Description

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet. She was born in Amherst and throughout her adult life she rarely travelled very far from home. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence. She was a prolific private poet, choosing to publish fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems. Her poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often utilize slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Her poems also tend to deal with themes of death and immortality, two subjects which infused her letters to friends. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, both of whom heavily edited the content. A complete and mostly unaltered collection of her poetry became available for the first time in 1955 when Poems by Emily Dickinson was published by Thomas H. Johnson.