American Literature
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
and place this at "the interface of murder and suicide". Gospel poems Throughout her life, Dickinson wrote poems reflecting a preoccupation with
the teachings of Jesus Christ and, indeed, many are addressed to him. She stresses the Gospels' contemporary pertinence and recreates them,
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