Dickinson’s simply constructed yet intensely felt, acutely intellectual 
writings take as their subject issues vital to humanity: the agonies and 
ecstasies of love, sexuality, the unfathomable nature of death, the horrors 
of war, God and religious belief, the importance of humor, and musings 
on the significance of literature, music, and art. 

    Emily Dickinson enjoys the King James Version of the Bible, as well 
as authors such as English WRTERS William Shakespeare, John Milton, Charles 
Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle. 
Dickinson’s early style shows the strong influence of William Shakespeare, 
Barrett Browning, Scottish poet Robert Browning, and English poets John 
Keats and George Herbert. And Dickinson read Emerson appreciatively, who 
became a pervasive and, in a sense, formative influence over her. As George 
F. Whicher notes, "Her sole function was to test the Transcendentalist 
ethic in its application to the inner life". 

1“death” in Emily Dickinson’s poets 

    For as long as history has been recorded and probably for much longer, 
man has always been different idea of his own death. Even those of us who 
have accepted death graciously, have at least in some way, --- feared, 
dreaded, or attempted to delay its arrival. We have personified death-- 
as an evildoer dressed in all black, its presence swoops down upon us and 
chokes the life from us as though it were some street murder with malicious 
intent. But in reality, we know that death is not the chaotic grim reaper 
of fairy tales and mythology. Rather than being a cruel and unfair prankster 
of evil, death is an unavoidable and natural part of life itself. 

    Death and immorality is the major theme in the largest portion of Emily 
Dickinson’s poetry. Her preoccupation with these subjects amounted to an 
obsession so that about one third of her poems dwell on them. Dickinson’s 
many friends died before her, and the fact that death seemed to occur often 
in the Amherst of the time added to her gloomy meditation. Dickinson’s 
is not sheer depiction of death, but an emphatic one of relations between 
life and death, death and love, death and eternity. Death is a must-be-crossed 
bridge. She did not fear it, because the arrival in another world is only 
through the grave and the forgiveness from God is the only way to eternity