Emily Dickinson: Poet and Poetry Analysis - Essay Example

The second half of Dickinson’s life was full of tragedies surrounding her and one can notice the traces of melancholy in her later poems. She secluded herself from public after her father’s death and remained at home dividing her time with her ailing mother and baking besides writing poems and corresponding with her friends who died one after the other. She was a great admirer of Robert and Elizabeth Browning’s works and deeply inspired by John Keats’ poems (Dickinson 1957). Her own poems reflected a state of loneliness and desire but at the same time urged the possibility of happiness in life.

It is as if she trying to convince herself of living a happy life despite the gloominess surrounding her. Her style of correspondence was so poetic that even when she wrote a letter to a literary critic Thomas Higginson to see if her poetry was worthy of publication she wrote in a poetic manner “… if my Verse is alive?” He was unaware that she had already published her work and so advised her to delay the process. She denied any relation with the printing press, only later claiming that “if fame belonged to me, I could not escape her” (Dickinson 1957).

Her poetry can be divided into various stages in her life. The ones she wrote before 1861 were mostly conventional and even humorous. She conveyed a sense of sentimentality and grief for fear of losing her friend Sue Gilbert for whom she wrote “I have a Bird in spring”. Between 1861 and 1865 she was most creative in her poetry which reflected emotionality and vigor. It is during this phase that she developed her main themes of death and immortality. After 1866 her writing seemed to have matured even more and she had already written two thirds of the entire collection that was found after her death in 1886 (Dickinson 1957).

Her life remains a mystery due to her prolonged seclusions and this can be the reason that her poems reflect a sense of deep inner struggle. One of Emily Dickinson’s poems “Success is counted sweetest”, which is the first to be published in a No Name anthology upon being urged by her friend Helen Hunt Jackson, because of the “purple Host” having acquired the enemy’s flag in battle and are thus, victors in the field. One might assume that the American Civil War compelled her to write this poem but there is also a possibility that she wrote it in response to her inner battles against the “Cavalry of Woe” that she mentions in another poem “To fight aloud, is very brave”.

Expanding her poem from two statements in the beginning of the poem, Dickinson builds her theme using words like “sweetest” in the first line to “nectar” in the second line. There is a sense “defeat” associated with “death” towards the end of the poem. Another poem “Wild Nights - Wild Nights!” reveals the poet’s sense of experience that she imagines happening in the future. She keeps the