Emily Dickinson wrote a highly characteristic poetry on the joy and pain of existence. Her poetry is compressed, sharp, but sometimes ambiguous. It is very interesting because she exploits the potentialities of the form as much as the capacities of the semantics. In "After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes", one of her definition poems, she refers to nerves sitting like tombs and uses "Hour of Lead" and "Quartz contentment" as metaphors of special awareness …showed first 75 words of 2872 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2872 total…terrible possibility? Death? Do the words "remembered if outlived" indicate survival because of "remembered"? Dickison keeps a lot of questions opened, and lets everybody interpret it in different ways. Bibliography: Primary Source: Dickinson, Emily. A Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse. Ed, Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 1968, 1993. Secondary Source: Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. Pollak, Vivian R. Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender. USA: Cornell University Press, 1984.