Emily Dickinson's Poems

Dickinson isn’t always Gothic, but many of her best and best-known poems revolve around that central Gothic question: what is it like to be dead?

Poems beginning with lines like “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” “If I may have it, when it’s Dead,” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” play along the boundary between the living and the dead and ask uncomfortable questions about the afterlife, such as whether there is one.

It’s surely no coincidence that her creative peak coincided with the Civil War. But what makes Dickinson… show more.