diagnosed and suffered a bright disease kidney disorder, and die in May 15, 1886.
There were only ten poems which were published during her life times. After her death, her sister Lavinia discovered the fascicles containing some 1,800
poems and she wanted to publish it. Lavinia are astonished to discover that the poems were written in odd and even paper-the back of envelopes and discarded
letters, bits of wrapping paper, and the edges of newspaper. With the help of Mable Loomis Todd, she asked Higginson to publish Emily Dickinson’s poems.
Poems had to be printed twice within two months of publication in the next eight year went 16 editions. The poems were so popular that Higginson and Todd
had to prepare for the second volume. The poems were published by subject matter and theme: love, death, nature, and friendship. The second volume, Poems,
Second Series , also popular, and went through five editions by 1893.
C. Criticism
Emily Dickinson can be called a miniaturist because most of her poems consist of no more than thirty lines. Her poetry displayed emotion. She always put
herself as the centre of her poems by the use of ‘I’. The way she wrote the poems reflected a complexity of human emotion, such as conviction and hesitancy, desire,
sorrow. Dickinson often used unusual words that led the readers to different interpretations. She was considered different from other poets because she lived in
her own world, solitaire, and that enable her to focus on her world more sharply Michelle.
Emily Dickinson also has a unique style in writing a poem. Most of her
poems have their own characteristic. Moreover, she really knows how to talk to her readers through her poems. Casey, Helen Marie on “Reports On What Emily
Dickinson Knew,” says that “Emily Dickinson knows the effect of poetry on readers and listeners, if there is one thing Emily Dickinson knew for sure, it was
what a good poem should do” http: www. cswnet. com erin ed1.htm. Emily Dickinson’s Poetry is a product of social condition in 19
t h
century. Myers gave comments in Thinking and Writing about Literature, “Dickinson’s
poetry is challenging because it is radical and original in its reader rejection of most traditional nineteenth-century themes and techniques” http: www. gale.
com freresrc poets. cndickinbio.htm. “She searched for truth and knew that the nature of truth made it impossible to nail it down once and for all; one had to nail
it down a hundred times” Magill 699. Dickinson’s poems on death have several difficult words. In order to
under stand those words we have to consult our dictionaries. Like death itself is a mysterious subject, Dickinson also wrote her poems on death in a mysterious way.
“This is why it is difficult to summarize Dickinson’s themes,” such as her view of death, because for Dickinson, trying to understand death, or love, or God, was
continuous quest. If something was understood why she need to write about it again and again?” Magill 699
Emily Dickinson is a person who believes in God. However, she once had a skeptical believe about Christianity. I think it is not because God but rather it is
the followers. She even rejected to go to church when she was in Seminary school. This is due to her inability to accept the orthodox religious faith of her day and her
longing for spiritual comfort of it. Furthermore, as a Christian she believes in God
and the life after death. Death is for Dickinson the ultimate punctuation mark, which,
appearing at the end of life’s sentence, gives it all its meaning. It is a gateway through which one passes to a perhaps even greater
type of existence. It also a mystery about which one can never be convinced, which is perhaps why she keeps probing Magill 700
Sharon Cameron in her article “On 280 I felt a funeral, in my Brain” says that
We may speculate that the poem chart the stages in the speaker’s loss of consciousness, and this loss of consciousness is a
dramatization of the deadening forces that today would be known as repression. We may further suppose that the speaker is
reconstructing or currently knowing an experience whose pain in the past rendered it impossible to know. It illustrates the way
which one can relate experience and, at the same time, suffer a disassociation past tense.
Pickard gives comments on Emily Dickinson’s poem “I felt Funeral, in my Brain.” With its detailed presentation of a complete funeral as felt through the
ebbing sensations of a dead person, this poem borders on the morbid in portraying the terrible struggle that the separation of the body from the soul occasions. Here is
only a despairing plunge into eternal abyss Pickard 104. Pickard gives comments on Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not
stop for Death.” He says that “This poem typifies many of her verses that personify death, which is the finest. She closely examined the sensation of dying,
the response of the onlookers, and the terrible struggle of the body for the funeral, the church services, and even the thought of the dead person” Pickard 102.
According to Shackford, Dickinson’s poems could make the readers really felt and saw what she said at the same time she wrote the poems. Dickinson could
figure out abstract things such as love, death, hope, loneliness and immortality by
the use of words. Shackford stated that there were two major opinions about Dickinson’s poems. The first opinion was based on the general readers. For them
Dickinson poems appeared to be imperfect. On the other hand, to the literary students, Dickinson’s poems could be used to stimulate materials for examination
D. Theoretical Framework
