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Techniques

1.  Precise use of language, often to produce shocking irony

2.  Irony, ambiguity, and paradox appear in common experiences

3.  Themes:  nature, love, faith, pain, the self, and especially immortality, death, and doubt

4.  Breaks poetic conventions to achieve her goal, and rejects 19th Century themes and techniques

5.  "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant-- / Success in Circuit lies"

6.  Apparent gaps are filled with meaning if the reader is sensitive to her use of personification, allusion, symbolism, startling syntax, and odd diction

7.  It helps to read her poems aloud

8.  White is the ultimate symbol of paradox:  it is the most concrete of colors, but also the visible absence of color.  It represents both energy (white heat) and loneliness (polar cold).  It represents the white radiance of eternity and the white terror of the shroud.

9.  Robert Frost said, "she came plunging through.  The meter and the rhyme often had to take care of itself."

10.  She often rages against death because she could not gather hard evidence about an afterlife, and she is fascinated by death bed scenes.

11.  She is best noted for unusual diction and syntax, the use of many dashes, and unusual capitalization.

One of only two known pictures of Emily Dickinson

Emily's home in Amherst, Mass.