ON BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH.docVIP

ON BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH Abstract: Death and eternity are the major themes in most of Emily Dickinson’s poems.“ Because I could not stop for death ”is one of her classic poems. Through the analysis, this essay clarifies infinite conceptions by the dialectical relationship between reality and imagination, the known and the unknown. And it tells what’s eternity in Dickson’s eyes. Keywords: death, eternity, finite, infinite Introduction Emily Dickinson（1830-1886）, the American best-known female poet ，was one of the foremost authors in American literature. Emily Dickinson ’s poems, as well as Walt Whitman’s, were considered as a part of American renaissance; they were regarded as pioneers of imagism. Both of them rejected custom and received wisdom and experimented with poetic style. She however differs from Whitman in a variety of ways. For one thing, Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the inner life of the individual. Whereas Whitman is national in his outlook, Dickinson is regional Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10,1830. She lived almost her entire life in the same town (much of it in the same house), traveled infrequently, never married, and in her last years never left the grounds of her family. So she was called vestal of Amherst. And yet despite this narrow -- some might say -- pathologically constricted-outward experience, she was an extremely intelligent, highly sensitive, and deeply passionate person who throughout her adult life wrote poems (add up to around 2000 ) that were startlingly original in both content and technique, poems that would profoun