American Literature
Farr, for example, contends that the Master is an unattainable composite figure, "human, with specific
characteristics, but godlike" and speculates that Master may be a "kind of Christian muse". Morbidity Dickinson's poems reflect her "early and
lifelong fascination" with illness, dying and death. Perhaps surprisingly for a New England spinster, her poems allude to death by many methods:
"crucifixion, drowning, hanging, suffocation, freezing, premature burial, shooting, stabbing and guillotinage". She reserved her sharpest insights into
the "death blow aimed by God" and the "funeral in the brain", often reinforced by images of thirst and starvation. Dickinson scholar Vivian Pollak
considers these references an autobiographical reflection of Dickinson's "thirstingstarving persona", an outward expression of her needy selfimage
as small, thin and frail. Dickinson's most psychologically complex poems explore the theme that the loss of hunger for life causes the death of self
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