I hate Emily Dickinson. I consider myself a well versed scholar (okay maybe that gives myself too much credit) and I definitely really love to read but my God I can’t stand that woman. She is so depressing and literally all she does complain which to be fair is also all I do but hey, at least I only complain about her. She lived a privileged life in a wealthy family and was never forced to marry or do literally anything but all she does is moan about how hard and awful her life was when people had it way way worse. Her writing makes no sense. It’s like she hates me with those slant rhymes and her random dashes that aren’t grammatically correct but somehow got her pinned as one of the best poets of all time? She enrages me. I do worry that she had severe mental illnesses and needed proper assistance that wasn’t offered at that time but in that case she should not be idolized so much. She held far too many obsessions on people she barely knew and spent far too much time in isolation regretting that very above average childhood she had. If I could meet someone who was dead, I might pick her just so I could get all these insane questions answered. “Why do you refer to yourself as a gnome?” might be my first. “What were your religious beliefs?” might be my second. I know why she thought about death so much but I want to know why it was all she seemed to be able to write about. One of the questions would for sure be “why do you use so many dashes??? What do they mean? Why do you end the last stanza with them? Do you hate me?!” Those all feel very valid and important. She ruins my mood every time I think of her. She has three themes to all of her hundreds of poems. The most popular being death — literally half of them are about this. The rest are either about eternal suffering or her hate of things that make you happy. Who hates spring and bees and the color yellow and for what reason is there a piano in the woods? Whatever I have to move on now or her craziness will make me feel like I’m going insane. Maybe someone can relate to her and understand her brain but it’s certainly not me. I’m moving on to more joyful things in life. —