Portrayal Of Death In Dickinson And Poe'S Poetry

I have decided to compare a few of the poems between the poets Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickenson due to the common theme of death that exists between the two and analysis how the two go about in terms of discussing death and giving feel to it as in do they show a sense of fear and sadness or do they show a sense of pain but ultimately lead into the acceptance of death as a part of life and nothing to be afraid of. This essay will also discuss the lives surrounding said poets to try and help give context to why they may feel the way that they feel about death and why it continues to appear so preveniently in the themes of their poems.

Edgar Allen Poe was born to Elizabeth Arnold in 1809 who was a travelling actor and she later married a man named David Poe jr. He abandoned the two of them in 1810 and passed away without seeing Poe again and his mother passed away a year later which caused Poe to experience death in a very early time but was later raised by another couple. He did not have a great relationship with his adoptive father and was later casted out of the home after he got kicked out of college due to debts and drinking. He later took up writing as his full-time career and rose to writing fame in the late 1830s, his poetry was full of darker themes such as death, revenge, mystery, and murder. Sometimes there would be a dash of the supernatural hidden within the story itself. It could be thought that the reason some of his stories were so dark were due to the fact that his mother died when he was young or the fact that his wife died of illness later in life also though the first one isn’t as likely due to him being so young he wouldn’t have remembered her all that well while the second death happened later in his career and was most likely responsible for some of the death in his works such as the raven in which a man is grieving the loss of the woman he loves and a raven torments him by replying with nevermore with whatever he asks much of which has to do with her, “Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.” Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”” (Levine 615) or Annabelle lee a story in which a man reminisces on remembering his wife and sadly talks about how she has died and blames the world for taking her away from him, “That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee” (Levine 618). The only hole in the theory on the women in his life dying affecting his work is that the raven was his first successful piece of work and his wife had no died at that point so if the theory were to be true then he must have been sad about his birth mother dying but that explanation is flimsy at best due to how young he would’ve been and not remembered her but it is possible that he would still feel sad its just unlikely.

Emily Dickenson is usually remembered as being a weird death obsessed woman who never came out of her home but these thoughts like poes these are not all exactly true and that things are much more complicated then what is originally believed. Her poems have a large range of subjects ranging from religion and current events to the one unavoidable event that everyone must face in the future which is death. Her poems were exceptionally short, but she wrote many with one volume of her works holding 1,800 this shows she put much of her life to be dedicated to her work. She was born into a very prominent family in amherest and her father was a state representative she did not see him a lot and stayed at the home in amherest, she attended a female seminary which prepares people for roles in the church, she did not graduate from the place though as she had trouble being what they wanted her to be which would later influence her work when discussing religion. some time after this she began her writing of poems. Her style of writing was very short usually her poems would only be a few sentences at most a paragraph but there were times when her poems would become much longer then would be expected of her such as 347 which goes on for about 7 stanzas while others are usually 2-4 stanzas. The theme of death seems to reappear repeatedly in her works and sometimes it can be very obvious that she is discussing death when this happens while other times it could be argued that she was not discussing death but the one thing she doesn’t seem to do is paint death as this terrifying finality to life but rather as something to accept coming and not to fight it. An example of her portraying death would be in poem 479 aka Because I could not stop for death, “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me The Carriage held but just Ourselves And Immortality.” (Levine 1676) this poem portrays death as a kind force that does not come rushing for someone but kindly comes for us when it is our time and does so in a way that is not painful as long as we do not try and fight it, this reason for portraying death could be that she had begun to have health problems around 1862 and those around her were passing such as her father and her 8 year old nephew. perhaps she had decided to not fear death but to accept it for what it is and that would be an aspect of life, but we may never fully know exactly the full reasoning for her reason to portray death like this

There are similarities between Poe and Dickenson in both their writing and things about their own lives that sort of mirror each other a bit. Edgar Allen Poe has had a character assassination on him by a close friend of his by writing a misleading obituary and changing letters that he sent out to make him look like a jerk to people in a vain attempt to destroy his legacy but if anything it seems to help bolster his fame, Emily Dickenson was seen as a “reclusive, eccentric, death-obsessed spinster who wrote in fits and starts as the spirit moved her”(Levine, 1654) many of these are unfounded and the origins of them are simple things that were exaggerated such as her writing in fits could have been in reference to how much she wrote which could also tie into the reclusive and eccentric part, the death obsessed part is an exaggeration of how much death was in her works while some was indeed there it wasn’t all she wrote about.

While there was a recurring theme in both their works of death the way that they went about portraying these deaths were very different from each other, Edgar Allen Poe wrote about death in a very macabre and grim manner and the deaths are usually grizzly and depressing which is intended to help with the narrative and as discussed earlier could stem from losing some of the women in his life, Emily writes about death as something that seems to come naturally and that while sometimes it hurts and isn’t pleasant it is not something you should fear or hate and that it is a natural part of life.

This was a good look into a subject that would not usually be touched upon and while many of their works are highly different from each other there is a sorta parallel between the two when it comes to how they are remembered and a reversed perspective how they had viewed the world around them while Poe saw death as bad and something to fear Dickenson saw it as a natural thing to not fear.