Emily Dickinson writing style

Emily Dickinson has proven herself to be one of the greats of poetry in her time and beyond. Her poems resonate today, and her unique writing style remains unmatched. One of her distinctive elements as a poet is her use of dashes. They are consistent in her works, and, as Fagan says, they “become a thread between the sayable and the unsayable, a caesura between life and death, a pause, a gasp, sometimes a chasm over which one must make a leap of understanding.” She claims that the dash represents more than just a piece of punctuation. Dickinson’s writing style consists of a lot of figurative language such as rhymes, imagery, and personification. Her common themes, or motifs, include nature, the individual and their relation to different things like God and death, and beauty. Her writing is more like the transcendentalists because of its usual optimistic characteristics, but it resembles Modernism because it took poetry in a new direction that modernists were really just trying to reach.

Dickinson’s poem, “The Soul selects her own Society”, shows exactly the extent of her dashes. Literally every line ends in a dash, and some contain them within lines. It reads: “The Soul selects her own Society—then—shuts the door—“ (Dickinson 440). Although Fagan claims that there is an utterly profound reason for these dashes in Dickinson’s writing, it seems like more of just a unique style she used, and simply and added pause to make the poems read the way she intended. In “Because I could not stop for Death”, Dickinson explains that death occurred when she would not give in to it, but it brings her “toward eternity” (448). This shows her interest in death, and that she views it as a bridge to a new eternity. Dickinson’s “The Savior must have been a Docile Gentleman” shows her Christian influence. She is not necessarily Christian, but she still writes about it. In “Hope is the thing with Feathers”, she explains that hope is something that lives in the soul, and in the soul of everyone, and there is not a storm strong enough “that could abash the little bird” (Dickinson). Whether religiously, morally, or intuitively based, Dickinson’s optimistic hope is something that will not be destroyed so easily.

Dickinson uses figurative language in just about every poem. There are rhymes such as “and sweetest in the gale is heard; and sore must be the storm that could abash the little bird that kept so many warm” (Dickinson). In the same poem she gives hope animal qualities. She says that hope has feathers and perches in the soul. Arguably, every poem of Dickinson’s uses imagery. She writes words that cause the reader to see the images that she describes. Her beautiful and complex writing style help create these images in a person’s mind. Ultimately, getting the reader to visualize what the writer creates is one of the main goals. They basically just want to get the people to see their vision.


Dickinson, Emily. "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers (254)- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More." Poets.org. Web. 21 Mar. 2012.


Dickinson, Emily. “from Dickinson’s Poetry.” Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 437-451. Print.


Fagan, Deirdre. "Emily Dickinson's Unutterable Word." Emily Dickinson Journal 14, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 70–75. Quoted as "Emily Dickinson's Unutterable Word" in Bloom, Harold, ed. Emily Dickinson, New Edition, Bloom's Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2008.Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin