Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) is one of the greatest American poets. Living almost all her life in her family's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, she wrote nearly eighteen hundred short poems, marked by dashes, unusual capitals and slant rhymes, on death, nature, love and the soul. Fewer than a dozen were published in her lifetime; the rest were discovered by her sister after her death.
Works
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Amherst
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family: her grandfather helped found Amherst College, and her father, Edward, was a lawyer and later a congressman. She studied at Amherst Academy and spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.
She lived in the family home, the Homestead, with her parents and her younger sister Lavinia; her brother Austin lived next door with his wife Susan Gilbert, Emily's closest friend and correspondent, to whom she sent hundreds of poems.
The poems in the drawer
Dickinson wrote most intensely in the years around the Civil War: in 1862 alone she wrote well over two hundred poems. She copied many of them onto folded sheets of paper and sewed them together into small booklets, now called fascicles, which she kept in a drawer.
In 1862 she wrote to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, enclosing four poems and asking whether her verse was alive. He found her poems remarkable but strange, advised her not to publish, and became a lifelong correspondent. The handful of poems printed in her lifetime appeared anonymously, often altered by editors.
The woman in white
From her thirties Dickinson rarely left the house and grounds, and spoke to some visitors from behind a door or from another room. She dressed in white, cared for her garden and her ailing mother, and baked bread praised by her family. Her letters, witty and enigmatic, were her main link with the world.
Her seclusion has fed many legends, but her poems show a mind of great range, reading the Bible, Shakespeare, the Brontës and the newspapers, and writing about God, death, nature and the inner life with startling concision.
Discovery after death
Emily Dickinson died at the Homestead on 15 May 1886, aged fifty-five. Lavinia found the fascicles and hundreds of loose poems in her room. Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson edited a first selection, published in 1890, which smoothed her punctuation and regularised her rhymes; it was a surprising success.
Complete editions faithful to her manuscripts came only in 1955, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, and in 1998, by R. W. Franklin. Her dashes and capitals are now seen as essential to her art.
Anecdotes
Gingerbread from the window
Dickinson loved children and baking. The children of the neighbourhood remembered that she would lower a basket of gingerbread to them on a string from her bedroom window.
A prize for her bread
In 1856 Emily Dickinson's rye and Indian bread won second prize at the Amherst Cattle Show. Her sister later said that Emily was the only one of the household whose bread their father would eat.
Frequently asked questions
How many poems did Emily Dickinson write?
About 1,800. Fewer than a dozen were published during her lifetime, anonymously.
Why do Emily Dickinson's poems have so many dashes?
The dashes are part of her manuscripts and seem to mark pauses, emphasis or shifts of thought. Her first editors replaced many of them with ordinary punctuation; modern editions restore them.
Did Emily Dickinson never leave her house?
She travelled in her youth, to Boston, Washington and Philadelphia, but from her thirties she lived in increasing seclusion in her family's home in Amherst.