Read the Emily Dickinson poems selected in the required reading and use ONE poem as the basis for your discussion about her poetry as a WHOLE. I suggest reading ALL of the poems before you select just one, as she wrote under common themes. Choose one of the following questions to answer as a focus for your thesis. Your paper is a literary critical essay; therefore, you should avoid writing in the first person. Please provide direct lines or words from the poem to support your ideas and use correct MLA format for documentation. This paper should be about three pages in length.
- What, for Dickinson, constitutes the ultimate threat? Is it the supernatural? Is it death? Is it a void, the unknowable, a nothingness that follows disintegration of the self? Is it separation from friends and familiar objects?
- Comment on Dickinson’s diction, her balance of abstract and concrete words, her uses of paradox, irony, and personification. Show how the manner in which she uses language contributes to the “suspension,” the inconclusiveness, in her poetry.
- Is the ambiguity of Dickinson’s poetry excessive, or is it somehow essential to the success of her poems?
- Which is more common in Dickinson’s poetry, the delight in nature or the sense of evil?
- Emily Dickinson described herself in a letter as follows: “[I] am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur – and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves” (L269). So few words give her recipient an ample verbal portrait, but they also reveal other things about her. Discuss this description in your paper, and then elaborate on Dickinson’s style. What other poems by her contain similarly concise yet creative descriptions? Which ones are your favorite?
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