Emily Dickinson's poetry is commonly noted for its stylistic idiosyncrasies: dashes, slant rhyme, and unconventional use of capitalization. The capitalization in her poetry has always had a particularly strong impact on readers. As the Emily Dickinson Museum notes, her choices in capitalization "stress and personify common nouns." They render her images more clear and often concretize abstract concepts. Here are a few examples from some of Dickinson's most famous poems:
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
Here, the capitalization of "Death" (alongside the use of the pronoun "he") makes death into an individual, male figure. The same can be said about the capitalization of "Ourselves" and "Immortality" which place the speaker, death and immortality in the same physical space. Her style allows her to make ideas as real, in the text, as people. This same idea is present in the following excerpt:
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
In their capitalized form, "Slant" and "Heft"—usually understood as abstract measurements—are given form. Likewise, "Winter Afternoons" and "Cathedral Tunes" gain new specificity. She traces a familiar pattern in this final example, portraying poets as lamplighters:
The Poets light but Lamps —
Themselves — go out —
The Wicks they stimulate
If vital Light
Once again, notice the capitalization of "Lamps," "Wicks," and bringers of "Light." By capitalizing these words, she elevates their meaning and importance within the work. She emphasizes the transience of a poet's individual life, but the endurance of their work and insight, framing it as "Light."
This unusual stylistic choice worked well for Dickinson because it allowed her the freedom to be simultaneously mysterious and pinpoint specific. Within her texts, she could place herself in a carriage with death, give the same weight to a slant of sunlight as sacred church music and imagine poets as the literal "luminaries" of their time. Capitalization gave her an avenue to explore concepts in a solid form, fusing intuitive feeling and intellectual thought.
