This aspect of the project was created to introduce Emily Dickinson’s poetry to high school and college undergrad students who enjoy poetry. I felt a Funeral, in my Brain serves as in introduction to one of Dickinson’s more famous poems and the literary elements present within them. The annotations also serve to highlight to the audience the unique stylistic choices that are present in most of Dickinson’s poetry. By doing this, it helps establish the different physical style it has comparison to the other periods, Romantic or Victorian. More about these poetry eras it can be found here in the other portion of this project, where data is compiled to compare Dickinson’s poetry to these periods.
It was purposeful to not to explain the meaning of the poem, as the intended audience should be able to interpret the poem. The addition of a linked audio reading of the poem serves to highlight the unique pauses in the poetry. Dickinson’s use of punctuation is one that benefits from being read aloud as it emphasizes the excessive use of punctuation and how it changes and emphases meanings and interpretations.
By using gloss to highlight the important literary aspects of Dickinson’s poetry it adds to this project as a balance to the analysis. The analysis of era/periods only focuses on quantitative data, not qualitative data, and the intended audience would not know much about Dickinson’s work, so this would add to the project by giving the audience a close reading of literary elements they can use to identify Dickinson’s poems. It is able to give the audience a feeling of what makes Dickinson poems so different, both with structure and with ideas.