Emily Dickinson

Their life

American poet who published fewer than a dozen poems in her lifetime and left nearly eighteen hundred behind — hand-stitched into little booklets in a bedroom in Amherst. Working in deliberate privacy, she compressed mortality, doubt, ecstasy, and grammar itself into slant-rhymed lines that changed poetry after her death. She chose the small room and made it infinite.

Known for

• Nearly 1,800 poems written in seclusion
• Slant rhyme and radical use of the dash
• Hand-sewn fascicles of poetry
• Lifelong correspondence with T. W. Higginson
• Posthumous discovery and publication, 1890
• Reclusive life at the Amherst Homestead

The road they walked

She was born in 1830 into one of Amherst's leading families — her father a lawyer, a state legislator, and treasurer of Amherst College, a man whose word carried weight in the town. Emily was educated at Amherst Academy and, briefly, at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where the pressure to publicly declare religious conversion was constant and she alone among her circle refused. That refusal — quiet, unyielding — became a pattern. By her mid-twenties she was drawing inward, and by her thirties she rarely left the Homestead, the family house on Main Street, sometimes speaking to visitors from behind a door rather than in the room with them.

New England in those years was thick with revivalist fervor and Puritan inheritance, and Dickinson wrote against and inside both — full of scripture and hymn meter, empty of easy faith. She read voraciously, corresponded fiercely, and found in her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, who lived next door, her earliest and most trusted reader. In 1862 she wrote to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson asking if her verse was 'alive,' beginning a correspondence that lasted the rest of her life, though he never quite grasped what she was doing and gently, repeatedly, advised her not to publish. She took the advice, or perhaps needed no persuading — fewer than a dozen poems appeared in print during her lifetime, always anonymously, some possibly without her consent.

What she did instead was sew. Nearly eighteen hundred poems, copied in her small hand onto folded sheets and bound into homemade booklets called fascicles, sat in a bureau in her bedroom, unknown even to most of her family. After her death her sister Lavinia found them and, refusing to let them be burned, pushed for publication. The first volume appeared in 1890, edited by Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, who smoothed her slant rhymes and regularized her dashes to make her palatable to Victorian taste. Only in 1955, with Thomas H. Johnson's variorum edition restoring her original punctuation and capitalization, did the poems arrive as she'd actually written them — and modern poetry, retroactively, gained one of its founders.

How their story ended

Dickinson died on May 15, 1886, at the Homestead in Amherst, at fifty-five. Her death certificate lists Bright's disease, a kidney ailment, though some scholars have since proposed severe hypertension or other causes — the record is not entirely settled. Her final years were marked by grief: her mother's death in 1882, the death of her young nephew Gilbert in 1883, and failing health of her own that kept her largely bedridden by the end. It was her sister Lavinia who, going through her room afterward, discovered the locked bureau of poems and insisted the world see them.”