Preview

Why Is Emily Dickinson Considered An Allegory

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
803 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Why Is Emily Dickinson Considered An Allegory
Emily Dickinson is one of the most intriguing poets encountered all semester. She uses deep, mysterious elements to elaborate her purpose of poems. Dickinson often blends symbolism and allegory in her poetry. Her use of real scenes and actions to suggest universal ideas and emotions helps really depict what she is trying to get across. Allegory played a big role in her works because the use of scenes and actions of artificial and unreal structuring causes the reader to think. This is because the people, scenes, and ideas are recognizably different from the representation itself. This blending of symbolism and allegory in Dickinson's poems can make reading her poem difficult to first time readers of her work. When the initial barrier of her tricky work is overcome, you see her evocative powers are paramount. Much Madness is Divinest Sense by Emily Dickinsons is one her most memorable works.The speaker of the poem gives interesting views on the way sanity is observed. The poem throws a …show more content…
Dickinson continues to use her impressive metaphorical language. This poem explains the wonders of reading by comparing a book to various modes of transportation. This string of comparisons is used to remind us of the true joy of reading. Reading enables people to become one with all kinds of different characters while traveling far and wide with them in imaginations, without even having to pay a cent. Dickinson does not steer away from the mysterious nature of the speaker with this poem either. Once again, we do not get any hints about who or what is telling us about books. The only thing that makes the speaker seem human at all is the pronoun "us" in line 2, which implies that he,she, or it is a reader, just like us. Thinking about the speaker as a slightly disembodied voice that is making observations about the natural and human pleasures of reading will make it easier to

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Dickinson's use of metaphors in this poem compares the traditional ways of religion and the church with a different perspective. She effectively compares nature with religion through her imagery. The comparisons between the lack of attendance at church has always been associated with not getting into Heaven, and Dickinson brings comfortable support for those that feel differently. The truest form of prayer and belief starts from within a person. Emily Dickinson confirms that with this brief but powerful…

    • 79 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    House Of Mirth Dbq Essay

    • 1750 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Variorum ed. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1998.…

    • 1750 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson’s main purpose in poem 355 is to describe an indefinable depression. She creates a melancholy persona to depict the chaos and despair she feels because of her condition. Her poem is structured around her uncertainty towards her mental state. Dickinson, in the first two stanzas, eliminates possibilities to what she may be feeling. She analyzes that “it was not death”, “it was not night”, “it was not frost”, “nor fire”. The poem appeals to the human sense of touch, as Dickinson compares tangible sensations that the body normally experiences to her tumultuous emotions. In the third stanza, Dickinson synthesizes all of the possibilities she eradicated in the previous two stanzas, ominously stating that her condition “tasted like them all”. The narrator is unable to distinguish her feelings from one another, leading the reader to conclude that she is in a chaotic state of mind. She compares her condition to a funeral, both of which evoke death. In the fourth stanza, Dickinson continues to explore her persona’s dark psyche. The narrator experiences terror and despair to the point where she “could not breathe.” Her only “key” to escape this punishment is to be able to understand what she is feeling and why…

    • 518 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The language present in Emily Dickinson’s poetry is at times unclear, sometimes ungrammatical and can be found to be disjunctive. Dickinson wrote in distinct brevity, irregular grammar, peculiar punctuation and hand picked diction. Her poems were written in a circular manner, where she took the reader to one place and them swept them back to the beginning always relating one metaphor to the next. Dickinson was an intimate person throughout her life, and her poems reflect that lifestyle. Like her poems, she was never quite figured out. Dickinson wrote not for the audience to understand but for her own self expression by writing down the words as they came to her, with little regard to the conventional syntax or diction. In this poem Dickinson coveys a metaphorical description of hope through simple language to explain a complex idea present in everyone’s life.…

    • 1320 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson uses many metaphors to express the theme. This provides powerful images and makes the theme more…

    • 404 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Much Madness is divinest Sense” 24. Dickinson compares what two ideas in this poem? 25. Defining madness as the “divinest Sense” is an example of what literary device? “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” 26. How does the speaker react to death? 27. What does the speaker mean in the lines “I…

    • 561 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Duhac, Joseph. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Guide to Commentary Published in English. 1890-1977. Boston: G.K. Hall. 327-331.…

    • 1044 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson Pros/Cons

    • 1484 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In poetry, Dickinson is often fascinated by nature, death, pain, love and God. In her poems Dickinson often speaks elliptically. That said, when reading Dickinson's poems, we must dot the I's and cross the T's that we think are not L's. We must make our own interpretation because Emily would not have wanted us to interpret them at all. This is where the window is open to much criticism that maybe a pro or con to how others view Dickinson and her work. This is where we unknowingly hyperbolae words or phrases that should be litotilate.…

    • 1484 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Emily Dickinson might be called an artisan, since most of her poems have fewer than thirty lines, yet she deals with the most deep topics in poetry: death, love, and humanity’s relations to God and nature. Her poetry not only impresses by its on going freshness but also the animation. Her use of language and approachness of her subjects in unique ways, might attribute to why “Hope is the thing with feathers” is one of her most famous works.…

    • 1259 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    This poem is short in length, like most of Emily Dickinson 's other poems. It contains the use of perfect rhymes, imperfect rhymes, and end rhymes. An example of the perfect rhyme is between the words 'sane ' and 'chain. ' The imperfect rhyme was depicted with the words 'madness ' and 'sense. ' The rhyming is subtle and adds to the flow of the poem; it is not strict and structured. Emily Dickinson 's tone is also a large contributing factor to the flow of the poem. She conveys a tone of defiance, and in some cases, sarcasm. The sarcasm is present in lines six and seven, “Assent – and you are sane – Demur – you 're straightway dangerous.” If one agrees with the majority than they are considered sane, but if one disagrees they are dangerous to this majority. The majority may be wrong, but if one just goes along with the status quo they will not be bothered. They might not be making the right decision to avoid making a difficult one and becoming “straightway dangerous.” Another way Dickinson may be representing this sarcasm is through her capitalization of certain letters. She capitalizes the word majority and madness when they do not need to be; she is putting an emphasis or importance in these words to stress her point.…

    • 973 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    She appears to search for the universal truths and investigate the circumstances of the human condition: sense of life, immortality, God, faith, place of man in the universe. Emily Dickinson questions absolutes and her argumentation is multisided. The poetic technique that she uses involves making abstract concrete, which creates a striking imagery like that of a hand of the wind combing the Sky. One could perceive Emerson's transcendentalism's, influence in these poems but the profound difference here is that Emily Dickinson does not take a role of a prophet, redeemer and teacher of the world. Instead, hers is the lonely search for the truth; she dismisses conventional faith as the easiest way toward salvation. Self-analysis, self-discipline, and self-critique are the tools of her…

    • 887 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Dickinson was a 19th century poet from Massachusetts who did not become famous until decades after her death. Looking back at her poetry, she was especially infatuated with death and religion. It would make perfect sense then that her poetry was influenced greatly by her own feelings of depression and loneliness. Emily Dickinson’s work is unique because of the poetic devices she uses, like irony, symbolism, connotation, imagery, and personification, and the recurring themes of death, religion, and nature. The following poems are related because they all share Dickinson’s common literary devices and themes.…

    • 1251 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In the Poem ‘Because I Could Not Stop for Death” Emily Dickinson uses symbolism and allegory to portray a woman’s voyage to internal life. Emily’s main symbols in the poem are to hide the true meaning of the symbols.…

    • 469 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dickinson and Her Religion

    • 1078 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Emily Dickinson's imagination is dynamic partly because she thinks of her mental world as always in flux and prefers not to adhere for long to any preconceived religious of philosophical doctrine. At different times she advances opposed positions on such central questions as the goodness of God, the reality of heaven, or the presence of the divine in nature. As a child of her culture, the fixed positions of her local Calvinism are inscribed in her mind and heart, while at the same time she distrusts them…

    • 1078 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    On Emily Dickinson’s famous poem she analyzes the power of truth and the honest way to tell it. The poet is clearly interested in truth by reading this poem. The words that Emily Dickinson uses are powerful and efficient. The poet dresses her words with a great character, and importance, she also forces the readers to discover the connections between the words and look up for the meaning of each word.…

    • 1024 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays