Life And Death In Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Life, Death, and What Comes Next Emily Dickinson is well known for style of poetry, as well as her ability to tackle tough subjects. Dickinson’s poetry mainly focuses on the nature of life, death, and the afterlife. Dickinson crafted a unique style in writing. “Her dazzling complex lyrics- compressed statements abounding in startling imagery and marked by an extraordinary vocabulary- explore a wide range of subjects…Her poems about death confront it’s from reality with honesty, humor, curiosity, and above all a refusal to be comforted” (Baym 1659). Dickinson uses simplistic language to express complex ideas. She writes about life, death and afterlife and uses these topics to get across complex ideas, but does so in a simple way by using simple language. Emily Dickinson was raised in a Calvinist household, where she and her family attended many religious meetings and most of the family’s friends were religious as well (Wolff 4). Readers can tell by Dickinson’s poems on death and afterlife she had an eternal struggle with her belief in God, and what happens to a person after death. By closely reading Dickinson’s poems we see that she struggles …show more content…
Cynthia Gibson Wolff states that “If Dickinson wished to express strong feelings like rage or terror, she would have to overcome the difficulties of finding a language that was deemed appropriate for her” (Wolff 181). Being that she was a woman, who had to write a “certain way” due to the expectations of Amherst, she created a unique style of writing in which she simplified her language and wrote as an innocent child in order to express her feelings about death, and what comes after death. When writing her poems, she wanted a language that was “clear, direct, available, acceptable in female, as well as powerful” and to accomplish that she chose the “language of the child” (Wolff