Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Largely unpublished and unknown during her lifetime, her work is now widely regarded as canonical. The Poetry Foundation describes her as having "created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized."
Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a prominent family. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning home to Amherst.
Although Dickinson was a prolific writer, only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. Today her poems are widely regarded as groundbreaking with their use of short acerbic lines, lean descriptions, and slant or off-rhyme. Her poetry primarily deals with nature and mortality.
Few in Dickinson's circle were aware of her writing until after her death, when her younger sister Lavinia discovered the poems in her desk. First published as a selection in 1890, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, the poems were significantly altered to fit the prevailing poetic conventions of the time. Not until 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson compiled a complete collection of her poetry, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, was Dickinson's work restored closer to her original intention. Her collection garnered wide recognition for its innovation.
At least eleven of Dickinson's poems were dedicated to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Some scholars believe censorship helped to obscure the nature of Emily and Susan's relationship, which has been interpreted as romantic.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at the family's homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, into a prominent, but not wealthy, family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer in Amherst and a trustee of Amherst College.
Two hundred years earlier, her patrilineal ancestors had arrived in the New World—in the Puritan Great Migration—where they prospered. Emily Dickinson's paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, was one of the founders of Amherst College. In 1813, he built the Homestead, a large mansion on Amherst's main street, that became the focus of Dickinson family life for the better part of a century.
Samuel Dickinson's eldest son, Edward, was treasurer of Amherst College from 1835 to 1873, served 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 from Monson, Massachusetts. They had three children: William Austin (1829–1895), known as Austin, Aust or Awe; Emily Elizabeth; and Lavinia Norcross (1833–1899), known as Lavinia or Vinnie.
She was also a cousin of Charles and Henry Sweetser, sons of her aunt Catherine, and 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.
On an extended visit to Monson when she was two, Dickinson's Aunt Lavinia described her as "perfectly well and contented—She is a very good child and but little trouble." Dickinson's aunt also noted the girl's affinity for music and her particular talent for 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". Wanting his children to be well-educated, her father followed their progress even while 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".
While Dickinson consistently described her father warmly, her correspondence suggests that her mother was regularly cold and aloof. In a letter to a confidante, Dickinson wrote 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 female students just two years earlier. At about the same time, her father purchased a house on North Pleasant Street. Dickinson's brother Austin later described this large new home as the "mansion" over which he and Dickinson presided as "lord and lady" while their parents were absent. The house overlooked Amherst's burial ground, described by one local minister as treeless and "forbidding".
Dickinson spent seven years at the academy, taking classes in English and classical literature, Latin, botany, geology, history, "mental philosophy," and arithmetic. Daniel Taggart Fiske, the school's principal at the time, later recalled that Dickinson was "very bright" and "an excellent scholar, of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties". Although she took a few terms off due to illness—the longest of which was in 1845–1846, when she was enrolled for only eleven weeks—she enjoyed her strenuous studies, writing to a friend that the academy was "a very fine school".
Dickinson was troubled from a young age by the "deepening menace" of death, especially the deaths of those who were close to her. When Sophia Holland, her second cousin and a close friend, grew ill from typhus and died in April 1844, Dickinson was traumatized. Recalling the incident 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 melancholic that her parents sent her to stay with family in Boston to recover. With her health and spirits restored, she soon returned to Amherst Academy to continue her studies. During this period, she met people who were to become lifelong friends and correspondents, such as Abiah Root, Abby Wood, Jane Humphrey, and Susan Huntington Gilbert, who later married Dickinson's brother Austin.
In 1845, a religious revival took place in Amherst, resulting in 46 confessions of faith among Dickinson's peers. Dickinson wrote to a friend the following year: "I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness as the short time in which I felt I had found my Savior." She went on to say it was her "greatest pleasure to commune alone with the great God & to feel that he would listen to my prayers." The experience did not last: Dickinson never made a formal declaration of faith, and attended services regularly for only a few years. After her church-going ended, about 1852, she wrote a poem opening: "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – I keep it, staying at Home".
During the last year of her stay at the academy, Dickinson became friendly with Leonard Humphrey, its popular new young principal. After finishing her final term at the Academy on August 10, 1847, Dickinson began attending Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which later became Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, about ten miles (16 km) from Amherst. She stayed at the seminary for only ten months. Although she liked the girls at Mount Holyoke, Dickinson made no lasting friendships there. The explanations for her brief stay at Mount Holyoke differ considerably: either she was in poor health, her father wanted to have her at home, she rebelled against the evangelical fervor present at the school, she disliked the discipline-minded teachers, or she was simply homesick. Whatever the reasons for leaving Mount Holyoke, her brother Austin appeared on March 25, 1848, to "bring [her] home at all events". Back in Amherst, Dickinson occupied her time with household activities. She took up baking for the family and enjoyed attending local events and activities in the budding college town.
Throughout her early years, Dickinson was influenced mainly by school, church, family, and friends. When she was eighteen her family befriended a young attorney, Benjamin Franklin Newton. Over several weeks, they talked about his love of books, and in 1850 he sent her Ralph Waldo Emerson's poems. Emerson's poems inspired Dickinson with her use of language and that "words had life". Other friends and family also helped influence her, such as Leonard Humphrey who she called her first master before Benjamin Franklin Newton. Both of their deaths shocked her as they were sudden. These deaths impacted her work. Another person in her life that influenced her was Susan Gilbert, her friend and sister-in law, as they shared a library. They both highlighted and underlined passages from books that interested them the most. Henry Vaughan Emmons was another friend with whom she exchanged letters that expanded her interest in reading as well as access to books that would not have been allowed in her home.