There were not so many love experiences or abundant life experiences for Dickinson, but she still wrote such a great amount of impressive poems about love and life which went so deeply into readers’ hearts. An unknown critic said that there was no such a person who lived highly introverted but felt pain and joy so strongly and there was no such a person like her who survived the despair by deeply understanding love and death. She was such an amazing puzzle that appealed many scholars to study. 

This paper will be focused on her love poems and study her view on love which is interpreted from her love poems. Though there were some clues that Dickinson had been into love several times, she did not actually have so many love experiences. Without abundant love experiences, she still wrote more than 300 love poems, counting for more than 1/6 in her total amount of poems, according to Xia Xiaomin’s research (2012). “It is the lack of love experiences that nurtures a rich imagination for love. The poor life experience highly contrasts with the rich poetic imagination. That’s sumptuous destitution” (Xia, 2012: 45-47). 

2. Literature Review

Emily Dickinson is a great poet in the world. During most of her life, she shrank from the contact with the world, leaving her life a kind of mystery to readers. Furthermore, the documents about her private life left after her death are only her talented poems and some survived letters with her friends which do not really provide any clear and explicit information about her private life. She is so mysterious and magnetic that a lot of readers and scholars are after her and working on the study of her. More and more scholars are jumping into the hole named Emily Dickinson and contribute a lot to this researching project. They interpret Dickinson’s poems and letters from different perspectives with perse theories of literary criticism.

There have been many papers involving the topic that this paper is focusing on. Many scholars had already studied and did research on Emily Dickinson’s view on love. They studied the topic from different perspectives. Some studied Dickinson by the intensive analysis on one poem, some chose several poems to classify and compare, and some compared Dickinson with one Chinese poetess to figure out their similarities in their love poems. The most frequented perspectives are as follows.