Emily Dickinson's The Brain Is A Solitude Of Space

Emily Dickinson lead a very interesting life style. At the age of thirty, Dickinson became very reclusive, rarely venturing from her home. She devoted most of her time to writing and only had occasional visitors. Emily Dickinson wrote predominantly poems and was very different in her writing style. Brett Wells explains that, “Dickinson is known posthumously for her unusual use of form and syntax.” Dickinson loved to use dashes in her writing and her handwriting was atrocious. Emily Dickinson is named as one of our nation’s greatest poets despite only having a handful of her poems published in her lifetime. Dickinson wrote about human understanding as being infinite in many of her poems. Emily Dickinson’s poems, There is a Solitude of Space, …show more content…
Emily Dickinson, in this poem, portrays the brain as being limitless on how much knowledge and information it can take in. Dickinson says, “The Brain-is wider than the Sky-...The Brain is deeper than the sea-.” In saying this, Dickinson is implying that the human brain has an unlimited amount of storage for knowledge. Professor Douglas Smith supports Dickinson’s argument by saying, “The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem.” This shows that the brain is, in fact, almost limitless and supports Emily Dickinson’s …show more content…
In the last stanza of this poem, Dickinson states, “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads were toward Eternity-” Richard Brantley explains this quote by saying, “In the realm of Death, time has elapsed into centuries for the speaker, though it seems shorter than her last day of life when she first “surmised” that her journey was toward Eternity.” This suggests that even though humans die, they live on. Dickinson limns that humans are boundless and unlimited, even through death. In this, Dickinson is implying that there is an afterlife. John Hall articulates that, “While the religious would argue that life on earth is a mere warm up for an eternity spent in heaven or hell, and many scientists would dismiss the concept for lack of proof – some people claim that they have definitive evidence to confirm once and for all that there is indeed life after death.” This topic is very controversial and has befuddled philosophers, scientists, and devout people since the dawn of time. Dickinson suggests, though, that humans are limitless by presupposing that there is an