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Jul 1, 2016 · By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Reducing Emily Dickinson’s 1,700+ poems to a list of the ten greatest poems she wrote is not an easy task and is, perhaps, a foolhardy one. Nevertheless, her wonderful Complete Poems (which we'd strongly recommend) runs to nearly 800 pages, so where is the beginner to … well, begin?
- Because I could not stop for Death. ‘Because I could not stop for death,’ Dickinson’s best-known poem, is a depiction of one speaker’s journey into the afterlife with personified “Death” leading the way.
- Hope is the Thing with Feathers. ‘Hope is the Thing with Feathers’ by Emily Dickinson is a poem about hope. It is depicted through the famous metaphor of a bird.
- I felt a Funeral, in my Brain. ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ by Emily Dickinson is a popular poem. In it, she depicts a very unusual idea of life after death.
- The Heart asks Pleasure – first. ‘The heart asks pleasure first’ by Emily Dickinson depicts the needs of the heart. They are highly changeable and include pleasure and excuse from pain.
- 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 ...
- Reedsy
Influenced most by the Bible, Shakespeare, and the seventeenth century metaphysicals (noted for their extravagant metaphors in linking disparate objects), she wrote poems on grief, love, death, loss, affection, and longing.
"Because I could not stop for death" is one of Emily Dickinson's most celebrated poems and was composed around 1863. In the poem, a female speaker tells the story of how she was visited by "Death," personified as a "kindly" gentleman, and taken for a ride in his carriage.
Dickinson’s poems explore themes of nature, death, and love. Her unique voice and unconventional style make her a seminal figure in American poetry. Read the free full text, the full collection analysis , and mini essays about of key ideas from Dickinson’s Poetry. Upgrade to PLUS and get instant access to all the study tools. Start your FREE trial.
Through this deceptively simple poem's picture of a lost ship on a huge ocean, Dickinson explores human vulnerability in the face of nature—and an indifferent cosmos more generally. Emily Dickinson probably wrote "Shipwreck" around 1863; like most of her work, the poem was only published posthumously, first appearing in the 1891 collection ...
