How Did Emily Dickinson Influence Her Poetry

Emily Dickinson is well known for writing poems about subjects that were very personal and relatable to her life and producing a vibrant image to intensify it. Most of her poetry consists of themes regarding death, love, nature, religion, and success. Before, these themes were rarely brought up in American literature. Researchers argue that the themes Dickinson wrote of were too controversial to profess at the time, therefore her contemporaries simply chose to neglect these topics and hoped to appeal to their audience in writing material of a less dense nature (Emily Dickinson's Influence on Modern Writers Topic of Book). Dickinson is thought to be rebellious to include the themes she did and write in a way that generated rich images, although she never did intend her poems to be
American poets in present times such as Charles Wright have adopted similar images Dickinson forms in her own poetry. An American literature professor from Harvard points out that Wright’s central image, a striking light during the evening in “A Journal of the Year of the Ox”, resembles the same image Dickinson produces in her poem, “There’s a certain Slant of light” (Emily Dickinson's Influence on Modern Writers Topic of Book). Through her openness in writing, Dickinson has encouraged other American poets to tear away from the norms and write about themes that are seldom addressed or of content in direct relation to their lives.
Another characteristic that sticks out in Dickinson’s work is her original punctuation and unique syntax in the poems she wrote. As for punctuation, in the majority of her poems, she puts dashes rather than a more expected mark like a period, comma, parentheses, or a colon. While the reasons might not be entirely clear for her frequent use of dashes, it’s thought of as a technique to indicate an interruption or an abrupt shift in thought, to emphasize a feeling, or to keep a sense of indecisiveness (Emily Dickinson: