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From the daguerreotype taken
at
Mount Holyoke, December 1846 or early 1847. The only authenticated
portrait of Emily Dickinson later than childhood, the original is held
by the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College.[1]
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December
10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst,
Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she
lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst
Academy for seven years in her
youth, she spent a short time at Mount
Holyoke Female Seminarybefore returning to her family's house in Amherst.
Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant
for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even
leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by
correspondence.
Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her
nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime.[2] The
work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly
by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time.
Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain
short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant
rhyme as well as unconventional
capitalization and punctuation.[3]Many
of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics
in letters to her friends.
Although most of her acquaintances were probably aware of Dickinson's writing,
it was not until after her death in 1886—when Lavinia, Emily's younger sister,
discovered her cache of poems—that the breadth of Dickinson's work became
apparent. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal
acquaintances Thomas
Wentworth Higginson and Mabel
Loomis Todd, both of whom heavily edited the content. A complete and
mostly unaltered collection of her poetry became available for the first time
in 1955 when The Poems of Emily
Dickinson was published by
scholar Thomas H. Johnson. Despite unfavorable reviews and skepticism of her
literary prowess during the late 19th and early 20th century, critics now
consider Dickinson to be a major American poet.[4]
Life
Family and early
childhood
A drawing of the young Emily Dickinson, age nine. It was made from a
portrait featuring Emily, Austin and Lavinia as children.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at the
family's homestead in Amherst,
Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, into a prominent, but not opulent,
family.[5]Two
hundred years earlier, the Dickinsons had arrived in the New World—in the
Puritan Great
Migration—where they prospered.[6] Emily
Dickinson's paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, had almost single-handedly
founded Amherst
College.[7] In
1813 he built the homestead, a large mansion on the town's Main Street, that
became the focus of Dickinson family life for the better part of a century.[8]Samuel
Dickinson's eldest son, Edward,
was treasurer of Amherst College for nearly forty years, served numerous terms
as a State Legislator, and represented the Hampshire district in the United
States Congress. On May 6, 1828, he married Emily Norcross from Monson.
They had three children:
By all accounts, young Emily was a well-behaved girl. On an extended visit to
Monson when she was two, Emily's Aunt Lavinia described Emily as "perfectly
well & contented—She is a very good child & but little trouble."[10] Emily's
aunt also noted the girl's affinity for music and her particular talent for
the piano, which she called "the moosic".[11]
Dickinson attended primary school in a two-story building on Pleasant Street.[12] Her
education was "ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl".[13] Her
father wanted his children well-educated and he followed their progress even
while away on business. When Emily 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".[14] While
Emily consistently described her father in a warm manner, her correspondence
suggests that her mother was regularly cold and aloof. In a letter to a
confidante, Emily wrote she "always ran Home to Awe [Austin] when a child, if
anything befell me. He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none."[15]
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.[12] At
about the same time, her father purchased a house on North Pleasant Street.[16] Emily's
brother Austin later described this large new home as the "mansion" over which
he and Emily presided as "lord and lady" while their parents were absent.[17] The
house overlooked Amherst's burial ground, described by one local minister as
treeless and "forbidding".[16]