Emily Dickinson By: Sakeenah Tyebbhoy

Biography Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts to one of the most prominent families in the community Second child of Emily and Edward Dickinson, a Calvinist lawyer who later served as state senator and state representative. Her closest life-long friends were her older brother Austin, and younger sister Lavinia She attended Amherst Academy from , and then briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary In her last years, she suffered many health problems, and personal losses. She died on May 15, 1886, from a kidney disorder and hypertension

Personal Life & Beliefs She lived with her parents her entire life in the Dickinson family house called the Homestead. She was considered highly introverted and eccentric. She seldom left her home and rarely had visitors. She even became known to not leave her bedroom She never married, and most of her friendships relied on correspondence Although Dickinson drew influences in her work from her Calvinist upbringing, she professed that her “failure to conform to the conventional expectations of her evangelical culture…helped liberate her to think on her own”

Life as a Poet Dickinson is recognized as one of the greatest American poets in Literature. She, along with Whitman, are the “19 th century poets who exerted the greatest influence on American poetry to come” A prolific, private poet, she is most famous for her collection of nearly 1,800 short poems She is considered a symbol of American Romanticism, and is also associated with the transcendentalist movement.

Themes and Influences The primary themes in her works explore pain and joy, the relationship of self to nature, the spiritual and the ordinary, religion, love and death. She was particularly influenced by Emerson, Bronte sisters, George Elliott, and Elizabeth Browning, who she saw a successful contemporary woman poet

Works & Styles Dickinson became famous for a new kind of poetry with a distinctive style and open form that broke from the traditional form, heeding Emerson’s call. She experimented with dashes, syntactical fragments, unconventional meter, and verbose language in her poems to make her poetry more powerful and expressive. She changed the game of poetry! She wrote tight, short poems with compressed lyrics “flaunting” her “refusal to conform”. This became a hallmark of modernist poetry to come She praised for her balance of imagery and her use of enjambment (the technique of running past the conventional stopping place of a line or a stanza break)

Legacy Dickinson did not gain much popularity as she deserved in her own lifetime. After finding records of Dickinson poems hidden away, her brother’s mistress Mabel Todd, Susan Dickinson & her daughter, and editor Thomas Higginson labored after her death to compile her poetry into 3 posthumous volumes that helped establish Dickinson as one of the great American poets.

Quiz What was the name of Dickinson’s family home? Approximately how many of her poems were published? What is the name of the technique (used by Dickinson) of running past the conventional stopping place of a line or a stanza break?

Souces. The Norton Anthology American Literature