John Dickinson

While reading “Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton, I found myself stopping in order to understand, interpret and analyze the text. The first point at which I stopped reading occurred very early on in the story. In the first paragraph, I stopped at the words “lofty terrace” and “Palatine and Forum.” I stopped at these words and looked up pictures of these things in order to be able to envision an image as I read on. I also stopped at the word parapet because I was unsure of the meaning. When I…

have been haunted by the idea of death, but few as much as Emily Dickinson. Even a small sampling of Emily Dickinson 's poetry is enough to reveal that death is her main subject of focus. In fact, it could be argued that death finds it’s way into each and every poem Dickinson writes, as it is so prevalent of a theme throughout her writing, the main difference would be of how obvious this theme is to the reader of each poem. Emily Dickinson 's interest in death is often criticized as being…

Emily Dickinson is one of the most complex and misunderstood artists of all time. Students are taught that Dickinson is a woman who went crazy in her room and wrote thousands of talented poems. In reality, she’s a complex and unique person compared to almost all other people that her ideas and lifestyle were misunderstood. Dickinson’s level of writing in her letters and poems made it hard for anyone else to be able to understand her and communicate back effectively. This inability to relate to…

On close examination one may find a literary equivalent of anubhava in T.S. Eliot's principle of objective correlative. Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep is an example of angica or visual correlative whereas Macbeth's speech at the death of his wife is that of vachika or auditory correlative: What Eliot takes as the formula of a particular emotion is naturally the inevitable motive and manifestation of the emotional state. If the creator has a proper knowledge of human psychology, he shall…

Sunsets, evenings, a skeleton, sleep, anesthetic, gravestones, an old man or woman, a stopped clock, coffin, the depth of the see - the void, all of these, are symbols of death or the fear of it. What lies after death is an enigma to all of us, expect the cases when we had a near death experience. However, the archetype of death is not entirely in connection with the physical death. The archetype of death is about our observation of death in other beings; our cognition of it based on our…

Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous poets of early America. She wrote many poems during the Civil War and the period where many people were heading to the West. Death was prominent in society and much of her writing is about death. Her writing about death is different from that of authors because she writes casually about her own death as she would any other event in her life. She is not writing about her physical death, but rather a lack of life. Dickinson’s “It was not Death, for I stood…

Death and its Significance in the Works of Shakespeare and A. E. Housman “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A. E. Housman, and “Fear no More the Heat o’ the Sun” by Shakespeare are elegies for youth who died prematurely. Through different versification, these two poems carry unique tones and attitudes. Both Shakespeare and Housman create elegies that soothe the pain of death, but they use different logic to justify their reasoning. Shakespeare juxtaposes extremes to argue that death is apathetic to…

One of the most intimate feelings is loss. As someone who does not express her intimate moments publicly, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” begins to change her dynamic with her poetry and herself. This is one of the few published poems which delve into an intimate topic and, I think, is part of the new era of Bishop poems where she becomes more open. A poem with about 17 drafts, Bishop spent a lot of time refining the poem and, in many cases, broadening it. Despite the intimacy of the subject,…

demands, Dickinson embraced her isolation and wrote often of the liberty she discovered in her reclusivity. Choosing a unique spiritual practice of seclusion with God, Emily Dickinson rebelled against the accepted means of worship in her country and era. Specifically in her poem “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church”, Dickinson explores religion as she practices: unrestrained and alone, surrounded by nature. Through the use of rhyme scheme, juxtaposition, and alliteration in this poem,…

“Life changes fast, life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” This is the first few lines of Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking, a poem she refers back to on many occasions to emphasize the humanity of death. “It was far, far too pale, and still, and, well, dead, yes dead. She was dead, dead, dead, dead…” This is a quote taken from Anthony Rapp’s autobiography, Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent, which also shows an…