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Jul 1, 2016 · A list of the ten greatest poems by Emily Dickinson, the American poet who wrote over 1,700 poems in her lifetime. The poems explore themes of anonymity, death, hope, beauty, and madness, using images and symbols to create a unique and wonderful world.
Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with…
- 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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Emily Dickinson's life and works have been the source of inspiration to artists, particularly to feminist-oriented artists, of a variety of mediums. A few notable examples are: The feminist artwork The Dinner Party, by Judy Chicago, first exhibited in 1979, features a place setting for Dickinson.
Apr 2, 2014 · Emily Dickinson was a reclusive American poet who wrote hundreds of poems and letters. She is known for her innovative use of form and syntax, and her work was published after her death in 1886. Learn about her life, family, influences, and famous works.
Apr 29, 2024 · Emily Dickinson, American lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two leading 19th-century American poets. Learn more about her life and works in this article.
William Wordsworth, who rallied for “common speech” within poems and argued against the poetic biases of the period, wrote some of the most influential poetry in Western literature, including his most famous work, The Prelude, which is often considered to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism.
