First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –Emily Dickinson’s Attitude toward Death

Abstract

Emily Dickinson, an American lyrical poet, who is placed an important position of the nineteenth century literature, the themes of her poetry usually focuses on Life, Nature, and Death which spurs widely discussion in later scholars － especially Death. Death is the most mysterious mystery and the key idea of Emily Dickinson’s poems. As Pamula Bennett writes in the introduction of Emily Dickinson: “she twists the strands of Puritan and sentimental concepts of God into a critique of both” (20). Through the theme, we see how she struggles between personal emotion and religion. How does she develop the idea of death, pain, to the imagery of religion, immortality? Her attitude toward death invites us to understand the changes of the silence woman poet’s inner world.