Emily Dickinson

1830-1886

Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth

(1830-1886)

• Born in Amherst, Massachusetts
• From 1840 to 1847 she attended the

Amherst Academy, and from 1847 to 1848

she studied at the Mount Holyoke Female

Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College)

• a trip to Washington, D.C., in the late 1850s
• a few trips to Boston for eye treatments
• Dickinson lived in the same house on Main

Street from 1855 until her death

• she published only about 10 of her nearly

2,000 poems

• Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas

Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd,

was published in 1890

Was she extremely reclusive?
• the play The Belle of Amherst (1976)
• entertained guests at her home and at the

home of her brother and sister-in-law

• a voluminous correspondence with friends,

family; a spiritual mentor

• Dickinson’s sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson

1998 Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s

Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

Literary influences

• the Bible
• William Shakespeare, John Milton,

Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, George Eliot, and Thomas
Carlyle

• Barrett Browning, Scottish poet

Robert Browning, John Keats and
George Herbert

Literary devices:

• She frequently employed off-rhymes:

ocean with noon and seam with swim

• Defamiliarization, using common

language/words in startling ways

• Intense metaphors
• Ellipsis - the omission of a word or

phrase necessary for a complete

syntactic construction but not

necessary for understanding

the visual aspects of her

poetry

• arranged and broke lines of verse in

highly unusual ways to underscore
meaning

• created extravagantly shaped letters

of the alphabet to emphasize or play
with a poem’s sense

• incorporated cutouts from novels,

magazines, and even the Bible to
augment her own use of language

self-publication

• She “published” by sending out at

least one-third of her poems in the
more than 1,000 letters she wrote to
at least 100 different correspondents

• She bound about 800 of her poems

into 40 manuscript books/bundles