Abstract:Emily Elizabeth Dickinson is a prominent American poet, who is regarded as the greatest American woman poet. She wrote nearly 1800 poems, which have touched upon the topics of life, love, nature, time and eternity. Though Dickinson lived her life highly introverted, the thoughts in her poems are rather illuminating and insightful. This thesis mostly focuses on her love poems and wants to figure out her view on love in some of her famous and representative love poems. It can be interpreted from her poems that Dickinson believed that earthly love between men and women was full of complexity and uncertainty. She was looking for a kind of love that was certain, immortal and beyond time and space both of which were earthly limitations for mankind. Therefore, Dickinson turned to religious love which was eternal and selfless.

Key words: Emily Dickinson; love poems; view on love; complexity of love, religious love 

从艾米莉·迪金森的著名爱情诗中读她的爱情观

摘  要:艾米莉·迪金森是一位杰出的美国诗人，她被认为是最伟大的美国女诗人之一。她一共写了将近1800首诗歌，诗歌的内容涉及到生命、爱情、自然、时间及永恒等主题。尽管她大部分时候足不出户，在自己的房间里生活，很少参与社交活动，她诗歌中所渗透的观点却是发人深思，很有启迪意义。本论文主要研究她众多诗歌中涉及到爱情的部分诗歌，并从她杰出的具有代表性的爱情诗中分析她的爱情观。从她的爱情诗中我们可以解读出她认为男女之间世俗的爱情是充满着复杂性和不确定性的，她在寻求永恒的超越人类时空限制的爱情，因此她转向了永恒和无私的宗教之爱。

关键词 ：艾米莉·迪金森；爱情诗；爱情观；爱情的复杂性；宗教之爱

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

2.1 The aspect of the relation between spiritual love and physical love 2

2.2 The aspect of Dickinson’s belief in eternal love 3

2.3 The aspect of Dickinson’s awareness of anti-tradition 3

3. The Complexity and Uncertainty of Love 4

3.1 Love is painful 4

3.2 Love is powerful 6

3.3 Love is risky 8

4. The Turn to Religious Love 10

4.1 The transition of Dickinson’s belief to religious love 10

4.2 The strong conclusion on Dickinson’s belief in religious love 11

5. Conclusion 13

References 14

1. Introduction

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson is a prominent American poet, who is regarded as the greatest American woman poet. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Although part of a prominent family with strong ties to its community, Dickinson lived much of her life highly introverted. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence.

While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. Dickinson’s poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Most of her poems deal with the topics of nature, love, life and death.

Dickinson lived in seclusion most of her life and stayed unmarried the whole life. Poems were regarded as her faith. Dickinson was indulged in thinking and meditating, in search of the meaning of life and the existence of self in her own poems. She described what poem was for her in one of her letters. Poem was something that would chill her so deeply that nothing could save her from the chillness. It was only poem that could enable her to feel the way that the top of her head was taken away.