“I DIED FOR BEAUTY” BY EMILY DICKINSON

“I died for beauty” by Emily Dickinson



“I died for beauty” by Emily Dickinson

Introduction

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was a poet U.S., whose passionate poetry has placed its author in the small pantheon of founding American poets now shares with Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson spent much of his life confined in a room in the house of his father in Amherst, and but five poems (three of them published without his signature and one without the author's knowledge), his enormous work remained unpublished and hidden until after his death.

It is a fact that all her life, Emily Dickinson is considered the mystery by questioning the absence of death, nature, soul, God's existence. She did not contemplate the outside, like many of her elders Romantics, but flowing in them or reflects them, leaving them flush through the prism of her inexhaustible curiosity and a multitude of approaches, reports intends or incongruous, which confuse and stimulate the reader in an endless spiral (Pickard, 2010).

Critical Analysis

Many of Emily Dickinson's works attempt to resolve very personal problems and were written in a heightened emotional state. Her poetry deals not only with the destructive forces of nature which lead to death, fear and the loss of self, but also with its converse; sensibility and human ecstasy. In some poems she shows a calm and civilized acceptance of death. She was also intensely aware of life, reacting to forces such as mountains, the sea, the night, flowers and thunderstorms with a mystical but child-like simplicity. At the same time her intellectual perception of these forces also reveals the beauty of their elemental form.

In I Died for Beauty she seemingly makes reference to the final stanza of John Keats' 1812 Ode on a Grecian Urn—'Beauty is truth, truth, beauty'. Andrew Motion (1997) sees this poem as an 'inquiry into the function of art and of its relation to life.' Motion comments that this 'reminds us that art is simultaneously like life and unlike it. Thus, Keats the poet, in loving beauty and truth must remain faithful to the world of experience rather than opt for a world of substitutes and abstractions.'

In contrast, there is a transcendent awareness of immortality in Emily Dickinson's verses. The temporal seems less important than the life of the mind and spirit. Living confined, by choice, her room becomes her near ...