How Does Emily Dickinson's Life Affect Her Poetry

Emily Dickinson, an incredibly talented American poet, who was unknown as a poet at her time, is now widely regarded as one of the best American poets. Dickinson was born December 10,1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She lived most of her life in her father’s house, rarely leaving her room. This affected Dickinson’s poems, which were often dealing with her inner emotions. In her poetry, Dickinson was always trying to get at the heart of the things. This contributed to creating her unique writing style.

Her efforts to eliminate inessential language and punctuation resulted in creating breathtaking effects on her poems. Dickinson drops endings from verbs and nouns and leaves out connecting words. By compressing the language Dickinson created her ultimate and unique signature. However, the downside is that this made her poems appear as a riddle to the reader. On the other hand, this kind of ambiguous writing helped her in keeping the reader engaged. Moreover, compressing her words within her poetry gave her the ability to write words with multiple meanings.

In most of her poems nouns tends to be capitalized. By doing this she draws attention to those words giving them a symbolic meaning and making them appear more meaningful than the others. This is one of the ways she uses grammar manipulation to convey meaning. In the poem “There's a certain Slant of light” which is also the first line of the first stanza Dickinson automatically draws the attention to the word “slant”. This is an example of how the capitalized words appear to be more important than those left in lowercase. Moreover, by using capitalization Dickinson emphasizes the words that she wants the readers to pay more attention to and find their