A poem is a piece of writing that partakes of the nature of both speech and song that is nearly always rhythmical, usually metaphorical, and often exhibits such formal elements as meter, rhyme, and stanzaic structure. Emily Dickinson, a very established poet of the nineteenth-century, used this style of writing to express feelings toward religion, love, and death. All of her inspiration came from these things that would impact her life dearly.
Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts where she would spend her childhood and adolescent years living. She graduated from Amherst Academy in 1847 and then attended nearby Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for one year. Growing up Dickinson set herself apart from all the other girls at school. She would travel around with her family soon after school taking in what the world had to offer. Some authors speculate that Dickinson lived a very dull and solitary life while one 20th century critic disagrees. He wrote in an article, “All pity for Miss Dickinson’s ‘starred life’ is misdirected. Her life was one of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent” (Brand). After settling down back home the young Dickinson would get to work. The years of 1861-1865 would become known as her writing years. Poetry in these years would be her primary focus producing over 600 poems. “If taken out of her social and political context, Emily appears as a rare poet who came on the scene fully formed to literary tradition” (Brand). Not many authors connected to Dickinson’s work but those that did found it to be truly remarkable. Many readers feel that she wrote on experiences throughout her life. One author said, “Dickinson suffered three great deprivations of her life: of a lover, of publication and fame, and of a God in whom she could believe” (Bond). Dickinson talks of this in most of her poem, along with death.
“Her entire body of work may be interpreted as a rebellion against the structures and dictates of Puritanism” (Petrino). Dickinson was born into a Puritan family which shaped her background and approach to the world. She denounced her religion and became subject to her own values. In earlier years while attending school Dickinson refused the opportunity to become baptized and profess her faith in God while in school. Dickinson seemed more interested in her own personal beliefs rather than Godly beliefs. She saw her beliefs around her in the world and nature in the form of art. Although Dickinson never professed to our lord and savior she still included Christological elements in her poetry. Many critics feel that this was only to add depth to her poetry or even a way of comparing her own morals to Christian beliefs. In Dickinson’s poem, “South in Dis Honor”, she makes a statement pertaining to the New Testament. “Dickinson’s tone is decidedly irreverent, making a play of doctrine for poetry,” Linda Freedman says of this (Bartel). Dickinson felt that there was no God. In her poem, “I Never Saw a Moor” it mentions that “Dickinson has never seen God or a glimpse of heaven, yet she is so sure of it” (Perrine’s 797). Dickinson only did this to add a sense of perplexing context to contrast her own thoughts and beliefs. Despite all of hints that God is real, she still conveys in her poetry a continuous strain of doubt that there is no God. “When it comes to Dickinson’s studies, however, the conversation about religion and theology is fraught with caveats and uncertainties,” according to Freedman (Bartel). This aspect of contrasting her life with her poetry will always remain a facet that made Dickinson a prevailing poet.
Dickinson’s love life was not very enthralling. It was because of this lack of love and her desire for it that she wrote about in her works. Dickinson wrote many poems on the topic of love or pertaining to it in some way. Dickinson lived life on the emotional level with great intensity. “When Dickinson desires to describe what she has found to be of supreme worth in the drama of living, and of supreme importance in how we should approach a proper understanding of the relation between the created world and divine transcendence, she employs the term love” (Hughes). For Dickinson love was the ultimate experience and metaphorical value. During her five year span of producing most of her poetry biographers believe Dickinson fell in with Reverend Mr. Charles Wadsworth; however, this love would not be fulfilled. Dickinson sought a truth in love to which she plays out into a reality to get an absolute value. Dickinson once said that, “Love is anterior to Life, Posterior to Death, Initial of Creation, and The Exponent of Earth” (Hughes). What she experienced in love is what we read about and what she displays in her works. The lack of fulfillment for love in her life shined throughout her poems. In her poem “The Love a Life can show Below”, Dickinson entices the reader and uses cascading verbs to show that love has an overwhelming importance for the self. “In poem after poem Dickinson identifies love as the highest realization of our positive relation to transcendence” (Hughes). One may also find how Dickinson describes her most dreadful and gratifying experiences which usually deal with love. She unveiled her passion through intense words and treated love with great sincerity. In many of her poems one may conclude that this infatuation with love comes from a pain, deprivation, or emotional numbness from it. She searched for love throughout her poems giving one the reason to formulate the idea that writing was what she truly loved and felt no man could fulfill this love like writing.
Along with religion and love, death was a key topic in many of Dickinson’s works. In many of her poems she describes death as a paramour, yet a tyrant. “Death was the object of fear, and yet it was a blessed way into Heaven- the ultimate release” (Kreidler). Dickinson’s writing years took place during the Civil War and her profound fascination with death can be attributed to this, but “more likely it was the deaths of members of her family that had a greater significance for her in the contemplation of mortality” (Kreidler). All these things made clear her close relationship with death and suffering. It was after this that Dickinson really found a habit for writing about death. After the death of her family members something inside her sparked and she became consumed by it. In her poem “I Could Not Stop for Death”, Dickinson speaks of passing on into eternal life form the temporal life. In her later years death would become the symbol in many of her poems. She refused to see visitors more frequently and rarely left her house. Many of her beloved readers feel that this was a time in which Dickinson felt she was nearing the end and that with the death of her loved ones she could no longer take it. Writing helped her ease her way through all of this and would eventually be her own escape into death.
“Dickinson’s poetry provides a record of her responses to a world she found at times alluring but which she ultimately disapproved as deeply flawed and indeed alarming” (Wolosky). Her dense and vivid poetry rendered emotions and observations. She transformed the paucity of her life into the richness of her inner life. Her life was a perplexing puzzle to many critics; however, it is plastered with religion, love, and death in every poem she has ever written. Her reclusion is the riveting central counter event of her life. It is because of this reclusion that one gets to see her work on such a broad spectrum. Dickinson truly earned her spot as one of America’s greatest poets.