Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson called her poetry “my letter to the world.” But only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime. Not until after her death did the world take notice of the odd, brilliant woman who was one of America’s greatest poets.

Dickinson was born and lived her entire life in her father’s red brick house in Amherst, Massachusetts. She had a normal childhood, but as an adult she led a largely solitary life. Because Emily Dickinson was rarely seen around Amherst after she reached adulthood, the townspeople called her “The Myth.” She never married. She rarely left her home and she spent many hours alone, writing poetry. Her poems expressed her deepest emotions. Many of them were about nature, death, and God.

In all, Dickinson wrote 1,775 poems. But she never tried to have them published. A few were submitted to newspapers by admirers without her consent.

She hid most of her poems in a bureau in her bedroom. After her death in 1886, her sister and a friend arranged for a volume of her poems to be published. One reviewer attacked them as “barbaric,” because they did not have simple positive messages or tradional forms. But the book became a great success with the American public, which recognized the genius of Emily Dickinson’s “letter to the world.”