After attending Amherst Institute and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Emily Dickinson retired to her father's house and rarely descended from her room. She wrote poetry all throughout her adult life, but of the almost two thousand poems she wrote, only seven were published in her lifetime, all anonymously, and most of them surreptitiously by friends who wished to see them in print. In 1862 she sent four poems to The Atlantic Monthly. The magazine's rejection of all four led to her belief that the public would not care for her poetry and she never again attempted to publish any of her verses. It would be up to later generations to discover the poetic genius who lived as a recluse in her father's house until she died at the age of fifty-five.
The themes of her poetry are as large as her world was small. Her verses are brief and very tightly ordered. They are usually concerned with such important subjects as fear, love, death, immortality, and man's relationship to nature. Her collected poems show the breadth of her tragic vision and her deep intellectual and emotional understanding of the human condition. Her standing in the world of letters has continued to increase with time and she is now considered one of America's greatest poets.
About the Author
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet who, despite the fact that less than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime, is widely considered one of the most original and influential poets of the 19th century.
