Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson is probably one of my favorite poets. Her poems are all very short, but they each have a certain amount of weight to them to make them very worth someone's time to read. I read a lot of Dickinson in AP English in high school, so it was interesting to revisit her again in college. I did realize this time around that many of her poems focus on death, or at least have death as a part of them. This was really interesting to me. It really made me wonder if Dickinson may have had a fear of death or something along those lines because of the amount of time she spent writing about it. Death is something that is going to happen to each one of us, and many of us do think about death and what it will be like, especially when someone close to us dies. However, I'm not sure if many of us will say that we think about death as much as Dickinson writes about it. She really seemed to have a fascination with death, and viewed it as a huge event in someone's life. Because of this, I also wonder if she was a Christian. Many Christians seem to accept death a lot more freely than non-Christians because there is the hope in life after death. But in many of her poems, Dickinson seems to view death as an end. I don't really see any sign of a belief that there is more after death in her poems, so I'm curious if she was a Christian or not.