Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at her family’s homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts (nowadays the home of the Emily Dickinson Museum). She received her early education at a one-room primary school and later attended Amherst Academy. From an early age, she was troubled by the prospect of death, especially following the death of her second cousin and a close friend in 1844, resulting in her being sent to relatives in Boston to recuperate.

After graduation, Dickinson went to study at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley but returned home after only ten months.

During her 20s, her mother suffered from various chronic illnesses, and Dickinson took on all domestic responsibilities and became more and more reclusive.

1855 was the last time Dickinson left her hometown when she traveled to Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia; afterward, she rarely left town and confined herself to her homestead and her brother’s house next door.

She started writing poetry when she was 11 but received validation only when she was 18 when a family friend read her poems and encouraged her to write.

In the sanctuary of her home, withdrawn from the outside world, Dickinson’s writing flourished; between 1858 to 1865, she had her most productive period, in which she wrote about 800 poems, making clean copies of her work and assembling them in 40 booklets, today known as her fascicles.

During this period, Dickinson was corresponding with Samuel Bowles, the owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican, to whom she sent dozens of letters and nearly fifty poems, and he published a few of them in his newspaper. Dickinson also befriended the literary critic and radical abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson following an article he published in 1862 encouraging young writers to publish their work.

In 1866, Dickinson’s solitude worsened, and she rarely left her homestead and even talked to her visitors through the door without seeing them. However, she was very expressive in her notes and letters to her family and friends. Although she continued to write poetry, her productivity declined, and she stopped assembling her work into the booklets.

In 1874, her father died, and her mother suffered a stroke, and over the next few years, more friends and family members died, including her mother, nephew, and beloved dog. These occurrences affected Dickinson’s mental and physical health, and in November 1885, she had to be confined to her bed for several months until she died at 55.

Though she wrote thousands of poems and letters, only ten were published during her life, most anonymously and some without her consent.

A few years before she died, she made her sister Lavinia swear to burn her papers after her death. Lavinia kept her promise and burned most of Dickinson’s correspondence, but after she found a collection of about 1800 of her poems and recognized their worth, she set her mind to editing and publishing them.

In 1890, four years after she died, Dickinson’s first collection was published and received critical and financial success. Her second collection was published the following year, running through five editions within two years. Since then, Dickinson’s work has remained continuously in print; but it wasn’t until 1955, with Thomas H. Johnson’s Dickinson’s Complete Poems, that her poems were published as they were initially written, without editing and altering.

A fruitful writer throughout three decades, the themes of Dickinson’s poems changed over time. From conventional and sentimental in her early work, she became more versatile and wrote about various themes, including love, identity, life, death, and immortality, as in one of her most famous poems, “Because I did not stop for Death.”

Her work is known for the unique use of metaphors and “flower language” to symbolize topics such as prudence, youth, and poetry, but its real distinction is its structure. In her writing style, Dickinson challenged conventions by ignoring the rules of grammar and syntax and using line braking, punctuation, and capitalization in unfamiliar ways. It created a sort of off-rhymes that formed into an enigmatic and haunting personal voice that made her one of the most important and influential poets of the 19th century and American literature at large.