What makes emily dickinson an american poet

Dickinson most often punctuated her poems with dashes, rather than the more expected array of periods, commas, and other punctuation marks. She also capitalized interior words, not just words at the beginning of a line. Her reasons are not entirely clear.

In addition, the dash was liberally used by many writers, as correspondence from the mid-nineteenth-century demonstrates. While Dickinson was far from the only person to employ it, she may have been the only poet to depend upon it.

Dickinson may also have intended for the dashes to indicate pauses when reading the poem aloud. Sometimes words with radically different meanings are suggested as possible alternatives. Emily Dickinson left school as a teenager, eventually living a reclusive life on the family homestead.

There, she secretly created bundles of poetry and wrote hundreds of letters. Due to a discovery by sister Lavinia, Dickinson's remarkable work was published after her death — on May 15, , in Amherst — and she is now considered one of the towering figures of American literature.

Dickinson was born on December 10, , in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her family had deep roots in New England. Her paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was well known as the founder of Amherst College. Her father worked at Amherst and served as a state legislator. Dickinson ultimately never joined a particular church or denomination, steadfastly going against the religious norms of the time. Dickinson began writing as a teenager. In , Dickinson ventured outside of Amherst, as far as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

There, she befriended a minister named Charles Wadsworth, who would also become a cherished correspondent. Among her peers, Dickinson's closest friend and adviser was a woman named Susan Gilbert, who may have been an amorous interest of Dickinson's as well. In , Gilbert married Dickinson's brother, William.

The Dickinson family lived on a large home known as the Homestead in Amherst. After their marriage, William and Susan settled in a property next to the Homestead known as the Evergreens. Emily and sister Lavinia served as chief caregivers for their ailing mother until she passed away in Neither Emily nor her sister ever married and lived together at the Homestead until their respective deaths.

The first line is as arresting an opening as one could imagine. By describing the moment of her death, the speaker lets you know she has already died.

In the third stanza, attention shifts back to the speaker, who has been observing her own death with all the strength of her remaining senses. Already growing detached from her surroundings, she is no longer interested in material possessions; instead she leaves behind whatever people can treasure and remember.

She is getting ready to guide herself towards death. Flying between the light and her, it seems to both signal the moment of death and represent the world that she is leaving. She is both distancing fear and revealing her detachment from life.

The blank quality serves to blot out the origin of the pain and the complications that pain brings. The second stanza insists that such suffering is aware only of its continuation.

Its present is an infinity, which remains exactly like the past. This infinity, and the past, which it reaches back to, are aware only of an indefinite future of suffering. The complete poem can be divided into two parts: the first twelve lines and the final eight lines.

Eberwein 89 It starts by emphatically affirming that there is a world beyond death which we cannot see but which we still can understand intuitively, as we do music.

Lines four through eight introduce conflict. Immortality is attractive but puzzling. Her faith now appears in the form of a bird that is searching for reasons to believe. But available evidence proves as irrelevant as twigs and as indefinite as the directions shown by a spinning weathervane. The desperation of a bird aimlessly looking for its way is analogous to the behavior of preachers whose gestures and hallelujahs cannot point the way to faith. Dying is an experiment because it will test us, and allow us, and no one else, to know if our qualities are high enough to let us survive beyond death.

In fact, because the topic is related to many of her other concerns, it is difficult to say how many of her poems concentrate on death, but over half of them, at least partly, and about third centrally, feature it. Most of these poems also touch on the subject of religion—although she did write about religion without mentioning death.