Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) is an American poet.

Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community.

After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attends the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst.

Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation.

Considered an eccentric by locals, she develops a penchant for white clothing and is known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom.

Dickinson never marries, and most friendships between her and others depend entirely upon correspondence.

While Dickinson is a prolific poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems are published during her lifetime.

The poems published then are usually edited significantly to fit conventional poetic rules.

Her poems were unique to her era.

They contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.

Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

Although Dickinson's acquaintances Are likely aware of her writing, it Is not until after her death in 1886—when Lavinia, Dickinson's younger sister, discovers her cache of poems—that the breadth of her work becomes public.

Her first collection of poetry is published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, though both heavily edited the content.

A 1998 New York Times article reveals that of the many edits made to Dickinson's work, the name "Susan" was often deliberately removed.

At least eleven of Dickinson's poems were dedicated to sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, though all the dedications were obliterated, presumably by Todd.

A complete, and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry becomes available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson publishes The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955.

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