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EMILY DICKINSON

AN INNOVATOR OF POETIC LANGUAGE AND LITERARY DEVICES

Birth and family

Emily Dickinson is considered to be one of the most important poets of the 19th

century because of her intense work and the originality of her adopted style of 

writing.

She was born on the 10th of December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, from father 

Edward Dickinson who was an important and prestigious lawyer at those times and

the treasurer of Amherst College and from mother Emily Norcross Dickinson. She

also had two siblings: a brother, Austin Dickinson who helped in the family lawyer 

service and then followed his father in being the treasurer of Amherst College and a

sister, Lavinia Dickinson which, as Emily, was never married and she engaged in the

family’s women duties.

Education

Her parents, especially her father, were strict about education so Emily got a proper 

one, first attending Primary School, then Amherst Academy for seven years from

1840 to 1847 and then enrolling in Mount Holyoke Female Seminar for one year.

Life

After finishing school, Emily Dickinson resumed her domestic and familial obligations

and began to wear only white clothing that could symbolize a nun, a virgin or a poet

or the combination of all three.

She suffered an emotional crisis after Samuel Bowles’s ( a friend of her father and

the publisher and editor of “The Republican Springfield”) public rejection and

discouraging against her writing and she started receiving less and less visitors until

she totally isolated herself. This is when her seclusion began with an epiphany that

she should dedicate her entire life to her work. She spent the rest of her life aloneand writing poems, the only contact that she had with other people being through

letters, and on the 15th of May 1886, at the age of 55th, she died of a kidney disease.

Although Emily had a poor, unplentiful social life, she managed to develop a rich,

passionate life through her work.

”If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I

know that  is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know

that  is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way? ”- Emily

Dickinson

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Nature

The nature was seen as the source of joy and beauty but can become threatening

and dangerous and it is characterized as indifferent to humanity.

Style

Many poems represent the poet’s opinion of gender issues. She purified her work by

eliminating inessential language and punctuation from her poems and she manages

to gain attention by compressing language and disregarding grammar rules and

sentence structure. Using these methods, her poems became almost

incomprehensible, like a riddle or intellectual puzzle for the readers and her 

seclusion contributed to the creation of her own style.

She uses imagery techniques to add a more profound understanding to her verses,

to emphasize what she feels, metaphors being the most commonly used literarydevice. The poet loved words for the simple fact of being words and for the capacity

of creating a full image, recalling a memory or wakening different sensations and

feelings by simply using them.

Elements

Emily Dickinson uses frequently in her poems the dash to emphasize a missing word

or to replace a comma or a period; she changes the functions of the words, often,

adjectives and verbs are used as nouns and capitalizes for no apparent reason other 

than that the words are nouns.

The rhyme is infrequent, the poet choosing to use types of rhyme that were not

accepted until late 19th century and are used by modern poets. This types are the

identical rhyme (sane, insane), eye rhyme (though, through), vowel rhyme (see,

buy), imperfect rhyme (time, thin) and suspended rhyme (thing, along).

She is coining new words, resurrect old ones and she is using simple terms in

unfamiliar contexts, this way managing to transmit better and clearer to the reader 

her feelings, also creating images with an explicative role.

Conclusions

Emily Dickinson opened a new frontier of feminine power and assertiveness through

her transcendent and imaginative verse and she also invented the free form of 

English’s most common poem-the hymn.

She also started a new era in the poetic language and she was the first to use

unmatched rhyme at those times.

She was considered to be a miniaturist because her poems have less than thirty

lines although she treats the deepest themes.