Emily Dickinson

Paper Summary:

The paper discusses Emily Dickinson's use of diction and poetic language and explores how her poetic oeuvre can be seen as initiatory and a prelude to contemporary poetry. The paper focuses on Dickinson's questioning of the society around her though her life as well as her penchant for seclusion. The paper also investigates the idea that Dickinson's work should be seen in a wider context and that her importance lies in her artistic kinship with the great poets of the world.

Outline:
Introduction and Background
Content and Themes
Poetic Style
Conclusion and Summary

From the Paper:

"The range of the themes and the content of her poems can be ascertained from the following comment. "Her lyrical, paradoxical, gnomic verse, treating of love and death, is marked as much by wit and a keen sense of domestic realities as by mysticism". In other words, the range of her concerns in the poems are not limited to the either the mundane or the esoteric but rather to an intensive and involved analysis of the full range of human experience. The fact that she did not exclude any area of the experience of reality and was also aware of the paradoxes and incongruities in life is an aspect that makes her oeuvre particularly significant in a modern context."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Emily Dickinson [essay on-line]; available from http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/selects.html; Internet: accessed 13 July 2008.
• Harvey P. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.
• Knox, Helene. "Dickinson's the Poets Light But Lamps." Explicator 41, no. 1 (1982): 31-31. Database on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=99229862. Internet. Accessed 15 July 2008.
• Leder, Sharon, and Andrea Abbott. The Language of Exclusion: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=27480769. Internet. Accessed 15 July 2008.
• Mitchell, Domhnall. Monarch of Perception Monarch of Perception. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Book on-line. Available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=11023238. Internet. Accessed 15 July 2008.

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