Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - Paula Hendrickson (essay date 1991)


Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - Paula Hendrickson (essay date 1991)

Paula Hendrickson (essay date 1991)

”Dickinson and the Process of Death,” Dickinson Studies, No. 77, 1st Half, 1991, pp. 33-43.

[Below, Hendrickson explores Dickinson's curiosity about the moment of death, pointing out how she uses the physical senses in her poems to try to understand the experience of dying.]

While many books and articles have been written on the topic of Emily Dickinson's death poems, virtually nothing has been published about her moment of death poems. On rare occasions, scholars have mentioned the moment of death poems as a sub-catagory of her death poems. In researching this paper, I found nothing which dealt with this topic any further. This is unfortunate, because the most fascinating of ED's death poems involve the description of the very moment of death. Some of these poems are seen thru the eyes of a bystander, and some are seen thru the eyes of the person who is dying. It has been documented by Dickinson in...

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