Living Through Letters By Emily Dickinson Analysis

Living Through Letters

Emily Dickinson once stated, “Saying nothing… sometimes says the most” (“The Power of No”). Dickinson lived her life by this motto and lived in the shadows with poetry as her only representation of who she was and what she felt. She did not believe in marriage, she lived in isolation, and took feminism to heart. Dickinson was close to her mother and was an asset to her father. She was in love with a man that she tended to write about in her letters and poetry that her sister had found after Dickinson’s death in 1886. She wasn’t religious and her views were considered ahead of her time. The American writer, Emily Dickinson, reflected her experiences in life, love, and examined ideas on death in her poetry.

Being one of

She wrote constantly about an anonymous lover in many of her secret letters. This anonymous man was Otis P. Lord, a married, Massachusetts Supreme Court judge and a friend of her father’s who shared his political views. “Master” was the nickname she gave Lord in her poems and letters, and often nicknamed herself “Daisy”. Although it wasn’t obvious that their relationship was romantic, she called him, her “closest earthy friend”. Soon after the death of Lord’s wife in 1877, their relationship developed. It is believed they contemplated marriage, but was ended by the death of Lord in 1884, two years before Dickinson passed herself. One letter of hers to this mysterious Master reads: “A love so big it scares her, rushing among her small heart—pushing aside the blood—and leaving her [all] faint and white in the gust’s arm—” (The Dark Mystery of Emily Dickinson’s Master Letters). Most are unsure if the “Master” truly is referring to Otis P. Lord. Some believe she is referring to the devil, others consider God as the “Master” she spoke about, even though she wasn’t religious. The biggest theory of them all was that because she was the mistress of many men, “Master” could be the nickname of more than one