SOURCE: Luisi, David. “Some Aspects of Emily Dickinson's Food and Liquor Poems.” English Studies 52, no. 1 (February 1971): 32-40.

In the following essay, Luisi examines approximately fifty of Dickinson's poems in which food imagery is used as a metaphor for the poet's thoughts on Puritanism and Epicureanism, as well as on want and satisfaction.

Among the poems of Emily Dickinson are an impressive number which deal directly or indirectly with food and liquor. Of the more than two hundred poems which employ this kind of imagery, approximately three quarters of them do so in a subordinate fashion. The remaining fifty or more poems, however, provide a sufficient number in which this imagery supplies the basic metaphors for her thoughts.

The context of these poems range from ‘Fame is a fickle food’¹ in which she simply states an aphorism and then continues to expand it; to the whimsicality of ‘Would you...