Emily Dickinson is one of the pioneers of American modernist poetry. She is known for her poetic language which is full of mystery, ambiguity and obscurity. There are many metaphors distributed in her poems, especially animal metaphors, nature metaphors and religious metaphors etc. By analyzing the metaphorical mapping system of her poems, it shows the cognitive frames that Dickinson constructs a world based on her own experiences and insights towards life. She manages to let readers to arise philosophical thoughts about nature, life and death etc. Based on the theory of poetic metaphor, this paper analyzes the poems from the book Selected Poems and Letters of Emily Dickinson, and explores the function of poetic metaphors and the understanding of poems.

Luo Nannan. A Study of Poetic Metaphor in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences (2023) Vol. 6, Issue 20: 87-92. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2023.062015.

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