Emily Dickinson Research Paper

The age of romanticism marked a great shift in American literature as writers and artists turned away from classicism and turned towards individuality, nature, and emotion. This period introduced new authors and poets whose works heavily influenced America’s new identity of individuality and freedom. New interest in nature and human life fueled the romantic movement, creating poetic accounts of natural imagery, freedom, and nature’s influence on people. Emily Dickinson was an influential American poet who wrote during the end of the movement. Although she was not a romantic poet, some of her poetry contain these distinctively romantic ideals. In order to convey deep meaning in her poetry, she often combined elements of romanticism and realism. Dickinson’s unconventional poetry was unique in comparison to her contemporaries due to her writing structure, use of literary devices, poetic language, and

Most of her lyric poetry touched on rather abstract concepts and ideas as a single speaker expresses inner thoughts and feelings. One of the elements of Dickinson’s writing that makes her stand out is her unique poetic structure. Her language is “elliptically compressed, disjunctive, at times ungrammatical; its reference is unclear; its metaphors are so densely compacted that literal components of meaning fade” (Miller 1). This style, as well as the use of dashes and capitalization throughout her writing, can make it difficult to understand the meaning behind her poems. For example, when Dickinson writes “The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air - Between the Heaves of Storm-”, she capitalizes common nouns in order to add emphasis, and she uses dashes for dramatic effect and emotion. Unrelated words rush together and stand out in order to provide another layer of meaning in her poetry; without the dashes, the poems would not be the same