[Name of the Writer]

[Name of Instructor]

[Subject]

[Date]

The Image of the Soul in Dickinson's 'The Soul Selects Her Own Society'

Introduction

The paper requires us to write about an image in a poem from Emily Dickinson and we would be talking about her poem, 'The Soul Selects Her Own Society.' Born in December, 1830, Dickinson belonged to a progressive family background. Her father and elder brother, both rose to become treasurers at the Amherst College. This was where she spent most of her life. An introvert by nature, she was prolific in her writings. The writings included poems as well as letters and this was how she stayed in contact with the outside world. It is said that only about a dozen or so of her poems were published at the time of her death in 1886. It was her sister who discovered the wealth she had left behind in the shape of her poems.

Initially, her works were unfavorably reviewed, but by the 20th century, she came to be known as a major American poet (Ford, p. 122). Her works centered on themes of solitude, death and alienation. Her work was unconventional for her time and as reflected in the poem under discussion, her poems typically lack titles, have unconventional capitalizations and punctuation. She was known break free from the traditional rhyme structure and later on, it became as an accepted style of composing poems. Dickinson's introvert nature and her insistence of remaining aloof from the world are reflected in nearly all her works.

Discussion

The poem under discussion is 'The Soul Selects Her Own Society' and according to Johnson, the poem appears to be titled as 303. The first line of the poem indicates the singular image that is dominant throughout the poem. The Soul is the image we are going to focus on. The reason for the selection is that the soul as a singularity has occurred in many of Dickinson's works. In this poem she speaks of the soul as being able to shut itself to the world and be satisfied in a world of its own. This would take us to the heart of the poem.

The opening line, 'the soul selects her own society' shows the soul selects its own world. The word society could mean the society of fellow beings or a state of being. When we speak of Dickinson and knowing most of her works, the society takes up ...