Emily Dickinson 3

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

was important to Emily Dickinson for several reasons. She wished to reason with her own feelings despite her contradictory beliefs - she wished to be one who "distils amazing sense / from ordinary meanings (#448)".
For her, life, nature and faith were all riddles in themselves. None of these three come with all the answers, although clues are given - her poems both deal with and mirror this phenomenon.
And through a riddle, at the last -
sagacity must go - (#501)
(In these lines Dickinson doubts the sense of religious claims about life, death and life after death). Her cryptic language thus became part of her search for truth and personal clarification. She couched her poetry in ambiguous, complex and multi-layered language - in this form it became both a defence, and a game. The riddles concealed her anarchy, her dissension and her audaciousness in questioning the status quo. She achieved her most audacious commentaries and attacks on American perceptions and ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

the readers awareness and intuition. One of the important functions of her poems were to decode the riddles she perceived in life, and search for the answers to her questions. As a consequence her poems have an expository nature - parallelling the actions of the reader as she/he attempts to decode and expose the core of the riddle. It has been argued that for Emily Dickinson, because life was uncontrolled and manipulative, so was imagery. Imagery for Dickinson was expansive of feeling, understanding and possibility, and it is through imagery that she achieves her tricks of perception and her illusionary performances. Through an arsenal of masks and poses, (she) sanctions her ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: