Emily Dickinson

Who Was Emily Dickinson?

Emily Dickinson was the most original poet in the American tradition and one of the finest lyric poets in any language — a woman who spent most of her adult life in almost complete seclusion in her father’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, writing nearly 1,800 poems that were almost entirely unpublished in her lifetime and that have shaped American poetry more profoundly than the work of any other single writer. Born in 1830 into a prominent Amherst family, she was educated at Amherst Academy and spent a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning home, apparently permanently.

The circumstances of her seclusion remain incompletely understood. She maintained intense epistolary friendships and seems to have experienced at least one devastating emotional attachment, but she rarely left her home and garden in her later years. What she produced in that seclusion was a body of poetry of extraordinary formal innovation — the slant rhyme, the compressed syntax, the em-dash that fragments and qualifies and suspends, the hymn meter deployed against itself — and of equally extraordinary thematic range: death, immortality, nature, love, God, the self, the act of perception itself.

Her quarrel with the Calvinist God of her formation is one of the sustained subjects of her poetry, and it is a quarrel conducted with the seriousness and the precision of a person who cannot simply dismiss the God she refuses. She is not an atheist; she is a wrestler, and her wrestling is among the most honest in American poetry.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Poems (First Series) — 1890 — posthumous, ed. Thomas Wentworth Higginson
• The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson — 1955 ed. Thomas H. Johnson — first complete edition
• The Letters of Emily Dickinson — 1958
• The Poems of Emily Dickinson — 1998 ed. R.W. Franklin — definitive variorum edition