Women in Poetry

           Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet that born on 10 December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. She has been proven as the most famous poet until today. She felt that she has the freedom to write anything about her feelings if she published it anonymously.  Her unique writing style makes her poetry resonate today. She used of dashes in poems to replace other punctuations and this make it look distinctive with others. Her writing style consists of rhymes, personifications and imagery. She normally wrote about nature, the relationship between individual and God or death, religion, and beauty. She used to write hundreds of poems to express herself by release her emotions in her poems. One of her poem that show the extent of dashes is “The Soul selects her own Society”. She had been regarded as a Transcendentalist because of its optimistic characteristics of her poems.  She wrote: “The Soul selects her own Society — Then — shuts the Door — To her divine Majority — Present no more —” (Dickinson 303). As we can see, she used dashes in every line to show how unique her poem can be, and read in the way she desired. She wrote about death in “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”.  “He kindly stopped for me -” (Dickinson 712). She personified [he] (death) as a gentlemen that who leisurely gave the poet a ride to her grave and immortality too. In the poem, she begins the death’s journey with the slow movement, which can be seen in line 5: “We slowly drove – He knew no haste”, but in Stanza 3, it seems like the movement towards death had speed up as they passed [the school, the fields of grain, and the setting sun]. The poem continued to get faster and faster till Stanza 5, everything got slower and gave readers a feeling like her life was came to the end as she wrote “Were toward Eternity –” in the last line of the poem. She wished that there is no Eternity and live forever.

Dickinson, Emily. “The Soul selects her own Society (303)” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20283 . October 21, 2007.

Dickinson, Emily. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death (712)”

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15395 .