People began to search for new meanings in life. Emily Dickinson undertook this journey through her prose.
Many believe her lifestyle and solitude brought her to the point of trancendentalism in her writing. During Emily Dickinson's life, she suffered many experiences that eventually sent her into seclusion, and those events, along with her reclusiveness, had a great impact on her poetry. Dickinson approached her poetry inductively, that is, she combined words to arrive at whatever conclusion the patterns of the words suggested, rather than starting out with a specific theme or message. Dickinson frequently used words with weight in her work, and as a result her works usually cannot be grasped fully in one reading without dissecting each word individually.
Dickinson was not as interested in detail, but in the circumference of the idea. Many of her poems leave the reader lacking a definite answer to the issues of death brought up within the poems. As with most poetry, Dickinson often writes about subjects and activities that relate her thoughts in a roundabout way. For example, in her poem "I Heard a Fly Buzz- a dead observer watches a fly buzzing around during the last few moments of his existence. Of course, she could really care less about talking about a fly. She is trying to share of views on death. Her writings usually supply, at least, a direction of her thoughts on this matter, but the reader must use intuition in order decipher the deeper meanings. While she expresses the thought that death is simply a separation from loved ones, whittled in with doubts about Christian views, Dickinson's highly regarded poetry communicates to the readers that death is no big deal and almost welcomes bereavement, but, at times, one gathers a sense that death truly scares her to death "no pun intended.
Dickinson broke new ground in striving for conciseness. She stripped her language of superfluous words and saw to it that those that remained were vivid and exact.
