“A death blow is a life blow to some,” says Emily Dickinson in poem 816 (Dickinson 816). Emily Dickinson did not commit suicide: she died of numerous medical conditions at the age of 55 in 1886. Her personal life was notoriously enigmatic, as she spent the last years of her life isolated in her room, having little or no contact with the world external. This type of estrangement, combined with the preoccupation with death highlighted in her poetry and her medical conditions highlighted in her personal correspondence, leads one to believe that there may have been some sort of suicidal undercurrent in Dickinson's work. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In a study published in 2001, in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, an experiment was performed to determine whether specific words in poetry could be indicators of a suicidal inclination. The following is an excerpt from the article: Suicide rates are much higher among poets than among authors of other literary forms and among the general population (1). This phenomenon has been variously attributed to the types of writers who are naturally drawn to poetry as well as to the characteristics of poetry itself. For example, there is retrospective evidence to suggest that many suicidal poets have suffered from some form of depressive disorder throughout their lives (1, 2). Poetry, it has been argued, can be a particularly attractive medium with which to deal with unpredictable episodes of mood swings (Stirman and Pennebaker 517). The article goes on to explain the specific study methods and what types of keywords were used to flag potentially suicidal poetry. Keywords were determined according to two popular theories of what motivates suicide: Durkheim's social integration/disengagement model and the more traditional hopelessness model. The poetry of eighteen corresponding poets, nine suicidal and nine not, was examined through the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) (Stirman and Pennebaker 517). This is a text analysis program that can be tuned to look for specific words or phrases. In this case, it was designed to highlight words that might indicate the type of distancing that is believed to be evidence of a suicidal inclination. I and I were chosen to be signs of estrangement, with us and our chosen ones as signs of healthy social integration (Stirman and Pennebaker 518). The trials revealed that suicidal poets use them much more often than surviving poets. Emily Dickinson used these key words often, with numerous examples can be found in her work. "I heard the buzz of a fly - when I died -", "For I could not wait for Death", "I heard a funeral in my brain" - even when Dickinson has company in her poem, it is decidedly anything but cheerful (Dickinson). This feeds the pattern of desperation. Death and Grave were two of the words chosen to support the Despair model. These and other words associated with negativity or hopelessness in general are theorized to be signs of depression, the kind that could lead to suicide. I have already given some examples of this in Dickinson's poetry, and there are many more to be found. One of his poems, 816, seems to advocate death, if not suicide. A death blow is a vital blow to some who until they died, did not become alive - that if they lived, they were dead but when they died, vitality began. (Dickinson 816) The multiple deaths that occurred among Emily Dickinson's family and friends during her lifetime are a matter of public record. This shows.