Reflection: The Writing Style of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson is hailed to be one of the greatest and most popular poets even up into the modern day where many people still read her works for inspiration. It is quite sad, looking back, that she did not know how well she was liked due to the fact that she actually only published a fraction of what she wrote during her lifetime, so she could not hear the enormous praise of her writings by many people.

Being born into a New England family, even she admitted that she had a “New Englandly” (McChesney 1). The ideals that she was raised around affected the way that she interpreted information, so it defiantly shows in her writing. It was obvious from very early on that Emily Dickinson was going to be some kind of poet, maybe even a famous one. In one of her letters to her friends, she contemplates why people, including herself, always take the fast fleeting days of summer for granted and only realize that they are gone once summer is almost at an end, yet next summer people do the same thing (McChesney 3). At the time, she was only fifteen years old, and instead of being “concerned with clothes and hair and social activities, Dickinson was already measuring her days with the weights and balances of a philosopher” (McChesney 3). Like other women of her time period, she was forced to do all of the housework, and subsequently, had very little time to actually write down all of the poet genius in her head. Her family, for the longest time, had no idea that she was writing poetry (McChesney 3).

One aspect of her writing style that she developed very early one in her writing life was when she was writing a letter to her cousin and she put a “blank” line instead of a salutation, to which she claimed that “’That isn’t an empty blank where I began—it is so full of affection that you can’t see any—that’s all’” (McChesney 3). These empty blanks that only she knew what went in them were continued to be used and perfected over her writing career (McChesney 3). One good example is when she says that “’I found the words to every thought I ever had – but One – ‘”which gives the impression that the word which is not there is unutterable word (Fagan 1). These dashes are “the physical manifestations of thought” which can be interpreted differently, depending on the reader (Fagan 2).

Another characteristic of her writing style is her love of nature that she shared with the rest of her family. Her focus in most of her works about nature was about the “miniature world of a leaf, a blade of grass, or an insect” (McChesney 3). By doing this she started to compare the relationships between the “tiny and the infinite” which led her to compare “the relationships of the natural world at hand with the boundless world of the universe” (McChesney 1). Even before Emily was fully grown and old, she seemed to poses the wisdom of an ancient thinker who spent the last several centuries just thinking.

McChesney, Sandra. "A View from the Window: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson." In Harold Bloom, ed. Emily Dickinson, Bloom's BioCritiques. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 2002. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.


Fagan, Deirdre. "Emily Dickinson's Unutterable Word." Emily Dickinson Journal 14, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 70–75. Quoted as "Emily Dickinson's Unutterable Word" in Bloom, Harold, ed. Emily Dickinson, New Edition, Bloom's Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2008.Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.