Topic > Emily Dickinson's View on Death in Her Confessional Poetry

Emily Dickinson is considered one of the leading American poets of the 19th century, known for her bold original verse, which is distinguished by epigrammatic compression, autobiographical voice and enigmatic brilliance. One of the most captivating aspects of Emily Dickinson's literature is her ability to present death in various forms. Having lived a life of simplicity and solitude, he wrote poems of great power; questioning the nature of immortality and death, with an almost mantic quality at times. This research paper aims to study Emily Dickinson as a confessional poet and the images of Death in her poetry, mainly focusing on the various possible theoretical explanations for her glorification and acceptance of death as “pleasure”. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayThe most distinctive feature of confessional poetry according to Byrne is the use of first-person narrative to "broaden the scope of the poem" and as a "tool for increasing the reader's emotional identification with the writer" and Dickinson does this placing the emphasis primarily on the moments of his emotional and philosophical crisis. The mention of the self, the fixing of an autobiographical connection, in other words, the use of the first-person point of view allows the reader to delve deeper into the author's thoughts and feelings. Hoffman believes that the roots of the confessional mode are embedded as “romantic lyrics” and “personal epics” which MH Abrams predominantly defines as “great romantic lyric” and “crisis autobiography”. Romantic lyrics always have a dramatic element that comes from the “poetry of experience” where the poet gives us a glimpse into the natural cause, often from personal life, thus allowing the reader to have a sympathetic eye towards the narrative. For example, the presence of the poet in the text itself makes it dramatic for the observer or reader. Many of his poems appear to be a dramatic monologue representing the various faces of human emotions, for example, faith and doubt, hope and despair, etc. Emily Dickinson is depicted as a colossal poet, known for her constant alliance with familiar tropes and spoken words. contempt for conventional associations and his poems bristle with the spirit of wildness and affirmation. A substantial part of her protest was against the psychological deterioration that patriarchy imposes on women with the discourse of marital conduct and duty, as well as against the strict Calvinist religious restrictions, as one of her poems writes: "It is such a small thing to cry - So short a thing to sigh - and yet - for Trades - the dimension of these We men and women die! small or brief things.Dickinson's concern is with the literary conventions of her time in which women were considered the delicate sex, sentimental and liable to faint or swoon at any small shock Dickinson's unapologetic disturbance of male dominance confers to his poetry a sense of confinement. Furthermore, confessional poets focus on topics once considered taboo. Death, romantically accepted as "beautiful" until the nineteenth century, only became a taboo in the twentieth century, making it "invisible", "embarrassing". ” and an “obscene fact” to hide. Dickinson instead considered death a "privilege". Her poetry clearly adheres to the above-mentioned conventions of a confessional poet and therefore it is not wrong to say that Emily Dickinson is a Romantic poetbut at the same time confessional. It describes the different emotional responses that death has on the human soul and mind and allows readers to see death from a different perspective. The ambiguous meaning of death used by Dickinson gives the audience the choice to have their own interpretations about death. Through the different descriptions of death, the author explains the many types of death that individuals experience. In the next topic I will explore how the manifested ideas of the Christian afterlife, the Freudian concept of pleasure, homosexuality, the American Civil War are some of the aspects that give reason to the romanticization of death in his poetry. According to Aries, men and women belonging to Christianity "accepted death as part of community life and die secure in the knowledge of their eventual resurrection." Christianity believes in the spiritual world of souls after life on Earth and in the vitality of good deeds which is rewarded with the gate of Heaven as it rightly says “For the wages of sins, sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in earthly life." Christ Jesus our Lord." Dickinson had no love for formal religion and had never allowed herself to join the church. Yet her poems give readers her very elegant understanding of the Bible and the fervor of faith that did not allow her to reject all the possibility behind the Christian idea of ​​the afterlife, the existence of God or the spiritual dimension. He takes us through the Christian life cycle through rebirth and resurrection be “hindered” as she would fail to meet the “high standards” because she fears that the grace of Jesus will be eclipsed by the affection and beauty of her lover who is “That New Adornate” She states that even if the grace of God were to happen to her and she becomes the one God elects her for salvation and heaven, heaven would be hell without her beloved alternately if he is saved and she damned, such salvation would be useless as they would still be apart. In the aspect of Freudian theory that concerns us, the psyche embraces the “least possible effort”. Smith in “The Death Drive Does Not Think” raises the question of the cogitative or reflective nature of a psychic mechanism when it is forced to repeat. The compulsion to repeat this mechanism makes it “mechanical” and eventually this mechanism begins to play a structural role and consequently becomes noticed and theorized. In theory, then, the now mechanical nature of the "death drive" is tactfully eliminated. This happens because by repeating models of mental and social behavior, psychic expenditure is minimized. The death drive therefore becomes a state of minimum effort which is the key to the Freudian “Pleasure-Principle”. Dickinson in “I Can't Live With You” clearly shows how she considers death as a “privilege” of which she cannot let her beloved take it first and wants death to come to both of them at the same time so as not to have to bear the burden alone. loss. . His recurring images of death in most of his poetry could therefore be taken as “mechanics” that could have resulted as “Pleasure” without “risking any genuinely new investment.” Death is personalized and she is also given a gender identity "he", which made her escape with the help of a friend called "immortality" [footnoteRef:5] with whom she gets carried away as if she were allowed to do so. It implies that most people do not think or talk about death because they are busy with their lives aiming to achieve a goal and therefore are afraid of death that would separate them from their ambitions and families.Emily had thought so much about death that it no longer remained a psychic apparatus. However, the possibility of her beloved's death is so shocking to her that she abandons him, almost in a state of terror. While Emily is unable to face the horror of the possibility that it may happen to her beloved, death for the poet has a very rational definition that is meant to affect all living beings. By expressing the desire for the end of self but not of the other, Dickinson alludes to readers with a suicidal tendency. While MartaBianchi, the niece, had already revealed her aunt's numerous heartbreaks, Ray presents these gentlemen to us as simple "male mentors". His poems are considered a sign of the lost love in this field. Patterson advances a new theory without sweeping away the old ones: “the lost lover was not a man at all. It was a woman." In one of her letters to Abiah Root, Dickinson expresses her views on the women of Amherst: “We have some very charming young women in school this term. I will call them nothing but women, because they are women in every sense of the word." Emily Dickinson's published works contain around forty poems that are addressed, without subterfuge, to another woman. Patterson believes that women could have written love poems to an imaginary man, assuming he was a lover, which patriarchy then required of women of that time. But usual letters from the point of view of a man's love were not usual. No woman would ever write poetry describing a love story between herself and an imaginary woman. Only a strong sense of truth could dictate poems so opposed to 19th century conventions. Dickinson draws on her lyrics through her poetry which includes snippets of her personal life, including her relationship with Susan Huntington Gilbert, who was her sister-in-law. One of his personal letters to Susan ran as follows: "I love you so much, Susie... I miss you, I cry for you... I fall asleep in tears, for your dear face... if it is over" , tell me, and I'll lift the lid of my Ghost box, and put another love inside; but if it still lives and beats, still lives and beats for me, then tell me and I will play the strings of another melody of happiness before I die. It is not that female homosexuality went completely unnoticed in that American century, but the connotations of lesbianism in that period were recognized as a medical or psychological phenomenon that aimed to explain its "etiology", characterization, adaptation and even a "cure" for lesbianism. Perhaps the treatment appeared to be a more humanitarian way of addressing homosexuality than classifying an individual as morally deficient and criminal, but it also allowed psychiatrists to maintain and reinterpret this medical model to keep "deviant" sex under their purview. Dickinson's poetry was published in full only after her death; this suggests his reluctance and fear to give the public even the slightest hint of his individual identity to the world that treated homosexuality as a disorder. Her unfitness to fit into society may have affected her psychologically due to the isolation she was forcing herself into and thus her personal life actually justified her mentioning "death" several times in her poems. Emily Dickinson wrote at the end of the book Romantic Period, and although she was influenced by some ideals of Romanticism, she is more commonly known as a writer of the realist era. And during this period no topic was more central to America than the Civil War in the nineteenth century. According to Drew Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering, the Civil War changed American attitudes toward death in three ways, one of which is that, 2010.