Modern music shares a lot of themes with older poetry. Emily Dickinson relates well to Folk and Pop artists of this decade as well as many relevant Hip-Hop emcees. She has a certain theme that connects to all three and she lays out many factors that develop into today’s music. Emily Dickinson laid a strong base of themes for musicians to take inspiration from, connecting older poems with more relevant sounds.
Dickinson’s motifs resonate well with current Folk artists. Dickinson was big on nature, something which comes up frequently in today’s Folk music. One of her most nature based poems, 214, shares a lot of themes with the newest album of Eddie Berman, as he makes a lot of comparisons relating to the outdoors and discussing the peace found within nature and freedom. She also gives off in many poems a description of a similar atmosphere to Mac DeMarco’s music, especially within song Blue Boy, where both have a simplicity and sense of relaxation in their works. Dickinson seems to use this and many other themes to relate to Folk music and a few other genres of today.
Emily Dickinson also wrote poems that go well with modern Pop music. She wrote a brief amount of love poetry, one of her better known ones being 269. This poem has strong emotional value in it, as it is in regards to a lost lover and contains a slew of emotion. Dickinson switches from reminisce in the first stanza to anger and frustration in the second, yet by the last stanza is completely satisfied again. With the passion displayed here, this poem relates well to Adele’s new song Hello (or in my opinion, any Adele song), or to a lot of Taylor Swift songs. I believe the most relevant Taylor Swift song would be Blank Space due to both Swift and Dickinson having very quick swings of emotion in each. 269 also gives off an air of mourning a relationship, which as of late is the basis for most of Drake’s songs (yes, Drake is a Pop artist). Further, this poem can also be interpreted as much more racy and sexual than sad and emotional. There are reasons to believe Emily Dickinson had a female lover who she is now yearning for in the poem. If this is the case, similar suggestions have been made about Demi Lovato’s Cool for the Summer, and both give off a similar tone, making these two works the most comparable in that aspect (Demi Lovato, more like Demi Libido). Dickinson relates well to Pop music, however her reach was greater than that.
Dickinson was strongly influential to Hip-Hop emcees as well. Continuing on poem 269, there are also cues that her lover in the poem might not just be gone, but be dead. If this is the case, one of the largest themes in Hip-Hop when involving love is rapping about the death of someone the artist cared about. On that note, this poem works as a prelude to You by Cam Meekins or Atmosphere’s Yesterday. The greatest difference is that in the Hip-Hop music, the love doesn’t necessarily have to be in the romantic sense, however in Pop it does. The more significant connection is death, Dickinson’s largest theme. A lot of rappers and Hip-Hop beatmakers like to use the genre to mourn, think philosophically about their existence, or as Emily Dickinson does in poem 241, talk about death in a sinister way, and discuss death’s positives. Dickinson’s poems carry a tone, so lyrics aren’t necessarily needed for the music to be relatable, which is why 269’s sense of mourning mixed with peace can be found in Thundercat and Mono/Poly’s Tribute to Paris. She also likes to reflect on her own morality, as do many other rappers. One of her least common views on death and least used in Hip-Hop is to treat death jokingly, yet she still does so in 241 and Eminem still occasionally does it when joking about Dr. Dre dying. It usually makes for a highly controversial song or poem. Dickinson relates well to today’s music, and not just one genre.
Emily Dickinson has many themes that tie nicely into current music. Whether it be her views on nature, her feelings of emotion and sexuality, or her rather morbid thoughts on death, she has inspired many genres – mainly Folk, Pop, and Hip-Hop. She is one of many poets of this time who gave inspiration to modern music, and it is arguable that all music was inspired by poetry. I would even argue music is the latest form of poetry. If Dickinson was the root, and the music mentioned above is the most recent manifestation, I think poetry’s prominence in the future is guaranteed to be strong.
