Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. During her life, almost none of her work saw print, and she was not well known; today, her poems are 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 notable family in Amherst, Massachusetts. After seven years at Amherst Academy, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, then returned home to Amherst for good.

Though she wrote constantly, only ten of her roughly 1,800 poems were published while she lived. Her poems are now seen as revolutionary, marked by short, sharp lines, spare descriptions, and off-rhymes. Their main subjects are nature and death. Almost no one around her knew she wrote poetry until after she died, when her younger sister Lavinia found the poems in a desk. A selection came out in 1890, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, but the editors heavily changed the poems to fit the poetic standards of the era. It was not until 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson put together a complete edition called *The Poems of Emily Dickinson*, that her work was restored closer to what she originally intended. That collection won 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 think 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, in 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 father’s ancestors had arrived in the New World during the Puritan Great Migration and had done well. Her paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, helped found Amherst College. In 1813, he built the Homestead, a large mansion on Amherst’s main street that became the center of family life for most of a century.

Samuel’s eldest son, Edward, was treasurer of Amherst College from 1835 to 1873, served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1838–1839 and 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 from Monson, Massachusetts. They had three children: William Austin (1829–1895), called Austin, Aust, or Awe; Emily Elizabeth; and Lavinia Norcross (1833–1899), called Lavinia or Vinnie. She was also a cousin of Charles and Henry Sweetser, sons of her aunt Catherine, and of Charles’s daughter Kate D. Sweetser. Dickinson was a distant cousin to Baxter Dickinson and his family, including his grandson, the organist and composer Clarence Dickinson.

When she was two, on a long 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 wanted his children well educated and kept track of their progress even when away on business. When Dickinson 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 spoke warmly of her father, her letters suggest her mother was often cold and distant. In a letter to a confidante, Dickinson wrote that 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 started together at Amherst Academy, a former boys’ school that had opened to 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 spent seven years at the academy, 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 Dickinson was “very bright” and “an excellent scholar, of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties.” She took a few terms off because of illness—the longest break was in 1845–1846, when she attended 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 when people close to her died. When her second cousin and close friend Sophia Holland died of typhus in April 1844, Dickinson was traumatized. Remembering the event 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.