Belonging Essay

An individual’s experiences with their society shape their views on belonging, influencing the decisions they make regarding their association with their world and identity. These notions of belonging are explored by the poet Emily Dickinson through her anthology The Selected Poetry of Emily Dickinson, specifically the semi – autobiographical poems “This is my letter to the world”, “I died for beauty but was scarce”, “I had been hungry all the years” and “A word dropped careless on a page”. These texts portray how an individual’s ideals towards belonging are influenced by their relationship with their world and why some may react differently to these experiences and developed ideals.
An individual’s desire to belong develops as they further experience the connection they   share with their world; some may lose this desire as they are continually rejected by this world. Dickinson depicts her loss of interest in belonging to the literary world, which had rejected her poetry, in the metonymic poems “Letter” and “Word”. Indifference towards the lack of approval from the literary world and a sense of hope is instilled within this text by her reference to a prophesised future where her poetry is accepted, through the metaphor of the “hands I cannot see”. This belief is similarly utilised in “Word” as Dickinson immortalises her poetry as well as herself through the pun of the “wrinkled maker” who laid down in the metaphoric “perpetual seam”, meaning her work will transcend time and be appreciated in the future, “at distances of centuries” from her time, highlighting her loss of interest in belonging to the literary society, of that time. Extending off of this Dickinson emphasises the power of her words, as well as words in general, demonstrating how fast they may spread and affect others through the analogy of disease with “infection” and “Malaria”, despite their current rejection by the literary canon. Dickinson looked further, past her time, where her work would’ve been...