How Emily Dickinson Created Immortality

Song Xiuming(Rocco)
Professor Aaron Crippen
English Writing (4)
15 May 2011
How Emily Dickinson Created Immortality?
According to Grossman, the function of poetry is to obtain for everybody one kind of success at the limit of the autonomy of the will. The natural will is mortal—no one can escape from death, but the poetry language can conserve the images, and more important, the human spirits. The immortality, however, is produced among the author and the reader. That is to say, the poetry language speaks through the author, and the author writes down a poem; and then comes the part of the reader—its readers put themselves into the poem, and if they could find something meaningful to themselves in the poem, they will bear this poem in their mind. As the written process can and will happen for one time, so without the readers, the poem will end. Different from the written part, the reading process can keep happening for unlimited times, and will do if the poem contains certain universal arousals for the readers. In this way, readers complete the creation of immortality.
Now it comes to Emily Dickinson, many people may argue that a poet choosing not to publish her poems must in desperate need of keeping her solitude. Maybe that is true, but it’s not the whole picture. Emily Dickinson is anyway a human being, even a bit different for the average but still. And every human being wants to be eternal, which is born in human nature from the very beginning of human race. In China almost everyone know the myth of Qin Shihuang looking for the medicine that could keep him from an end to his mortal life, and in ancient Egypt people try to create immortality by making mummies. All these prove that the mortal human wants an immortal life, and so did Emily Dickinson. This poet definitely wanted to have an eternal life, otherwise she would have committed suicide for thousands of times rather than writing poetry. She also mentioned her poems in the letters she wrote to her...