Biography facts about emily dickinson

Raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, she devoted her time to writing, producing nearly 1, poems throughout her life. Despite her prolific output, Dickinson's work went largely unrecognized during her lifetime. Most of her poems were published posthumously, many altered to fit the conventional norms of the time. Today, she is celebrated for her unique syntactical style, evocative themes, and innovative use of form, which have had an enduring influence on modern poetry.

While Emily Dickinson's artistic contributions are well-documented, her financial standing remains largely unknown. Dickinson spent much of her adult life in the family homestead, leading a minimalist and self-sustained lifestyle that focused more on personal expression than material wealth. Much of her income was linked to her family's modest means; her father served as a state legislator, and the family had connections within the community.

After her death, her sister Lavinia discovered an extensive collection of Dickinson's unpublished work, which eventually led to her posthumous fame. Thus, any potential financial gains stemming from her poetry were realized only after her passing. Emily Dickinson is best known for her innovative and poignant poetry, characterized by her unique syntax and form.

Her works often explore themes of death, immortality, nature, and the inner workings of the human mind. Despite her reclusive life, Dickinson's poetry has had a profound impact on American literature, influencing countless poets and writers in the 20th century and beyond. Growing up in a prominent New England family and receiving a solid education, Emily Dickinson was exposed to various literary influences early in her life.

The isolation she experienced later in life, particularly within the family homestead, contributed to her introspective nature, shaping her distinct voice and perspective in her writing. Emily Dickinson lived a reclusive life, primarily within her family's homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. She maintained close relationships with her family, particularly her sister Lavinia and her friend Susan Gilbert, whom she corresponded with extensively.

Despite her limited social interactions, Dickinson's relationships were deep and meaningful, influencing her poetry and providing emotional support throughout her life. Although Emily Dickinson wrote prolifically throughout her life, only a few of her poems were published during her lifetime, often altered to meet contemporary standards.

After her death inher sister Lavinia discovered a treasure trove of unpublished poetry.

Biography facts about emily dickinson: Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was

Judith Farr points out that few people knew that Dickinson wrote poems, and she was far better-known for her gardening while she was alive. Born in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, inEmily Dickinson would spend virtually all of her life within the same town she briefly studied at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary elsewhere in Massachusetts but returned home soon after.

If Dickinson were alive today, she would most probably be diagnoses with a severe agoraphobic syndrome. In AprilEmily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a lecturer and essayist living in Worcester, Massachusetts, enclosing four of her poems. But during her lifetime, only 10 of her poems would see print. I am glad not to live near her.

Scholar Judith Farr notes that Dickinson, during her lifetime, "was known more widely as a gardener, perhaps, than as a poet". It contained pressed flower specimens that she collected, classified, and labeled using the Linnaean system. It has not survived, but efforts to revive it have begun. Her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, remembered "carpets of lily-of-the-valley and pansiesplatoons of sweetpeashyacinthsenough in May to give all the bees of summer dyspepsia.

There were ribbons of peony hedges and drifts of daffodils in season, marigolds to distraction—a butterfly utopia". Dickinson would often send her friends bunches of flowers with verses attached, but "they valued the posy more than the poetry". On June 16,while in Boston, Edward Dickinson suffered a stroke and died.

Biography facts about emily dickinson: Emily Dickinson (December 10,

When the simple funeral was held in the Homestead's entrance hall, Dickinson stayed in her room with the door cracked open. Neither did she attend the memorial service on June Lamenting her mother's increasing physical as well as biography facts about emily dickinson demands, Dickinson wrote that "Home is so far from Home". After the death of Lord's wife inhis friendship with Dickinson probably became a late-life romance, though as their letters were destroyed, this is surmised.

Dickinson looked forward to this day greatly; a surviving fragment of a letter written by her states that "Tuesday is a deeply depressed Day". After being critically ill for several years, Judge Lord died in March Dickinson referred to him as "our latest Lost". Although she continued to write in her biography facts about emily dickinson years, Dickinson stopped editing and organizing her poems.

She also exacted a promise from her sister Lavinia to burn her papers. The s were a difficult time for the remaining Dickinsons. Irreconcilably alienated from his wife, Austin fell in love in with Mabel Loomis Toddan Amherst College faculty wife who had recently moved to the area. Todd never met Dickinson but was intrigued by her, referring to her as "a lady whom the people call the Myth ".

Five weeks later, Dickinson wrote, "We were never intimate As death succeeded death, Dickinson found her world upended. In the fall ofshe wrote, "The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come. She remained unconscious late into the night and weeks of ill health followed. On November 30,her feebleness and other symptoms were so worrying that Austin canceled a trip to Boston.

What is thought to be her last letter was sent to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross, and simply read: "Little Cousins, Called Back. Austin wrote in his diary that "the day was awful Lavinia and Austin asked Susan to wash Dickinson's body upon her death. Susan also wrote Dickinson's obituary for the Springfield Republicanending it with four lines from one of Dickinson's poems: "Morns like these, we parted; Noons like these, she rose; Fluttering first, then firmer, To her fair repose.

Despite Dickinson's prolific writing, only ten poems and a letter were published during her lifetime. After her younger sister Lavinia discovered the collection of nearly 1, poems, Dickinson's first volume was published four years after her death. Until Thomas H. Johnson published Dickinson's Complete Poems in[ ] Dickinson's poems were considerably edited and altered from their manuscript versions.

Since Dickinson has remained continuously in print. They were published anonymously and heavily edited, with conventionalized punctuation and formal titles. Inseveral poems were altered and published in Drum Beatto raise funds for medical care for Union soldiers in the war. In the s, Higginson showed Dickinson's poems to Helen Hunt Jacksonwho had coincidentally been at the academy with Dickinson when they were girls.

It was the last poem published during Dickinson's lifetime. After Dickinson's death, Lavinia Dickinson kept her promise and burned most of the poet's correspondence. Significantly though, Dickinson had left no instructions about the 40 notebooks and loose sheets gathered in a locked chest. Higginson, appeared in November One reviewer, inwrote: "The world will not rest satisfied till every scrap of her writings, letters as well as literature, has been published".

Nearly a dozen new editions of Dickinson's poetry, whether containing previously unpublished or newly edited poems, were published between and These competing editions of Dickinson's poetry, often differing in order and structure, ensured that the poet's work was in the public's eye. The first scholarly publication came in with a completely new three-volume set edited by Thomas H.

Forming the basis of later Dickinson scholarship, Johnson's variorum brought all of Dickinson's known poems together for the first time. Using the physical evidence of the original papers, the poems were intended to be published in their original order for the first time. Editor Ralph W. Franklin relied on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the poet's packets.

Dickinson biographer Alfred Habegger wrote in My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson that "The consequences of the poet's failure to disseminate her work in a faithful and orderly manner are still very much with us". Dickinson's poems generally fall into three distinct periods, the works in each period having certain general characters in common.

The extensive use of dashes and unconventional capitalization in Dickinson's manuscripts, and the idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery, combine to create a body of work that is "far more various in its styles and forms than is commonly supposed". Sometimes her use of these meters is regular, but oftentimes it is irregular. The regular form that she most often employs is the ballad stanzaa traditional form that is divided into quatrains, using tetrameter for the first and third lines and trimeter for the second and fourth, while rhyming the second and fourth lines ABCB.

Though Dickinson often uses perfect rhymes for lines two and four, she also makes frequent use of slant rhyme. Since many of her poems were written in traditional ballad stanzas with ABCB rhyme schemes, some of these poems can be sung to fit the melodies of popular folk songs and hymns that also use the common meteremploying alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.

Dickinson scholar and poet Anthony Hecht finds resonances in Dickinson's poetry not only with hymns and song forms but also with psalms and riddlesciting the following example: "Who is the East? Late 20th-century scholars are "deeply interested" in Dickinson's highly individual use of punctuation and lineation line lengths and line breaks. As Farr points out, "snakes instantly notice you"; Dickinson's version captures the "breathless immediacy" of the encounter; and The Republican ' s punctuation renders "her lines more commonplace".

Meaningful distinctions, these scholars assert, can be drawn from varying lengths and angles of dash, and differing arrangements of text on the page. Franklin's variorum edition of the poems provided alternate wordings to those chosen by Johnson, in a more limited editorial intervention. Franklin also used typeset dashes of varying length to approximate the manuscripts' dashes more closely.

Dickinson left no formal statement of her aesthetic intentions and, because of the variety of her themes, her work does not fit conveniently into any genre. She has been regarded, alongside Emerson whose poems Dickinson admiredas a Transcendentalist. Flowers and gardens : Farr notes that Dickinson's "poems and letters almost wholly concern flowers" and that allusions to gardens often refer to an "imaginative realm The Master poems : Dickinson left a large number of poems addressed to "Signor", "Sir" and "Master", who is characterized as Dickinson's "lover for all eternity".

Farr, for example, contends that the Master is an unattainable composite figure, "human, with specific characteristics, but godlike" and speculates that Master may be a "kind of Christian muse". Morbidity : Dickinson's poems reflect her "early and lifelong fascination" with illness, dying and death. Dickinson scholar Vivian R. Pollak [ Wikidata ] considers these references an autobiographical reflection of Dickinson's "thirsting-starving persona", an outward expression of her needy self-image as small, thin and frail.

Critic Edwin Folsom analyzes how "winter for Dickinson is the season that forces reality, that strips all hope of transcendence. It is a season of death and a metaphor for death". Gospel poems : Throughout her life, Dickinson wrote poems reflecting a preoccupation with the teachings of Jesus Christ and, indeed, many are addressed to him.

The Undiscovered Continent : Academic Suzanne Juhasz [ Wikidata ] considers that Dickinson saw the mind and spirit as tangible visitable places and that for much of her life she lived within them. At other times, the imagery is darker and forbidding—castles or prisons, complete with corridors and rooms—to create a dwelling place of "oneself" where one resides with one's other selves.

The surge of posthumous publication gave Dickinson's poetry its first public exposure. Backed by Higginson and with a favorable notice from William Dean Howellsan editor of Harper's Magazinethe poetry received mixed reviews after it was first published in Higginson himself stated in his preface to the first edition of Dickinson's published work that the poetry's quality "is that of extraordinary grasp and insight", [ ] albeit "without the proper control and chastening" that the experience of publishing during her lifetime might have conferred.

Maurice Thompsonwho was literary editor of The Independent for twelve years, noted in that her poetry had "a strange mixture of rare individuality and originality". Andrew Langa British writer, dismissed Dickinson's work, stating that "if poetry is to exist at all, it really must have form and grammar, and must rhyme when it professes to rhyme.

The wisdom of the ages and the nature of man insist on so much". She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blakeand strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson But the incoherence and formlessness of her—versicles are fatal Critical attention to Dickinson's poetry was meager from to the early s. Rather than seeing Dickinson's poetic styling as a result of a lack of knowledge or skill, modern critics believed the irregularities were consciously artistic.

Dickinson was suddenly referred to by various critics as a great woman poet, and a cult following began to form. In the s, a number of the New Critics—among them R. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars She came The second wave of feminism created greater cultural sympathy for her as a female poet.

In the first collection of critical essays on Dickinson from a feminist perspective, she is heralded as the greatest woman poet in the English language. She carefully selected her society and controlled the disposal of her time Some scholars question the poet's sexuality, theorizing that the numerous letters and poems that were dedicated to Susan Gilbert Dickinson indicate a lesbian romance, and speculating about how this may have influenced her poetry.

Bianchi promoted Dickinson's poetic achievement. Bianchi inherited The Evergreens as well as the copyright for her aunt's poetry from her parents, publishing works such as Emily Dickinson Face to Face and Letters of Emily Dickinsonwhich stoked public curiosity about her aunt. Bianchi's books perpetrated legends about her aunt in the context of family tradition, personal recollection and correspondence.

In contrast, Millicent Todd Bingham's took a more objective and realistic approach to the poet. Emily Dickinson is now considered a powerful and persistent figure in American culture. Eliotand Hart Crane as a major American poet, [ ] and in listed her among the 26 central writers of Western civilization.

Biography facts about emily dickinson: Emily Dickinson is considered one

Dickinson is taught in American literature and poetry classes in the United States from middle school to college. A digital facsimile of the herbarium is available online. Inin recognition of Dickinson's growing stature as a poet, the Homestead was purchased by Amherst College. It opened to the public for tours, and also served as a faculty residence for many years.

The Emily Dickinson Museum was created in when ownership of the Evergreens, which had been occupied by Dickinson family heirs untilwas transferred to the college. Emily Dickinson's life and works have been the source of inspiration to artists, particularly to feminist -oriented artists, of a variety of mediums. A few notable examples are:.

A few examples of these translations are the following:. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Dickinson was born on December 10,in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her family had deep roots in New England. Her paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was well known as the founder of Amherst College. Her father worked at Amherst and served as a state legislator.

Dickinson ultimately never joined a particular church or denomination, steadfastly going against the religious norms of the time. Dickinson began writing as a teenager. InDickinson ventured outside of Amherst, as far as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There, she befriended a minister named Charles Wadsworth, who would also become a cherished correspondent.

Among her peers, Dickinson's closest friend and adviser was a woman named Susan Gilbert, who may have been an amorous interest of Dickinson's as well. InGilbert married Dickinson's brother, William. The Dickinson family lived on a large home known as the Homestead in Amherst. After their marriage, William and Susan settled in a property next to the Homestead known as the Evergreens.

Emily and sister Lavinia served as chief caregivers for their ailing mother until she passed away in