712 by Emily Dickinson
Biography info
96 by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended school for one year and went back home because she was homesick. It was then that her reclusiveness began. She rarely left the house and rarely had visitors.Her friends and family were the topics of her writing and when one of her close friends left her writing became depressing. By the age of thirty she was almost totally recluse and spent the majority of her time reading or with her family. Her poetry tends to depict lonely people and their desire for something more. She and her sister lived in similar isolation whist her brother got married and moved in with his wife next door. Her writings were religious and encouraged by the poetry of seventeenth century Metaphysicalists. She died in 1886 and upon her death they found almost two thousand poems that she wrote. For a womans work to be published at that time was unheard of and her work wasn't published until the early 19th century.
I chose the poem "Because I could not stop for Death..."and it has rhyme and figurative language. She personified death and made it seem like a human being. She also used rhyme in alot of the poem but not the whole thing. The rhythm of the poem also made it alot easier to read and understand. It also held my interest and made me pay alot more attention to what I was reading.

For my second poem I chose her poem numbered 96 and entitled "My life closed twice before its close." It was quite short but it held a great deal of meaning in it. Reading this poem made me look at life with a different prospective because it made me realize that life is short and whilst for most there is a life after death you never really know what life has in store for you.
Emily Dickinson is definately an American poet because she is very much a realist and she writes in the same dark way that many of the realists in America are. She has a very distinct style of writing and it is very American in the way that she writes about life and death and loneliness and wanting.