"I heard a buzz.." Emily Dickinson

I will be doing a blog over "I heard a buzz" by Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson is known for hew great number of poems and their popularity that soured after her death. The poem is about how in the death of this person they see a fly. Emily gives a great amount of detail about those few seconds before death seeing the fly. "Talking about those few seconds of life that With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, Between the light and me; the person had Emily says, " (Dickinson) This shows the how great of an author Emily was. She uses the least amount of actual story but with such great detail, those few seconds can have a thousand words. The author Ralph Waldo Emerson was also very well known for doing this because he would also write things with an exponential amount of detail. This makes both Emily Dickinson and Ralph Emerson some of the most well known authors still today because of how they write, no so much what they write. That is the key to being popular and legendary. Many people can write a great story, poem, or novel. It’s the people whose writing is amazing and legendary in all their works, not just one. I think these two are legendary because they are not popular for just a story or poem; they are legendary for just about all of them together. Another author who has achieved this legendary status is Mr. Henry David Thoreau. All three have made huge strides in literature that continue to be popular today. A literary critic by the name of Randall Huff, whom I have read criticisms before and found him very insightful, said this about her poem; “The startling premise of Emily Dickinson's opening line will not trouble those who believe that one's personality makes up a large part of the soul or is determined by it; thus the immortality promised the soul by church authority and tradition would extend to the personality and perhaps the memory as well. “(Huff) Here is where he explains why some would not find this poem to be troubling or hard for most to read because of how/who the people are reading it. It is almost a good idea to read his criticism before actually reading the poem because he allows the reader to know what mind set to read it from. This is key to reading the legendary Mrs. Emily Dickinson’s poetry.



Dickinson, Emily. "Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson." Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. Web. 14 Mar. 2012. .

Huff, Randall. "'I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—'." The Facts On File Companion to American Poetry, vol. 1. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= CPAP0190&SingleRecord=True (accessed March 14, 2012).