Emily Dickinson Poetry Analysis

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Recommended: emily dickinson poems compare and contrast

Joshua Blake Aldridge
5/7/14
American Literature (Section C02)
Essay #2
Dickinson’s poetry and life
Emily Dickinson was a polarizing author whose love live has intrigued readers for many years. Her catalog consists of many poems and stories but the one thing included in the majority of them is love. It is documented that she was never married but yet love is a major theme in a vast amount of her poetry. Was there a person that she truly loved but never had the chance to pursue? To better understand Emily Dickinson, one must look at her personal life, her poems, and her diction.
First, Emily Dickinson poems are often under scrutiny since she was never married. As a poet who wrote so intently about love but was never married, she had to have had some form of inspiration. The fact that she wrote several love poems but never married may have caused more people to look into her personal life and see what drove the women to write such poems. Early Dickinson biographers identified George Gould as a suitor who may have been briefly engaged to the poet in the 1850s (Emily Dickinson's Love Life). Her lady friendships, notably with schoolmate and sometime later sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert and with their mutual friend Catherine Scott Turner Anthon, have also drawn interest with anyone observing Dickinson’s life, who argue whether their friendships represent just a normal kind of friendship or maybe something more resembling that of a sexual relationship (Emily Dickinson's Love Life). Biographers have attempted to find the main source for her intensity in her love poems, but no biographer has been able to identify specifically who the inspiration was for Dickinson's love poems (http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/ED303/emilybio.htm...

... middle of paper ...

...fted them to be an experience and journey to the reader. Though the world may never know why she chose not to marry, her vast collection of love poems and her other poems of different matters is what she is remembered by and carry on her legacy of being one of the best poets of her generation.

Works Cited
"Emily Dickinson's Love Life." Www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org. Trustees of Amherst College, n.d. Web. 04 May 2014. .
Woodlief, Ann M. "Biography of Emily Dickinson." Http://www.vcu.edu/. Virginia Commonwealth University, n.d. Web. 04 May 2014. .
"Major Characteristics of Dickinson's Poetry." Http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/. Trustees of Amherst College, n.d. Web. 04 May 2014. .

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