Emily Dickinson
1830–1886 · American (Amherst, Massachusetts) · American Renaissance
Known for: One of America's greatest poets—1,800 poems of compressed intensity, almost none published in her lifetime
Emily Dickinson spent most of her adult life as a recluse in her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, rarely leaving, dressing in white, and communicating with visitors through a closed door. Yet her mind was volcanic—her poems are dense, elliptical, and explosive, using dashes and unconventional capitalization that baffled early editors.
She bound 1,800 poems into 40 hand-sewn booklets that were discovered after her death. Only 10 were published in her lifetime, anonymously. With Whitman, she co-founded American poetry—her compressed, elliptical style anticipated modernism by half a century.
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