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Portrait of Emily Dickinson

Literature · Poets

Emily Dickinson

1830–1886 · American

American lyric poetry; proto-modernism

Emily Dickinson lived almost her whole life in Amherst, Massachusetts, increasingly withdrawn, and published only a handful of poems in her lifetime. After her death her sister found nearly 1,800 poems, many sewn into booklets. Her compressed lyrics, with their dashes, capitals and slant rhymes, on death, nature, faith and the mind, make her one of America's greatest poets.

How to spot them

  • ▸The recluse of Amherst, Massachusetts, who dressed in white
  • ▸Dashes, idiosyncratic capitals, slant rhyme and hymn (common) metre
  • ▸"Because I could not stop for Death"; "Hope is the thing with feathers"; "I'm Nobody! Who are you?"
  • ▸Poems hand-sewn into fascicles; poems known by first lines and numbers (Johnson, Franklin)

Key works

Because I could not stop for Death (c. 1863)

Death as a courteous gentleman caller driving the speaker in a carriage towards eternity

"Hope" is the thing with feathers (c. 1861)

Hope pictured as a bird perching in the soul and singing without pause

I'm Nobody! Who are you? (c. 1861)

Playful rejection of fame and public life

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died (c. 1863)

A deathbed scene interrupted by the buzzing of a fly

There's a certain Slant of light (c. 1861–62)

Winter afternoon light as a source of spiritual despair

A narrow Fellow in the Grass (c. 1865)

A snake poem, one of the few printed in her lifetime (as 'The Snake', 1866)

Tell all the truth but tell it slant (c. 1872)

Truth should be revealed gradually, like lightning explained kindly to children

Key ideas

  • Radical compression and ambiguity anticipating modernist poetry
  • Slant rhyme and the dash as expressive tools within a hymn-metre frame
  • Intense inward exploration of death, immortality, pain and ecstasy

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born and died in the family Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts; briefly attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
  • •Only about ten poems (some counts say eight) were published in her lifetime, anonymously and often altered by editors
  • •Her sister Lavinia discovered nearly 1,800 poems after her death, many in about forty hand-sewn booklets (fascicles)
  • •First collection, Poems (1890), was edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
  • •Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 edition restored her dashes and gave the poems numbers; R. W. Franklin produced a new edition in 1998
  • •Her poems have no titles and are known by their first lines
  • •The one-woman play The Belle of Amherst (1976) and the film A Quiet Passion (2016) dramatise her life

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources