It was not Death, for I stood up Summary & Analysis
by Emily Dickinson

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“It was not Death, for I stood up” was written by the American poet Emily Dickinson in the summer of 1862. The poem depicts a harrowing experience of hopelessness and despair, which the speaker suggests is all the more terrible for being impossible to name or understand. Dickinson published only a few poems in her lifetime, instead sewing many of her poems into handmade fascicles or booklets. She included “It was not Death, for I stood up” in Fascicle 17, and the poem was first published in the posthumous collection Poems in 1891.

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