How should I read Emily Dickinson?

Emily Dickinson once defined poetry this way: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way? read more

Emily Dickinson writes in sound bites; it's as if she is talking out loud and her randomly elegant thoughts arrange themselves on paper. read more

Reading Dickinson's poetry often leaves readers feeling exactly this way, because she names so incisively many of our most troubling emotions and perceptions. But often, too, her poetry can make readers feel this way because it baffles and challenges expectations of what a poem should be. read more

One of Dickinson’s best-known poems, this is one of several poems on this list which takes death as its theme. Death never seems to have been far from Emily Dickinson’s mind, and this poem, which muses upon the moment of death with everyone gathered around the speaker’s deathbed, also features a Dickinsonian favourite: the mysterious fly. read more