The Bee Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth
Dickinson (December 10, 1830
– May 15, 1886) was an American poet.
Born in Amherst,
Massachusetts, to a successful
family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly
introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at
the
Amherst Academy for seven years in her
youth, she spent a short time at
Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to
her family's house in Amherst. Thought of as an
eccentric by the locals, she became known for her
penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet
guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of
her friendships were therefore carried out by
correspondence.
Although Dickinson
was a
prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her
nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during
her lifetime.[2]
The
work that was published during her lifetime was
usually altered significantly by the publishers to
fit the conventional poetic rules of the
time. Dickinson's
poems
are unique for the era in which she wrote; they
contain short lines, typically lack titles, and
often use slant
rhyme as well as
unconventional capitalization and
punctuation.[3]
Many of
her poems deal with themes of death and immortality,
two recurring topics in letters to her friends.
Although most of her acquaintances were probably aware
of Dickinson's
writing, it was not
until after her death in 1886—when Lavinia, Emily's
younger sister, discovered her cache of poems—that
the breadth of Dickinson's work became apparent. Her
first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by
personal acquaintances
Thomas Wentworth Higginson and
Mabel
Loomis Todd, both of whom heavily
edited the content. A complete and mostly unaltered
collection of her poetry became available for the first
time in 1955 when The Poems of Emily
Dickinson was published by
scholar Thomas H. Johnson. Despite unfavorable
reviews and skepticism of her literary prowess
during the late 19th and early 20th century, critics
now consider Dickinson
to be a
major American poet.
From
Wikipedia:
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