Ayodeji Ilesanmi
Ms. Pape
English 1302.625
March 27, 2012
Research Paper
STEPS ONE THROUGH FOUR
Step One: Topic Choice
Option 2: Choose one of the three poets from the list above.
Discuss theme or themes as they are presented in four poems (minimum) from your poet’s work.
I will like to analyze theme in the works of Emily Dickinson.
Step Two: Two Potential Sources
Martin, Wendy. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.
Meyer, Michael. “A Study of Emily Dickinson.” The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. 831-73. Print.
Step Three:
1. Other Works Cited.
Anderson, Charles R. “The Conscious Self in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.” American Literature 31.3 (1959): 290. Print.
Grabher, Gudrun, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller. The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1998. Print.
Leiter, Sharon. Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. New York, NY: Facts on File, 2007. Print.
2. Annotated/trial Work Cited.
Anderson, Charles R. “The Conscious Self in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.” American Literature 31.3 (1959): 290. Print.
Anderson in this literary criticism discusses the poetic qualities of Emily Dickinson: poems written by her; predominant themes of Dickinson’s poems; source of inspiration for the poems.
The Term Paper on Emily Dickinsons Poetry Death Bloom Poems
EMILY DICKINSON: DEATH TAKES LIFE IN POETRY Emily Dickinson is regarded as one of the greatest American poets that have ever existed. (Benfey 5) The unique qualities of her brief, but emotional, poems were so uncommon that they made her peerless in a sense that her writing could not be compared to. Her diverse poetic character could be directly connected to her tragic and unusual life. The poems ...
Emsley, Sarah. “Is Emily Dickinson a Metaphysical Poet?” Canadian Review of American Studies 33.3 (2003): 249-65. Print.
Emsley in this article explores the metaphysical themes in the poetry of Emily Dickinson: frequent use of abrupt, attention-getting openings in her poetry: focus of Dickinson’s poetry on the theme of death; characteristics of metaphysical poetry; approaches used by Dickinson in tackling problems of metaphysics.
Grabher, Gudrun, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller. The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1998. Print.
Editors and Contributors in this book attempts to provide accurate, up-to-date information about Emily Dickinson, her life and works, her letters and manuscripts, the cultural climate of her times, her reception and influence, and the current state of Dickinson scholarship.
Leiter, Sharon. Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. New York, NY: Facts on File, 2007. Print.
Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson contains extensive analyses and close readings of more than 150 of her best-known poems, including “Because I could not stop for Death,” “I felt a funeral, in my Brain,” and “I like to see it lap the miles.” This encyclopedic guide also discusses the many societal, intellectual, spiritual, and literary influences revealed in Dickinson’s poems.
Martin, Wendy. The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.
Wendy Martin explores the ways in which Dickinson’s personal struggles with romantic love, religious faith, friendship and community shape her poetry. The complex publication history of her works, as well as their reception, is teased out, and a guide to further reading is included. Dickinson emerges not only as one of America’s finest poets, but also as a fiercely independent intellect and an original talent writing poetry far ahead of her time.
The Term Paper on Theme Of Death In Emily Dickinson Poetry
Theme of Death in Emily Dickinson Poetry Not one of Emily Elizabeth Dickinsons readers has met the woman who lived and died in Amherst, Massachusetts more than a century ago, yet most of those same readers who have come to understand her through her work feel as if they know her closely. However it was her reclusive life that made understanding her quite difficult. However, taking a close look at ...
Meyer, Michael. “A Study of Emily Dickinson.” The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. 831-73. Print.
Meyer in this chapter presents a variety of poems by Emily Dickinson, not wholly a representative of her work, but to offer enough poems to suggest the technique and concerns that characterize the uniqueness of her writings.
Notes in Reference to Works Cited:
1. “Emily Dickinson was willing to admit that there are no final answers to great traditional questions that continue to exercise poets and theologians: What are beauty, truth, goodness, love? And she was content to accept as part of a cosmic process beyond comprehension those questions that were more and more to vex modern philosophers and scientists: What is the nature of reality and of the consciousness? In her best poetry, unlike many of her contemporaries, she turned away from the pursuit of absolutes to an exploration of the existential self, something quite different from the subjective lyricism of an earlier generation.” (Anderson 302-303)
“Her precision of thought and her passion for economy in language made all of her utterance tend towards the epigrammatic. The precocious wordplay of her earliest letters had developed by maturity into style of extraordinary sharpness and surprise.”(291)
2. “A number of critics have tried to establish to establish the extent to which Dickinson was familiar with and made use of metaphysical tradition of poetry. While some think that she is related to the metaphysical poets only in spirit, others believe that, as Judith Banzer suggests, she also looked to them for “an occasional technical lesson.”(Emsley 252) Among Emily Dickinson’s poems, there are indeed some that are truly metaphysical, both in handling of philosophical perplexing tensions and in the use of the defining character of metaphysical poetry, the conceit.”(262)
3. “Dickinson’s interest in creating such a sensation makes her poetry unorthodox and difficult to understand. Often abandoning conventional poetic standards, Dickinson chose her words for the feeling they create, for their ability to awaken in the reader a specific emotion at the moment described…..her letters and poems provide fresh ways to investigate and understand the emotional, intellectual, and psychological nature of humanity.”(Martin 40)
The Term Paper on Emily Dickinson Poem Death Nature
... childhood, helping her ability to observe, Emily Dickinson displays her fear of nature in her poem, "I Started Early - Took My ... the fact that they were both poets... Emily Dickinson's younger sister, Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, was born on February 28, 1833. ... (web). While Emily was in seclusion, there were many Dickinson family battles being fought (web). Emily suffered great emotional troubles ...
“Dickinson defied all poetic rules and as a result created inventive poems that allowed her to capture thoughts and emotions in dramatic, though often enigmatic, fashion.” (41)
4. “Dickinson made individual consciousness in the poems the nexus of attention, unmediated by a philosophical theme…… she brought into view with her audacious and critical metaphors the opaque being of humans, the “mysterious peninsula” as she called it, the unmanageable but excruciatingly sensitive and needful portion that we might describe as her preoccupation. She had distaste for lingering, and the resulting compression and fragmentation in her brief poems defeat our efforts to summarize her.” ( Grabher, Gudrun 194)
“Dickinson’s sentences and lines often seem designed (in judicious ellipses, elisions, contractions, puns, and dashes) to afford the greatest possible number of simultaneous and yet mutually resistant readings” (251)
Trial Organizational Thesis Sentence: Emily Dickinson in her poems dealt with critical issues that formed the theme for her poems, some of which includes: Death, Love, nature, God and religion, home and family.
BASIC OUTLINE
I. Introduction
A. Emily Dickinson, one of America’s greatest poets
B. Biographical information
C. Dickinson’s style
II. Body
A. Dickinson’s religious beliefs and her poems
B. Seclusion and Dickinson’s poems
C. Themes in Dickinson’s poems
1. Death
2. Love
3. Nature
4. God and religion
5. Home and family
III. CONCLUSION
A. The Elliptical nature of Dickinson’s poems
B. Summarize thesis statement
C. Dickinson’s originality distinguished her from other great poets of the 19th and 20th centuries
