Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson daguerreotype (cropped)

Emily Dickinson was a 19th-century American poet whose distinctive writing style made her stand out from the other poets in her era. She is known for her notably unconventional writing style that was unique at the time, where she often made use of dashes and unusual capitalization, and frequently used slant rhyme, which is a type of rhyme with words that have similar but not identical sounds. She ignored the typical rules of versification and grammar, making her work brave and completely original. Dickinson was highly educated and was raised in a Calvinist household, which emphasized the sovereignty of God and the authority of the Bible. This religious influence permeates throughout her work. She had a complicated relationship with her religious beliefs and God; while her friends and family proclaimed their love of Christ, she was reluctant to join the church and ultimately stopped attending services altogether.

Dickinson’s family was well known in the Massachusetts community where they lived. Her grandfather was a trustee of Amherst College, while her father had served in both state and federal Congresses. Although Dickinson herself was more socially active at a younger age, she became more reclusive later in the later years of her life. Scholars believe she was troubled from a young age by the "deepening menace" of death; throughout her lifetime she would suffer tremendous loss of friends and family, while later living through the time of the American Civil war that began in 1861 and ended in 1865. She began to isolate herself in her room in her family’s homestead and did not leave unless it was absolutely necessary. She began to talk to her visitors from the other side of her door instead of speaking to them face to face. Only the few people who knew her personally and had exchanged written correspondence with her during the last years of her life had ever seen her in person. Her writing was said to be an outlet for her to express herself verbally rather than socially. Her works reflect this, as they are full of religious imagery and nuance, conversations about death, the ironies of life, her love of nature, and criticisms of societal behaviors.

Dickinson died of heart failure at her home on May 15th, 1886. Only a handful of poems and a single letter were published during her life. After her death, her younger sister discovered Dickinson’s vast collection of nearly 1,800 poems and letters, and she had Dickinson's first volume published almost four years after her death. Literary scholar Thomas H. Johnson would eventually publish Dickinson's Complete Poems in 1955, and her poems have been in print continuously since.