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Emily Dickinson's Vision of Life

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In one way or another, a poet's personal life and experiences influence the style and content of their writing; some more than others. Emily Dickinson is one of the most renowned poets of her time and is recognized for the amount of genuine, emotional insight into life, death, and love she was able to show through the words of her poetry. Many believe Dickinson's lifestyle and solitude brought her to that point in her writing. During Emily Dickinson's life, she suffered many experiences that eventually sent her into seclusion, and those events, along with her reclusiveness, had a great impact on her poetry. According to Conrad Aiken, Nature "seemed to her a more manifest and more beautiful evidence of Divine Will than creeds and churches  (NCLC 21:35). Her views and feelings toward faith and God placed her further away from society and created even more distance in her personal relationships with her family and close friends (Ravert 1). The factors that drove Emily Dickinson to live as she did, to withdraw from the world, are numerous, but most believe one of the most prominent reasons was that she simply chose to live that way. It seems she became a hermit by deliberate and conscious choice, for she had no interest in public life or the ways of society (Tate, Reactionary 22-24). In an 1891 essay, composed by Mabel L. Todd, the critic stated Emily "had tried society and the world but found it lacking" (NCLC 21:14). In Dickinson's poems concerning travel or the poems of adventure of the mind, the first way to look at "Emily Dickinson Abroad" lies in her artistic technique plus her imaginative passion in creating an inner world as a way to journey abroad. This technique covers three significant dimensions: the movement from consciousness to unconsciousness, from reality to fantasy, and from Amherst to the whole universe: heaven, death, eternity and immortality. The presumption is based on her belief that she dwells "in possibility

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