Readers of the poetry of Emily Dickinson over the years have had several different images of the poet in mind, with perhaps the primary one being the "New England Nun," a version of her life which sees her as a heroic virgin who lived behind the walls of her father's house and renounced the world in order to nurture in sorrow the higher and purer love of someone who was absent forever. This images sees the woman opening her heart through her poetry. Thwarted love has been the central issue in the legend surrounding her, and her deeper feelings are manifested in her poetry through her love of nature and children. This image has been described as follows:
Trapped by an era considered intellectually dogmatic and emotionally limited, the poet triumphs through her writing, which outlives the age and proves to be timeless. The poet enters the popular consciousness as a symbol of all natural but hidden genius, and of all the love that is denied freedom (Ferlazzo 13).
Much of this image is a myth, but the power of her poetry to convey emotions and a special sense of love and loss is not. An examination of her life and poetry will show how she treats the subject of love and how she views the emotion and then conveys her perception in her work.
Much of the myth of Emily Dickinson centers on the fact that she lived most of her life in one house, and the concept of home is central in her work and is also embodied with her ideas of love, love for family, love for nature, love for life. Dickinson's image of home is turned into an image of herself--her home is her world, and she has a perception of the architecture of the home that is akin to her perception of the architecture of the body:
The poet uses household terms--from architecture to such humble objects as the cup--the image of house and home per se or its corollaries and surrogates, to treat all of her most pressing concerns, concerns which relate to her place in the u...