Emily Dickinson

“The effort to communicate a private self without compromising her privacy, and the justification for such effort, lie behind distinctive procedures of Emily Dickinson`s poetry”
The period in which Emily Dickinson lived and wrote, was called ‘the cult of domesticity’. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830 and she died in 1886.
The role of the woman in that period was to be inside thehouse. Woman meant wife, mother and housewife. The main purpose of women in the nineteenth century was to bear children and to live a private life within their house, it means, women were excluded from public life, not allowed to study or work because they were considered inferior to the men. Emily Dickinson differs from the women of that period, because she devoted her life to literature, writinga big amount of poems.
Dickinson wrote most of her poems during the Civil War, so she used vocabulary and imagery about death and war, as well as strong images and syntactic structures. That period was hard for the intellectuals, and the process of writing was difficult for them and also to be known because of their works.
Emily Dickinson is characterised because of the frequent use of symbolsin her handwriting, such as many dashes in only one poem. Her poems are intense because of her emotional state. She lived the death of members of her family, as well as the Civil War and it caused in her the desire to live in loneliness.
She was never married and she devoted the last decades of her life living in her house, in her own bedroom. She specified that she could only leave her home inextreme circumstances, avoiding visitors. She decided to live in her own, and it is easy to find in her poems because she used so many terms about loneliness, death, etc. and her poetry tells much about her life.
Emily had better education than another people from that period. She was interested in literature so at the end of her life she had written close to eighteen hundred poems and only tenwere published before her death. Fifty years later, some volumes of her poems appeared, and she became in one of the most famous poets of that period.
Only ten of her poems were published before her death, and not many people knew about her poetry. During her medical treatment in Cambridge, Dickinson was living in her aunt´s house, and she started to have a close relationship with her ‘littlecousins’ Fanny and Loo, they were also interested in literature. Dickinson used to read them some of her poems, and share with them her poetry and interest in literature.
After Dickinson`s death, her sister Lavinia, found the compilation of poems and she became the discoverer of her poetry and her first editor.
It is known a common desire to separate what she wrote and what she lived, because shewrote poems apparently about herself, but there is a distinction between ‘two lifes’.It is said that Dickinson created or invented a ‘new life’ in order hide her private life that was reflected in her poetry. It is really difficult to separate then what she lived and what she wrote, for example, she was never married, but reading her poems, it is easy to find ‘he’ pronoun that seems to refer to herhusband (imaginary one), she deals with spiritualized love.
Emily Dickinson was defined as ‘one of the oddest and most intriguing personalities in literary history’. The maturity of Dickinson´s poetry was reached almost immediately. She did a perfect dichotomy between earth and heaven and imaginary and natural world. At the same time, she treats her poems with religious connotations, but those aremodified, not in the same sense she believed in. There were other themes she deals with like extreme suffering, human states, the relation between religion and nature etc.
In order to create a magic vocabulary and a good combination of grammar, she used to write using different literary devices.
The use of anaphora in her poems, make them more fluent, as well as easier to read, in the way it...