The “Maid of Amherst”, American Lyric poet…

The “Maid of Amherst”, American Lyric poet Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, a redhead, had experimented with poetic rhythms and rhymes in about 1850, apparently while under the spell of the poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Bronté and under the tutelage of Benjamin F. Newton, a young man studying law in her father's office.

Her poetry, almost all of which is published posthumously, earns her the title ”the New England mystic”.

After 1862, on the advice of a literary man Thomas Wentworth Higginsons, (who will remain Dickinson's “preceptor” for the rest of her life) she resists all efforts by her friends to put her poems before the public.

As a result, only seven poems are published during her lifetime, five of them in the “Springfield Republican”.