ON BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH

Abstract: Death and eternity are the major themes in most of Emily Dickinson’s 
poems.“ Because I could not stop for death ”is one of her classic poems. 
Through the analysis, this essay clarifies infinite conceptions by the 
dialectical relationship between reality and imagination, the known and 
the unknown. And it tells what’s eternity in Dickson’s eyes. 

Keywords: death, eternity, finite, infinite 

Introduction  
    Emily Dickinson（1830-1886）, the American best-known female poet ，was 
one of the foremost authors in American literature. Emily Dickinson ’s 
poems, as well as Walt Whitman’s, were considered as a part of "American 
renaissance"; they were regarded as pioneers of imagism. Both of them rejected 
custom and received wisdom and experimented with poetic style. She however 
differs from Whitman in a variety of ways. For one thing, Whitman seems 
to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the inner life 
of the individual. Whereas Whitman is "national" in his outlook, Dickinson 
is "regional" 

    Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10,1830. 
She lived almost her entire life in the same town (much of it in the same 
house), traveled infrequently, never married, and in her last years never 
left the grounds of her family. So she was called "vestal of Amherst". 
And yet despite this narrow -- some might say -- pathologically constricted-outward 
experience, she was an extremely intelligent, highly sensitive, and deeply 
passionate person who throughout her adult life wrote poems (add up to 
around 2000 ) that were startlingly original in both content and technique, 
poems that would profoundly influence several generations of American poets 
and that would win her a secure position as one of the greatest poets that 
America has ever produced