How does Dickinsons poetry differ from that of her contemporaries?
Emily Dickinson’s poetry shares characteristics with her contemporaries, but her work departs in other ways from poetry written at the time. She wrote about topics (spirituality, nature, art) that interested her contemporaries, and the structure of her poems often imitates common hymn meter, used frequently in both religious and non-religious music. However, Dickinson’s treatment of these subjects and her vast vocabulary resulted in poems that are more concise, less sentimental, and more layered than that of her contemporaries: “Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone” (Fr 124) to describe a grave, “Zero at the Bone” to denote fear (Fr 1096), and “Faith slips – and laughs, and rallies” (Fr 373) to protray the human effort to believe in something beyond the here and now. See Major Characteristics of Dickinson’s Poetry.
