Identify And Analyse Some Of The Major Themes Or Subjects In Emily Dickinson’S Poetry.

Identify and analyse some of the major themes or subjects in Emily Dickinson’s poetry.  

Regarded as one of America’s greatest poets, Emily Dickinson stands out among her literary contemporaries; due to her originality, she was often described in a series of contrasts to what she was not and one of the most common of these was the contrast to Walt Whitman. Both poets contributed great works at the same time in America (during the Civil War), but unlike Whitman’s truly American style, Dickinson’s collection is considered the last breath of New England Puritanism and whilst Whitman’s poems contain multiple references to social or political events in America, Dickinson’s contain none; her work is concerned with individual experience and inner psychology.
    She lived a very reclusive life, often shut away in the confines of her Father’s house with only her own thoughts, family and close friends as company and rarely venturing further than the garden. Her themes are therefore personal and often very intense; “When she went into reclusion...she took her language with her...removed from sensation into words of privately encoded intent.” (Porter 1981, p.116-117) Being detached from events outside the parameters she erected for herself meant that she took wider themes of love, death, religion and nature and condensed them down to an intimate level. Just as she isolated herself from the world, she also isolated experience from its wider context.
    The poem which beings “I cannot live with you” appears to explain Dickinson’s desire for Susan Gilbert and the poem encompasses the themes of isolation, love and pain. In the opening stanza Emily makes it clear that she has set herself apart from the world outside of her home:

“I cannot live with You-
It would be Life-
And Life is over there-
Behind the shelf”           (Lauter 2006, p.3067)

She associates Susan with Life, with a capital ‘L’, which implies something complete and something which she has given up...