Term Papers on Emily Dickinson

Term Paper Title	Emily Dickinson
# of Words	1691
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	6.76

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was the second daughter of a prominent lawyer and one-term United States congressional representative, Edward Dickinson and his wife, Emily Norcross Dickinson. Being rooted in the puritanical Massachusetts of the 1800’s, the Dickinson children were raised in the Christian tradition, and they were expected to take up their father’s religious beliefs and values without argument. Later in life, Emily would come to challenge these conventional religious viewpoints of her father and the church, and the challenges she met with would later contribute to the strength of her poetry.

From 1840 to 1847, Emily attended the Amherst Academy. Afterwards, she left for the South Hadley Female Seminary where she started to blossom into a delicate young woman. She had a demure manner that was almost fun with her close friends, but Emily could be shy, silent, or even depreciating in the presence of strangers. Although she was successful at college, Emily returned after only one year at the seminary in 1848 to Amherst where she began her life of seclusion. Refusing to see almost everyone that came to visit, Emily seldom left her father’s house. In her entire life, she took one trip to Philadelphia, one to Washington, and a few trips to Boston. During this time, her early twenties, Emily began to write poetry seriously. Fortunately, during those rare journeys Emily met two very influential men that would be sources of inspiration and guidance:

Charles Wadsworth and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

The Reverend Charles Wadsworth, age 41, had a powerful effect on Emily’s life and her poetry. She met Charles on her trip to Philadelphia. Wadsworth, like Dickinson, was a solitary, romantic person that Emily could confide in when writing her poetry. Many of Dickinson’s critics believe that Wadsworth was the focal point of Emily’s love poems.

When Emily had a sizable backlog of poems, she sought out somebody for advice about anonymous publication, and on April 15, 1862 she found Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an eminent literary man. Although Higginson advised Dickinson against publishing her poetry, he did see the creative originality in her poetry, and he remained Emily’s "preceptor" for the remainder of her life. It was after that correspondence in 1862 that Emily decided against publishing her poems, and, as a result, only seven of her poems were published in her lifetime - five of them in the Springfield Republican. The remainder of the works would wait until after Dickinson’s death.

The later years of Dickinson’s life were primarily spent in mourning because of several deaths within the time frame of a few years. Emily’s father died in 1874, her nephew Gilbert died in 1883, and both Charles Wadsworth and Emily’s mother died in 1882. Over those few years, many of the most influential and precious friendships of Emily’s passed away, and that gave way to the more concentrated obsession with death in her poetry. On June 14, 1884 Emily’s obsessions and poetic speculations started to come to a stop when she suffered the first attack of her terminal illness. Throughout the year of 1885, Emily was confined to bed in her family’s house where she had lived her entire life, and on May 15, 1886 Emily took her last breath at the age of 56. At that moment the world lost one of its most talented and insightful poets. Emily left behind nearly 2,000 poems.

Because I could not stop for Death

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but e...

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