Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (Amherst, Massachusetts, 1830-1886) was an American poet who wrote in English in the nineteenth century. Although she composed nearly 1,800 poems, only a handful appeared in print during her lifetime, and her work did not gain wide recognition until after her death. Today she stands among the essential figures of American poetry, alongside Poe, Emerson and Whitman, and she is admired for a style that is unlike that of any of her contemporaries.

She was born into a prominent family in Amherst, a New England town with strong Puritan roots and close ties to the local church and college. She spent seven years at Amherst Academy, where she proved an excellent student, and then spent a short and unhappy period at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before going back to the family home. Over time she withdrew from social life. Her neighbors thought her eccentric; she was known for dressing in white and for refusing to receive visitors, and in her last years she reportedly did not even leave her room. She never married, and many of her closest friendships were kept alive through letters.

In that quiet world she developed a voice that was entirely her own. Her poems often use short lines, frequently have no titles, rely on slant rhymes and follow punctuation that departs sharply from the norms of her day. Death and immortality are her most persistent subjects, and they appear in her letters as well. Her early reading included Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose poems convinced her that words had life. Her closest emotional bond was with her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, to whom at least eleven poems were dedicated. Those dedications were later erased, and many scholars read the relationship between the two women as romantic.

After Dickinson died in 1886, her younger sister Lavinia discovered the manuscripts she had kept. The first selection, published in 1890, was edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, who altered the poems to suit the taste of the period. Only in 1955, with the complete edition prepared by Thomas H. Johnson, did readers get a version much closer to what she had written. Critics in her lifetime and in the decades that followed were often skeptical, but her reputation has grown steadily. She is now regarded almost universally as one of the most important American poets, and her gift for compressing feeling into very few words continues to shape later writers.