Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a prominent local family — her father Edward Dickinson was a lawyer, state legislator, and treasurer of Amherst College — and spent almost the whole of her life in the family home there, withdrawing by her thirties into an increasingly reclusive existence, rarely leaving the house or receiving visitors in her later years. She wrote nearly 1,800 poems, of which fewer than a dozen were published in her lifetime, anonymously and heavily edited to smooth her unconventional dashes, slant rhymes, and compressed, elliptical syntax into more conventional verse; she sent many more in letters to correspondents, among them Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose literary advice she solicited in 1862 and to whom she signed herself his "scholar" for the rest of her life. After her death from kidney disease at fifty-five, her sister Lavinia discovered nearly forty handwritten booklets of poems locked in a bureau drawer and pressed Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd to prepare them for publication; Poems (1890), Poems: Second Series (1891), and Poems: Third Series (1896) introduced her to the public for the first time and, despite the editors' smoothing of her style for these early editions, revealed a poet now regarded as one of the most original in the English language.