Emily Dickinson's Collected Poems
What is distinctive about Dickinson's choice of words in her poems?
look at her poems
look at her poems
Emily completely disregarded the rules of grammar and language, and instead used words as she saw fit. Due to this style her poetry takes on a unique style which is both admired and criticized. "...she distilled or eliminated inessential language and punctuation from her poems. She leaves out helping verbs and connecting words; she drops endings from verbs and nouns. It is not always clear what her pronouns refer to; sometimes a pronoun refers to a word which does not appear in the poem."
Emily also had a deep love for words and their meanings, and often created poems based solely on defining a words she was interested in at the time, for example, "Pain has an element of blank," "Renunciation is a piercing virtue," and "Hope is the thing with feathers."..."One of her amusements was to read Webster's Dictionary (1844) and to savor words and their definitions."
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/dickinson.html#style