Dickinson’s Attitude Towards Life and Love from Her Poems

Attitude to life is a very comprehensive term which encompasses a great many aspects of life. Life consists of not a few elements but almost an infinite variety of things. However a poet usually does have some attitude towards life which in his/her case may mean he/she highlights some particular aspects of life not too many of course. In the case of Emily Dickinson we find that she has highlighted some important aspects of life – friendship, society, pain and suffering and growth in life and the most potent factor of life that is love.

In some of Dickinson’s poems she talks about dear people who seem to be regarded more as beloved friends than as objects of romantic ardor. Later in life Dickinson wrote to Samuel Bowles ‘My friends are my estate’ and still later she declared that letters feel to her like immortality because they contain the mind ‘without corporeal friend’. From her statements it seems that sometimes she treasured friendship held at a distance more than the actual presence of friends.

Dickinson has distinctive views on pain, suffering and growth as an integral part of life. Suffering plays a major role in her poems about death and immortality just as death appears in her poems on suffering.

▶Her poems on the themes of suffering and growth belong to three groups:

(1) deprivation as a cause of suffering

(2) suffering leading to disintegration and

(3) suffering as bringing compensatory rewards of spiritual growth.

▶Some of her poems reflect her belief that suffering is necessary for creativity. Poems on love and on nature suggest that suffering will lead to a fulfillment of love or that the fatality which one feels in nature elevates one and sharpens his sensibility. ‘ Death –blow is a life blow to some’ implies that every apparent evil has a corresponding good and good is never brought to birth without evil.

Dickinson considered the subject of love from a philosophical point of view although her love poetry had its source in her own tension is indicated here a tension between her desire to live and her helplessness before death.

▶Thus we find Dickinson has explored different aspects of death. She is indeed an eminent poet of death.