Emily Dickinson: How Illness Shaped Her Writing Essay -- Biography

Emily Dickinson has a characteristic writing modal value. Dickinsons use of dashes and randomly placed gravid letters through kayoed her work give her a unique style that is contradictory to her time. Many believe that it was her genius that caused this while steady others believes it was her unhealthiness that contributed to her characteristic writing style. Lyndall Gordons biography offers a major revelation establish that Dickinson suffered from epilepsy. The author makes her case partly through prescriptions that Dickinson received (the papers still survive) and reinterprets poems such as I felt a Cleaving in my theme to describe the poets condition. She writes that sickness is a more sensible reason for retirement than disappointed love. Epilepsy carried a stigma, and Gordon explains that because diagnosis was rarely uttered, still less dress on paper, theres little chance of explicit evidence (Ciuraru). Gordon makes a glib-tongued case for the link between epilepsys vis ual and cerebral distortions and Dickinsons extraordinary lyric poem (Showalter). By examining the imagery, diction, symbolism and tone in the poems I Felt a Funeral in my Brain, I Felt a Cleaving in my estimation and Pain, the reader can decipher the characteristics of Emilys unsoundness brought out in her writing.Through the use of imagery, diction and symbolism in these three poems, the reader can get a sense of the pain and distraught that Dickinson may have felt because of her illness. In I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind the speaker talks of how my Brain had split (2). The phrase Brain (2) is capitalized to add emphasis on the word. To have ones brain split (2) gives the illusion of ones brain really being rendered in two. To have this actually happen wou... ...is experiencing. Pain is expound as an Element of Blank (1). Blank is nonhingness. It cannot recollect (2), it cannot look on a time when it was not there. It is difficult and hard to live with. The speaker cannot remember When it begun-Or if there were/ A time when it was not-(3-4). The illness has become such a part of the speakers life, she cannot remember a time when it did not occur. The speaker has no Future (5) with the pain of the illness. The illusion of infinity with the illness and pain is given and reiterated in the next line with Its measureless contain-(6). The only future the speaker has is New Periods- Of Pain (8). Because all the delivery are capitalized the reader is given the feeling of decisiveness. That this is all there is, zipper more than pain. The dash causes the reader to pause and digest this information and the finality of it.