Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She came from a prominent, though not wealthy, family whose life centered on the Homestead, a large house built by her grandfather Samuel Dickinson, one of the founders of Amherst College. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer, a trustee and treasurer of Amherst College, a state legislator, a state senator, and later a member of the 33rd U.S. Congress from 1853 to 1855. Dickinson grew up in a household closely tied to education, public life, and the town of Amherst.

Her own education was unusually strong for a Victorian girl. She attended primary school on Pleasant Street, then began at Amherst Academy in 1840 with her sister Lavinia. Over seven years there, she studied English and classical literature, Latin, botany, geology, history, mental philosophy, and arithmetic. A school principal later remembered her as “very bright” and “an excellent scholar.” After Amherst Academy, she briefly attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning home to Amherst, the place that would remain central to her life and writing.

Dickinson was a prolific writer, but she was largely unpublished and unknown while she lived. Only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems appeared in print during her lifetime. Today, her poems are widely regarded as canonical and groundbreaking, especially for their short, acerbic lines, lean descriptions, and slant or off-rhymes. Her work often turns on nature and mortality, using compressed language to press at what could be felt but not easily stated.

Several experiences shaped the way Dickinson thought and wrote. Death troubled her from a young age, especially the deaths of people close to her. In 1844, her second cousin and close friend Sophia Holland died of typhus, an event that left Dickinson traumatized and deeply melancholic for a time. Religion also marked her youth. During an Amherst revival in 1845, she wrote of feeling peace and happiness in faith, but she never made a formal declaration and later stopped regular church attendance. Around 1852, she wrote the poem that opens, “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – I keep it, staying at Home.”

Her writing became known only after her death on May 15, 1886, when her younger sister Lavinia found the poems in her desk. A selection was first published in 1890, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, though the poems were changed to fit the poetic conventions of the time. In 1955, Thomas H. Johnson’s complete collection, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, brought her work closer to her original intention and gained wide recognition for its innovation. Dickinson’s poems still speak with force because they are spare, exact, and fearless about nature, death, belief, and what remains just out of reach.