How Did Emily Dickinson Influence Her Poetry

Emily Dickinson wrote over 1,800 poems throughout her lifetime. Although basically none of these were published while she was alive, she still managed to leave a major impact on the American literary world. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born December 10th of 1830, in Amherst Massachusetts. She first got accepted into Amherst academy in 1840, she later transferred to Mount Holyoke female seminary she only attended Holyoke for about a year. Her paternal grandfather Samuel Dickinson was one of the original founders of Amherst academy (biography.com).
Around the 1860’s Emily became reclusive and hardly ever came out of her house and people rarely visited her, but the ones that did visit Emily were a great influence on her poetry (poets.org).
She often used images from nature, religion, law, and many other day to day activities to give her ideas: the wonders of nature, the identity of the self, death and immortality, and love (emilydickinsonmuseum.org). One of Dickinson’s many talents as a poet is her ability to describe abstract qualities with concrete images. In many of her poems, abstract ideas and material things are used to explain each other, but the relation between them remains a mystery until she wants us to know (emilydickinsonmuseum.org). “Emily Dickinson experimented with a variety of metrical and stanzaic forms, including short meter (6686) and the ballad stanza, which depends more on beats per line (usually 4 alternating with 3) than on exact syllable counts” (emilydickinsonmuseum.org). Even in common meter, she didn’t always follow the “rules” of poetry. She is also pretty famous for her use of “slant rhyme” which are words that almost rhyme but just aren't there. She also like to punctuate her poems with dashes, rather than periods, commas, or other punctuation marks. She also used “irregular capitalization” with just about every single poem, which is capitalizing in the middle of a sentence. Still to this day no one really knows why she used these