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, and a spiritual mentor

Dickinson's sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson

In 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 syntactical 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

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

---