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15 Enlightening Emily Dickinson Quotes. Emily Dickinson was one of the handful of 19th-century American writers who helped mold the nation’s literary voice. Even though virtually all of her poems were published posthumously, Emily Dickinson remains one of the most significant and influential writers of American literature.
- Who Is Emily Dickinson?
- Success Is Counted Sweetest
- I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
- “Hope” Is The Thing with Feathers
- I Felt A Funeral, in My Brain
- There’S A Certain Slant of Light
- Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
- This Is My Letter to The World
- I Dwell in Possibility
- I Heard A Fly Buzz– When I Died
Born in 1830 as the middle child in a prosperous Massachusetts family, Dickinson dazzled her teachers early on with her brilliant mind and flowering imagination. She spent a year studying at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now a women’s college. Known for her fierce originality of thought, she distinguished herself among her pious classmates for her...
Omni-disciplinary writer Joyce Carol Oates called Dickinson, one of her literary idols, the “poet of paradox.” This poem makes it clear how she earned that title. Victory, it argues, can only be grasped by the losers. Using militaristic imagery, the poem observes, in Dickinson’s usual unsentimental manner, that life is often a zero-sum game: succes...
This crowd-pleasing verse shows off the poet’s playful side. It’s proof that Dickinson’s insights on human psychology aren’t limited to heavy topics like grief, doubt, and the fear of death. Here, her speaker winkingly draws the reader into a friendly conspiracy of anonymity. You get the sense that this is someone who would’ve love binge-watching r...
With its sweet message and singable rhythm, this tribute to hope is arguably Dickinson’s best-known work. Prettier and somewhat more palatable than many of her later meditations on pain and death, it appears on plenty of greeting cards and posters you can buy online. The poem spins out a straightforward extended metaphor: hope as a bird — selfless,...
Opaque and viscerally disturbing, this poem combines two Dickinson-esque mainstays: funerary imagery and a forensic examination of psychological turmoil. The speaker, though suffering, remains keenly self-aware, observing their own pain with blade-sharp insight. This funeral in the brain eludes easy decoding. It could signify the death of reason — ...
This beautifully crafted poem speaks to anyone who feels a little out of sorts when the days start getting shorter, but you don’t have to suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder to understand it. It offers a somber meditation on the emotional weight of time’s passing, suffused with typical Dickinsonian images of light and faith. Here they take on a...
Short and potent as a shot of whiskey, this poem seems to offer something unusual: a portrait of the recluse in love — whether with man, woman, or God. Of course, it would be a mistake to treat any bit of verse as a straightforward autobiography with line breaks. But a poem as sexy as this one, in a bibliography as buttoned-up as Dickinson’s? The t...
Here’s another poem that makes it hard to separate Dickinson the writer from Emily the human being. The poet of paradoxes was herself a paradoxical person. She worked tirelessly, her huge oeuvre suggesting she never suffered from writer’s block. But she had to be cajoled into publishing anything, even without a byline. In light of Dickinson’s famou...
One of literature’s most celebrated homebodies, Dickinson pulls from an architectural lexicon — the language of chambers and gambrels, windows and doors — to express the boundlessness of imagination. Set against Prose, Possibility stands in a metonymic relation to poetry: it’s poetry that gives the speaker her feeling of sky-span limitlessness. Lik...
This death poem treads some of Dickinson’s favorite thematic ground, but with a considerably more caustic wit than many of her other pieces. After all, its speaker isn’t a soul shedding her cloak of mortality — it’s a corpse. Compared to some of her other works, this piece presents death in a way that feels irreverent, almost slapstick. Dying is a ...
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Jul 1, 2016 · 3. ‘ Hope is the thing with feathers ’. ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –. That perches in the soul –. And sings the tune without the words –. And never stops – at all –. In this poem, Dickinson likens hope to a singing bird, a ‘thing with feathers’ which ‘perches in the soul’.
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- This is my letter to the World/That never wrote to Me — Poem: This is my letter to the World. Techniques: Enjambment, personification.
- For love of Her — Sweet — countrymen/Judge tenderly — of Me. Poem: This is my letter to the World. Techniques: Caesura, diction. Quotes about Death in Emily Dickinson’s Poems.
- When folded in perpetual seam/The wrinkled maker lie. Poem: A word dropped careless on a page. Techniques: Juxtaposition, visual imagery.
- From the malaria – Poem: A word dropped careless on a page. Techniques: Pause, anapodoton.
- Jone Johnson Lewis
- I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there's a pair of us! Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know! How dreary – to be – Somebody!
- We never know how high we are. Till we are called to rise; And then, if we are true to plan, Our statures touch the skies.
- There is no frigate like a book. To take us lands away, Nor any coursers like a page. Of prancing poetry. This traverse may the poorest take.
- Success is counted sweetest. By those who ne’er succeed. To comprehend a nectar. Requires sorest need. Not one of all the purple host.
Stone. In Dickinson’s poems, stones represent immutability and finality: unlike flowers or the light of day, stones remain essentially unchanged. The speaker in “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” ( 216 ) imagines the dead lying unaffected by the breezes of nature—and of life. After the speaker chooses her soul in “The Soul selects her ...
34 of the best book quotes from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. “To be alive──is Power.”. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”. “If certain, when this life was out, That yours and mine should be, I ’d toss it yonder like a rind, And taste eternity.”. “Now, when I read, I read not, For interrupting tears Obliterate ...
