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Essay on Emily Dickinson - I felt a funeral in my brain
Emily Dickinson is America’s best-known female poet and one of the foremost authors in American literature. Dickinson’s simply constructed yet intensely felt, acutely intellectual writings take as their subject issues vital to humanity: the agonies and ecstasies of love, sexuality, the unfathomable nature of death, the horrors of war, God and religious belief, the importance of humor, and musings on the significance of literature, music, and art. The notion that Dickinson was extremely reclusive is a popular one, but it is at best a partial truth. Dickinson’s first editors molded their descriptions of her and her work to conform to 19th-century stereotypes of women writers and to downplay qualities that did not match the conventional conception.
In the early stages of her career, Dickinson’s handwritten lyrics imitated the formalities of print, and her poetic techniques were conventional, but she later began to attend to the visual aspects of her work. For example, she arranged and broke lines of verse in highly unusual ways to underscore meaning and she created extravagantly shaped letters of the alphabet to emphasize or play with a poem’s sense. She also incorporated cutouts from novels, magazines, and even the Bible to augment her own use of language. Even though few of Dickinson’s poems were formally published during her lifetime, she herself “published” by sending out at least one-third of her poems in the more than 1,000 letters she wrote to at least 100 different correspondents. (Allen, Esther)
"I felt a funeral in my brain" by Dickinson expresses the speaker's plunge into lunacy. It is a horrifying poem for both the orator and the person who reads. The presenter experiences the collapse of himself in the bedlam of the cataleptic, and the reader experiences the speaker's sliding insanity and the repulsion most of us feel about going fanatical................
