Emily Elizabeth Essay, Research Paper
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Mass. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer and leading citizen of Amherst. Her mother was Emily Norcross Dickinson. Emily had an older brother, William Austin, and a younger sister, Lavinia. Emily Dickinson had more formal education than most women of her time. As her father was serving in Congress, she got a chance to meet the Reverend Charles Wadsworth. He was the subject of her love poems.
After her schooling, which included one year at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, she became increasingly reclusive and lived out her entire life in the family home. Her illness compelled her to remain indoors with her eyes heavily bandaged for months at a time. These extended periods of sensory deprivation caused her to seek solace in writing and to convert her poems into replacements for her injured eyes. Many poems discuss her physical pain; many mention such topics as optics, astronomy, light, or the sun; Summing up, her poetry reflects the intensity of the struggles with the religious ideas, and deals essentially with nature, love, and death. In all these poems, she used her personal experience as a tool for discussing philosophical and religious matter and led her, finally, to conceive a system of meta poetics in which she served as a translator or mediator between God?s will and human experience.
Upon her death, her sister, Lavinia, discovered more than 1700 poems hidden in various places. Three volumes of poems were published between 1891 and 1896 and the remainder by 1945. Emily Dickinson stands as one of the truly great American Poets of the 19th century.
Criticism And Personal Opinion:
According to me, It seems to me that she was familiar with the poetic theories of Edgar Allan Poe. Both had been using the subjects like love, nature, doubt and faith repeatedly used in their poems. They are called the ?Sad Poets? in American Poetry. For her, Poetry was a part of life. One of the Critics, Editor Thomas Higginson asked her to define poetry, she gave a subjective, emotional response:? If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold that no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my heart were taken off, I know that is poetry. ? This was her love for poetry.
According to some critics, Dickinson had no abstract theory of poetry. Some critics have associated her with the New England Tradition as she was been characterized to be shy, withdrawn, to say little, but to convey much. Her poems tends toward epigrammatic, the concentrated, carefully wrought, gemlike lyric, whose mastery of ambiguity, of allusion, of compressed syntax, of the lyric outburst, is a central. Conversely, Some literary men of her time saw Dickinson?s poems to be nothing special about and attributed her experiments in rhyme and rhythm to the naivete of an untaught lady poet with a tin ear. Some critics in the present time thinks that she cannot be considered a major poet because she writes tiny poems.
About the Poem:
In the poem, ?Because I Could not wait for death?, she talks about death. The whole theme of the poem is ?Death?. Indeed, she has the ability to reach into the fact of human death. Here, she pose of having already died before she writes this poem. While in some poems, we can see her as approaching death. In the verse, ?Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me;? she used ?Personification? to represent death as a person. After reading the whole poet, it can be seen that she is one of the fearless person (poet). If the fearlessness ran out, she had her courage, and after that her heart-stopping recklessness. This poems seems to be in Iambic beat. This is the ?Dramatic poetry? poetry.
Summary:
In the beginning of the poem, she is pose as dead. As she could not wait for death, death stopped for her. Death, as personified, came to pick her up. In the vehicle, there were only two passenger, poet herself, and Death, the Immortality. No body knows the speed of death. In the journey, she had to abandoned her labor and her leisure for his (deaths) civility. So death is dominating in the journey of the soul to the heaven or hell. But in this poem, it is shown that without any haste, they went to all the places of her rememberance like school where children and may be herself might have spent time, wrestling ground, field of gazing grain, the setting sun.
Work Cited
Dickinson, Emily. ?The Oxford Companion to Women?s writing in the United States.? New York: Oxford University Press, 1995: (247-249)
Dickinson, Emily. ?American Women Writers from Colonial Times to the present.? Lina Mainiero. New York: A Fredrick Ungan Book Contonuum Publishing Company, 1886. 497
www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap4/*censored*inson.html
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