Preview

Emily Dickinson's Poetry in Relation to Society

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1237 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Emily Dickinson's Poetry in Relation to Society
<center><b>Q: Poetry texts are powerful indicators of society's values. Discuss with reference to two or more poems.</b></center>
<br>
<br>Emily Dickinson's poetry powerfully indicates values of society of the time. It does this through its conciseness, its simplicity and its control. Indications of society's values are seen in many of Dickinson's poems, but they are especially noticeable in ‘It was not Death', and ‘Because I could not stop for Death'. In Dickinson's poem ‘It was not Death', she demonstrates how restricting and stereotyping society can be on an individual, and how society values the conformity of the whole community, even though they may not want to. In Dickinson's poem ‘Because I could not stop for Death', she is questioning society's values on religion and everlasting life.
<br>
<br>Emily Dickinson's poems analyse her perception of the world and society, which is different to that of the commonly accepted, objective perception. The reader sees this perception in her poem ‘It was not Death', where Emily appears to perceive a world full of confusion and chaos. She also observes that society tries to place people into stereotypes, and feels that she herself is restricted to one.
<br>
<br>The Figures I have seen
<br>Set orderly, for Burial,
<br>Reminded me, of mine –
<br>
<br>Dickinson shows in these lines that her own life reflects that of a dead persons – it appears to be a living thing, but lacks something that makes it alive. It seems that life is a conventional pattern, and she is conformed in society just like the people in the coffins. She resents the way that in her society people were heavily placed into stereotypes.
<br>
<br>As if my life were shaven,
<br>And fitted to a frame
<br>
<br>These lines express Dickinson's thoughts about the restrictions of her life in her society. The fact that her life was ‘shaven' seems to give the image of being cut down to size with a razor to fit her frame, and this is a very sharp image. It also seems to

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson is unquestionably one of the most significant, innovative, and renowned American poets. She did not always receive such high praise, however, as most of her fame and honor was obtained long after she died. While she was alive, she lived most of her life isolated from society as a recluse. During this reclusion, however, she wrote almost eighteen hundred poems, and one of these included “Because I could not stop for Death” (Mays 1187). This is one of her most popular poems and that is in part because it allows the audience to analyze the topic of death and the struggle to come to grip with one’s own demise. The concept of Death is humanized within this poem. “He” is portrayed as a groom and a conductor, as much as he is a robber…

    • 1217 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dickinson’s poems use a stunning array of literary elements in order to reinforce the paradoxical nature of their purpose. These purposes range from a denouncement of religion and God, to her complex feelings towards death, to Dickinson’s declaration of her self-sufficiency and independence from society. “The Soul selects her own Society –“ is a Dickinson poem that conveys all three of these purposes. Using the literary elements and devices of religion, individualism, skepticism, sensory depictions, and body parts, Dickinson’s speaker in “The Soul Selects her own Society –“ boldly declares their feelings towards independence, society, and religion.…

    • 947 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson seems to be in dismay, contain grief, be confused, and even jealous that it wasn't her or another that died in the woman's place. With all of these emotions in place, Justin Bryant’s note seems appropriate. He noted, “"The speaker never has one solid and stated attitude toward the woman's death". She switches her attitudes back and forth throughout the poem in her utter confusion.…

    • 587 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Michael Salvucci Mrs. Comeau English 10 Honors Death, Pain, and the Pursuit of Peace Although Emily Dickinson’s poetry is profoundly insightful, her poems have a very confinedpan of subjects and themes. Most likely due to her early life and social reclusion, Dickinson’s poetry is limited to three major subjects: death, pain, and on a somewhat lighter note, nature. Dickinson’s poetry is greatly influenced by her early life as she led an extremely secluded and pessimisticlife. In her early adult years the poet spent one year studying at female seminary, from 1847 to 1848. Dickinson’s blunt pessimistic attitude is shown in a letter, written to a friend, as she says “I am not happy…Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, and I am standing alone in rebellion.” (Meltzer 20-21) The poets self-described rebellious manner can be acclaimed to her residence featuring many politically active and dominant men, as her brother, father and grandfather were all attorneys with interest in politics. Again in a letter to a friend written during a political convention, Dickinson wonders “why can’t [she] be a delegate in the convention?” as she says “[she] knows all about the tariff and the law.” (Sewall 64-65) She recognizes the gender barrier in society and as a result Dickinson develops a unique style of poetry. Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality. (Lines 1-4) The speaker’s use of the word ‘kindly’ to describe death exemplifies his civil and considerate manner, but is his courteous character an illusion? Later in the poem the speaker writes: We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put away My labor, and my leisure too, For his civility. (4-8) Because of death’s kindness in stopping for the speaker, she “put[s] away / [her] labor, and [her] leisure too,” (5-6), is death being true in taking her to heaven, or is he betraying her? There interposed a fly (9-12)…

    • 978 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson Pros/Cons

    • 1484 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In poetry, Dickinson is often fascinated by nature, death, pain, love and God. In her poems Dickinson often speaks elliptically. That said, when reading Dickinson's poems, we must dot the I's and cross the T's that we think are not L's. We must make our own interpretation because Emily would not have wanted us to interpret them at all. This is where the window is open to much criticism that maybe a pro or con to how others view Dickinson and her work. This is where we unknowingly hyperbolae words or phrases that should be litotilate.…

    • 1484 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson, a chief figure in American literature, wrote hundreds of poems in her lifetime using unusual syntax and form. Several if not all her poems revolved around themes of nature, illness, love, and death. Dickinson’s poem, Because I could not stop for Death, a lyric with a jarring volta conflates several themes with an air of ambiguity leaving multiple interpretations open for analysis. Whether death is a lover and immortality their chaperone, a deceiver and seducer of the speaker to lead her to demise, or a timely truth of life, literary devices such as syntax, selection of detail, and diction throughout the poem support and enable these different understandings to stand alone.…

    • 113 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson’s main purpose in poem 355 is to describe an indefinable depression. She creates a melancholy persona to depict the chaos and despair she feels because of her condition. Her poem is structured around her uncertainty towards her mental state. Dickinson, in the first two stanzas, eliminates possibilities to what she may be feeling. She analyzes that “it was not death”, “it was not night”, “it was not frost”, “nor fire”. The poem appeals to the human sense of touch, as Dickinson compares tangible sensations that the body normally experiences to her tumultuous emotions. In the third stanza, Dickinson synthesizes all of the possibilities she eradicated in the previous two stanzas, ominously stating that her condition “tasted like them all”. The narrator is unable to distinguish her feelings from one another, leading the reader to conclude that she is in a chaotic state of mind. She compares her condition to a funeral, both of which evoke death. In the fourth stanza, Dickinson continues to explore her persona’s dark psyche. The narrator experiences terror and despair to the point where she “could not breathe.” Her only “key” to escape this punishment is to be able to understand what she is feeling and why…

    • 518 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In the second stanza Emily explains the woman’s slow ride. She expresses this in the line “We slowly drove He knew no haste.” Dickinson describes how death’s politeness makes the woman step back from everything keeping her busy. Dickinson shows this in the lines “And I had to put away my labor and my leisure too, for his civility.”…

    • 469 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dickinson and Her Religion

    • 1078 Words
    • 5 Pages

    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.…

    • 1078 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson was a 19th century poet from Massachusetts who did not become famous until decades after her death. Looking back at her poetry, she was especially infatuated with death and religion. It would make perfect sense then that her poetry was influenced greatly by her own feelings of depression and loneliness. Emily Dickinson’s work is unique because of the poetic devices she uses, like irony, symbolism, connotation, imagery, and personification, and the recurring themes of death, religion, and nature. The following poems are related because they all share Dickinson’s common literary devices and themes.…

    • 1251 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson's poetry can be seen as a study of deep fears and emotions, specifically in her exploration of death. In her famous poem #465 Dickinson explores the possibility of a life without the elaborate, finished ending that her religious upbringing promised her. She forces herself to question whether there is a possibility of death being a mundane nothingness. In this last moment of doubt in the appearance of the divine, the speaker in the poem find an independent and personal acceptance of a death without profundity or salvation.…

    • 1539 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the first stanza, Dickinson personifies death as a benevolent suitor, who has come to guide her on a journey from life to afterlife. She clearly welcomes death, and is unafraid of leaving her mortal life behind perhaps because as a woman, Dickinson was unattached to the world as she did not have a lover, and lived an extremely reclusive life. Therefore ending her life on earth was not a worry to her but rather something she received gladly. Death is personified in this stanza as Dickinson makes 'Death' a noun, she goes on to give him human characteristics such as 'kindly stopping' for the persona. Since she did not have the ability to die by her own will, she was glad when death came to meet her. The fact that he pays special attention to her by coming to meet her in a 'carriage' furthers his presentation as a suitor, perhaps the one Dickinson never acquired during her lifetime. The inevitability of dying is shown by use of punctuation with a full stop after 'Immortality' despite the lack of punctuation present in the rest of the stanza. This makes the reader realise that death will meet everyone, and it is our reaction to death which may make our journey into the afterlife…

    • 1663 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson is regarded as one of the greatest American female poets. Although Emily Dickinson wrote about death in many of her works, she often times wrote about it in peculiar ways such as death as being eternal and continuous but also immortality as a state of consciousness can be seen in her poem, "Because I could not stop for Death-“.…

    • 551 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Once you're faced with losing your life even the smallest things become meaningful. All of the sudden when dying the meaning to life becomes important. As the woman was grasping her last hours on earth and seizing each moment other people were going on living, as if the day meant nothing because they had so much more of life to live. It was just a regular ordinary day to them, but to her it was everything. When Dickinson uses the phrase, "As We went out and in Between Her final Room And Room Where those alive," She is saying in other words as the woman lived her final hours, everyone else was still alive.…

    • 573 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson Belonging

    • 914 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Dickinson scrutinized the inextricable links between orthodoxy, the formation of an individual’s identity and the agonizing paradox of belonging. This can be seen in “I had been hungry” which demonstrates the persona’s desire for acknowledgement and her Asceticism. “I looked in windows for the wealth, I could not hope for mine”, appears to be an anguished cry for inclusion and indicates her envy when looking in at those who have a sense of belonging. though she finally acknowledges that while communion with others is tempting, she would lose too much of her natural self by conforming. The words, “Nor was I hungry, so I found”, reflects her longing to sample the bounty having been satisfied by her lack of hunger, she ironically returns to her solitary subsistence and inured to hard ships. In a similar manner, Dickinson’s “ I gave myself to him” also reveals her thoughts on her sense of belonging. Through the despondency of her words, “Myself a poorer prove”, the use of alliteration stresses a sense of disillusionment and discontent that she does not belong dueperhaps to her inadequacy – or even her paradoxical reluctance to belong.. The enrichment or limitation of the experience of belonging is depicted in the work of Dickinson. Unpack the words of the question to show how Dickinson’s poetry really reflects her…

    • 914 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays