poems is to stress a point or idea the poetess is trying to express, rather than being an end in themselves. These two tools allow her to present serious critiques of her society and the place she feels she has been allocated into by masking her concerns in a light-hearted, irreverent tone.
Emily Dickinson is one of the great visionary poets of nineteenth century America. In her lifetime, she composed more poems than most modern Americans will even read in their lifetimes. Dickinson is still praised today, and she continues to be taught in schools, read for pleasure, and studied for research and criticism. Since she stayed inside her house for most of her life, and many of her poems were not discovered until after her death, Dickinson was uninvolved in the publication process of her poetry. This means that every Dickinson poem in print today is just a guess—an assumption of what the author wanted on the page. As a result, Dickinson maintains an aura of mystery as a writer. However, this mystery is often overshadowed by a more prevalent notion of Dickinson as an eccentric recluse or a madwoman. Of course, it is difficult to give one label to Dickinson and expect that label to summarize her entire life. Certainly she was a complex woman who could not accurately be described with one sentence or phrase. Her poems are unique and quite interestingly composed—just looking at them on the page is pleasurable—and it may very well prove useful to examine the author when reading her poems. Understanding Dickinson may lead to a better interpretation of the poems, a better appreciation of her life’s work. What is not useful, however, is reading her poems while looking back at the one sentence summary of Dickinson’s life.
The very first line proclaims the intense metaphor of books sustaining life. By equating words to food, or something worthy of consumption, Dickinson creates an idea of literature essential to the continuation of human life. The capitalization of the word “Words” lends itself to the idea of words as their own entity, and as something with more substance than merely the words themselves. Continuing to the next line, the theme of words as food persists. The connotations of the word robust are most commonly well-fed and vigorous, so the point the narrator makes is the nourishment of the spirit can only literature can facilitate. By
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.
Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m Nobody! Who are You?” and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory,” both address a simple, and very human drive: the desire to be “somebody”. Though both poets are, in essence, talking about the same thing, they do so in very different ways. Dickinson addresses the issue more directly, describing how much more favorable it is to be a nobody; while Robinson attacks this issue from the side, by describing the life of a somebody (Richard Cory). However, both poets come down on the same side of the issue, that is, that being a “somebody” is rife with problems and is likely more trouble that it is worth.
In her poetry, Dickinson used figurative language to convey the mood of the poem. Her use of
Emily Dickinson was affected by her life for several reasons. One of the reasons was that she was never married, though she went through many serious relationships, she never settled down.
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...
In Marianne’s case she uses all types of figurative language to support the tone she aims to
In Dickinson, ‘’Who are you?’’ shows she is proud of being a nobody and not being in the "crowd". She explains this when she says, “Are you – nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell the story, don’t tell!
This use of irony makes the poem more interesting to the reader. Imagery is a big component of most works of poetry. Authors strive to achieve a certain image for the reader to paint in their mind. Dickinson tries to paint a picture of?death? in her own words,.