Emily Dickinson was a renowned American poet who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts in the 19th century. She never married and spent much of her life in isolation, producing hundreds of poems that explored themes of nature, mortality, the afterlife, and spirituality. According to Dickinson, poetry was something that could make her body feel physically cold or as if her head was removed - if a work caused those sensations, she knew it was poetry.
8. "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so
cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I
feel physically as if the top of my head were taken
off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I
know it. Is there any other way? ” -Emily Dickinson
Pain
Grief
Joy
Love
Art
Was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts
As she continue to grow she started to live in almost complete isolation from the outside world, still continuing to correspond and read. She spent a great deal of this time with her family. Her father, Edward Dickinson- a national politic. Her older brother, Austin- an attorney, who lived next door with his wife. Her younger sister, Lavinia, who also lived at home for her entire life in similar isolation. Lavinia and Austin were also her intellectual companions.
She attended Amherst Academy for 7 years
She also attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (destroyed by a fire in 1896)
In her later years, Dickinson enjoyed a romance with Judge Otis Phillips Lord, a friend of her father. Letters to Lord suggest that she considered marrying him, though she never did.
There is also evidence that she received at least one marriage proposal, from George H. Gould, which came to nothing.
Themes: pain, grief, joy, love, nature, and art
Although she started writing when a teen, these ten years were what so many call as her “writing years” due to the fact that it was in this decade where a lot of her work was produced.
“My earliest friend”; “My dying Tutor”; “my Father’s Law Student”; “The first of my own friends” “a gentle, yet grave Preceptor”; “an elder brother, loved indeed very much”– these were some of the ways Emily Dickinson used to speak of Benjamin Franklin Newton, a young man that she met at school whose effect upon her development as a poet was huge. She treasured the advice of his letters, and never forgot him.
Dickinson shared a portion of her poems with family and selected friends like this ones.
After her death, Dickinson’s family discovered forty hand made volumes of nearly 1,800 poems, called booklets or fascicles (now a days).