“A death blow is a death blow to some,” says Emily Dickinson in poem 816 (Dickinson 816). Emily Dickinson did not commit suicide: she died after numerous health problems 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 bedroom , having little or no contact with the outside world. This type of estrangement, coupled with the preoccupation with death evidenced in his poetry and his health problems evidenced in his personal correspondence, suggests that there may have been something of a suicidal undercurrent beneath -jacent in Dickinson's work. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay In a 2001 study published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, an experiment was performed to determine whether specific words in poetry could be indicators of a suicidal tendency. Here is an excerpt from the article: Suicide rates are much higher among poets than among authors of other literary forms as well as in the general population (1). This phenomenon has been variously attributed to the types of writers naturally drawn to poetry as well as to the characteristics of the poetry itself. For example, there is retrospective evidence suggesting that many suicidal poets suffered from some form of depressive disorder throughout their lives (1, 2). Poetry, it has been argued, can be a particularly appealing means of coping with unpredictable episodes of mood swings (Stirman and Pennebaker 517). The article goes on to explain the specific methods of study and what types of trigger words were used to mark potentially suicidal poetry. Trigger words were determined based on 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 analyzed as part of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) (Stirman and Pennebaker 517). This is a text analysis program that can be calibrated to search for specific words or phrases. In this case, it involved marking words that could indicate the type of estrangement considered evidence of suicidal tendency. I and I have been chosen to be signs of estrangement, we and our elected officials to be signs of healthy social integration (Stirman and Pennebaker 518). Tests found that suicidal poets use them much more often than surviving poets. Emily Dickinson used these trigger words often, with many examples found in her work. "I heard the buzz of a fly - when I died -", "Because I could not wait for death", "I felt a funeral in my brain" - even when Dickinson has company in his poetry, it is decidedly far from joyful (Dickinson). This feeds into the Hopelessness model. Death and Grave were two of the words chosen to support the Despair model. These words, along with 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. One of his poems, 816, seems to advocate death, even suicide. A death blow is a death blow to some who, until their death, did not become alive - who had lived, were dead but when they died, vitality began. (Dickinson 816) The multiple deaths that occurred among the family..