Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Though she published almost nothing while alive and remained obscure, her poetry is now considered essential to the literary canon. The Poetry Foundation notes that she “created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized.” She came from a well-known family in Amherst, Massachusetts, attended Amherst Academy for seven years, and spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning home.

Dickinson wrote prolifically—nearly 1,800 poems—but only ten saw print during her lifetime. Today her work is celebrated for its innovation: short, sharp lines, spare descriptions, and slant rhymes. Her subjects often circle around nature and mortality. Few people close to her knew she wrote poetry until after her death, when her younger sister Lavinia found the poems in a desk. A selection was published in 1890, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, but the editors heavily altered the poems to fit the poetic norms of the era. It wasn’t until 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson released *The Poems of Emily Dickinson*, that her work was restored closer to her original intentions. That collection earned wide acclaim for its originality.

At least eleven of Dickinson’s poems were dedicated to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Some scholars argue that censorship helped hide the nature of Emily and Susan’s relationship, which has been interpreted as romantic.

**Life**

**Family and early childhood**

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, at the family homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her family was prominent but not wealthy. Her father, Edward Dickinson, worked as a lawyer in Amherst and served as a trustee of Amherst College. Two centuries earlier, her patrilineal ancestors had arrived in the New World during the Puritan Great Migration and prospered. Her paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, helped found Amherst College and built the Homestead in 1813—a large mansion on Amherst’s main street that became the center of family life for nearly a century.

Edward Dickinson, Samuel’s eldest son, served as treasurer of Amherst College from 1835 to 1873, held seats in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1838–1839; 1873) and the Massachusetts Senate (1842–1843), and represented Massachusetts’s 10th congressional district in the 33rd U.S. Congress (1853–1855). On May 6, 1828, he married Emily Norcross of Monson, Massachusetts. They had three children: William Austin (1829–1895), known as Austin, Aust, or Awe; Emily Elizabeth; and Lavinia Norcross (1833–1899), called Lavinia or Vinnie. Dickinson was also a cousin of Charles and Henry Sweetser (sons of her aunt Catherine) and of Charles’s daughter Kate D. Sweetser. She was a distant cousin to Baxter Dickinson and his family, including his grandson, organist and composer Clarence Dickinson.

When Dickinson was two, on a visit to Monson, her aunt Lavinia described her as “perfectly well and contented—She is a very good child and but little trouble.” Her aunt also noted the girl’s love of music and her particular skill at the piano, which she called “the moosic.” Dickinson attended primary school in a two-story building on Pleasant Street. Her education was “ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl.” Her father, wanting his children well-educated, kept track of their progress even while away on business. When she was seven, he wrote home, reminding his children to “keep school, and learn, so as to tell me, when I come home, how many new things you have learned.”

Though Dickinson always wrote warmly about her father, her letters suggest her mother was often cold and distant. In one letter, she said she “always ran Home to Awe [Austin] when a child, if anything befell me. She was an awful Mother, but I liked her better than none.” On September 7, 1840, Dickinson and her sister Lavinia began attending Amherst Academy, a former boys’ school that had admitted girls just two years earlier. Around the same time, her father bought a house on North Pleasant Street. Her brother Austin later described this large new home as the “mansion” over which he and Dickinson acted as “lord and lady” while their parents were away. The house overlooked Amherst’s burial ground, which one local minister called treeless and “forbidding.”

**Teenage years**

Dickinson attended the academy for seven years, studying English and classical literature, Latin, botany, geology, history, “mental philosophy,” and arithmetic. The school’s principal at the time, Daniel Taggart Fiske, later recalled that she was “very bright” and “an excellent scholar, of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties.” She took a few terms off due to illness—the longest break was in 1845–1846, when she was enrolled for only eleven weeks—but she enjoyed her demanding studies, writing to a friend that the academy was “a very fine school.”

From a young age, Dickinson was troubled by the “deepening menace” of death, especially the deaths of those close to her. When her second cousin and close friend Sophia Holland died of typhus in April 1844, Dickinson was deeply affected. Two years later, she wrote that “it seemed to me I should die too if I could not be permitted to watch over her or even look at her face.” She became so melancholy that her parents sent her to stay with family in Boston to recover. Once her health and spirits returned, she went back to Amherst Academy. During this time, she met people who would become lifelong friends and correspondents.