Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, the daughter of a respected lawyer and politician. She left college after a year and from her late twenties almost never left her family home; from her late thirties she rarely left her bedroom. From that white room she wrote 1,789 poems — short, syntactically broken, philosophically dazzling, almost all of them in 'common metre' (the iambic 4-3-4-3 of Protestant hymns) but pulling against it constantly. Only ten were published in her lifetime, anonymously and edited heavily by editors who could not see what they were looking at. After her death her sister found a locked chest containing the rest. The first volume of her poems appeared in 1890; the first reasonably accurate edition only in 1955. She is now generally considered alongside Whitman as one of the two indispensable American poets of the nineteenth century. She died of Bright's disease at fifty-five in the bedroom she had hardly left for the last fifteen years of her life.
All Figures
Poet
Emily Dickinson
1,830 CE – 1,886 CE
The Amherst recluse who wrote almost two thousand short, dense, dazzling poems and published only a handful in her lifetime — most of them anonymously and without her permission.
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