illustrated portrait of English poet Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

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Student Question

What are recurrent themes in Emily Dickinson's poetry and how does her format differ?

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Emily Dickinson's poetry frequently explores themes of nature, death, love, and emotions such as grief and ecstasy. Notable examples include poems like "Because I could not stop for Death" and "I felt a Funeral in my Brain." Her format is distinctive, often using "fourteeners" with alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter, irregular meter, slant rhyme, erratic capitalization, and liberal use of dashes, setting her work apart from her contemporaries.

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Emily Dickinson was a prolific poet who wrote on a wide variety of topics; however, some of her recurrent themes are nature, death, love, and emotions, especially grief. Examples of her nature poems are 1096, which describes a meeting with a snake, and 359, which describes a bird eating a worm. Some of her most famous poems about death are ones in which she seems to describe her own demise, such as "Because I could not stop for Death" (479) and "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died" (591). Dickinson's love poetry has engendered much interest, because she never married, and the object(s) of these poems remain a mystery. They include "I'm 'wife' - I've finished that" (225) and "Wild nights - Wild nights!" (269). Two poems that powerfully describe the grief of loss are "I felt a Funeral in my Brain" (340) and "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" (372). Yet Dickinson wrote of ecstasy as well, as in "I taste a liquor never brewed" (207). Regarding the formatting of her poems, Dickinson commonly wrote in iambic in a form called "fourteeners," meaning alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. However, many poems use very short lines and irregular meter. One hallmark of her poetry is slant rhyme--using rhymes that are not exact, but "near" rhymes. Finally, erratic capitalization and liberal use of the dash within and at the ends of lines differentiate Dickinson's poetry from other poets of her time, or before or after her, making her poetry unique. 

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