Emily Dickinson, daguerreotype, c. 1847 — the only authenticated adult portrait. Wikimedia Commons · public domain.
Poet · Pairing II
Emily Dickinson
1830–1886 · American poet of the interior life
“I dwell in Possibility –”
Emily Dickinson lived almost her entire life in the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, and in her later years rarely left it. In near-total privacy she wrote nearly 1,800 poems — short, startling, and utterly original — stitched together with her signature dashes, slant rhymes, and unexpected capital letters.
Fewer than a dozen of her poems were published during her lifetime, mostly anonymously. Only after her death did her sister discover the hoard of manuscripts, and the first selection appeared in 1890. Today she is regarded as one of the two great pillars of nineteenth-century American poetry — the intense, compressed, inward counterpart to Whitman’s sprawling expansiveness.
Her poems turn the smallest things — a bird, a fly, a slant of light, the word “Nobody” — into meditations on death, faith, the mind, and the self.
In this curriculum
Read her in Pairing II — The Self and the Soul →