Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Little known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community.

“Emily Dickinson is one of our most original writers, a force destined to endure in American letters. . . . Without elaborate philosophy, yet with irresistible ways of expression, Emily Dickinson’s poems have true lyric appeal, because they make abstractions, such as love, hope, loneliness, death, and immortality, seem near and intimate and faithful.” —The Atlantic

One of the nineteenth century’s leading poets, Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems during her lifetime, though only a handful were published.

Emily Dickinson was arguably America's most startling and original poet in the 19th century. According to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her correspondent, and mentor, writing 15 years after her death, "Few events in American literary history have been more curious than the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson into a posthumous fame only more accentuated by the utterly recluse character of her life and by her aversion to even a literary publicity."