USH - Emily Dickinson - Church

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 and died on May 15, 1886 at the age of 56. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, the second of three children. She was very close to her brother, Austin, and her sister, Lavinia. Neither Emily nor Lavinia ever married, both living at home their entire lives, and, while Austin did get married, he and his wife chose to live in a house that was next door to his childhood home. Her family was in moderate privilege with strong local and religious attachments, with loving but strict parents. As a child, she was thought of as frail (both by her parents and others), and was thus often kept home from school. She did, despite this, excel at school. Ms. Dickinson did very well in many subjects, including Latin and science, as well as composition (She was recognized for her “prodigious abilities in composition.”). Although she did attend a college (Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now Mount Holyoke College), she found it too strict and religious-based, remaining there for only one year.

Nearly 1,800 of Dickinson’s poems have been published, but only 10 were known to have been published during her lifetime. These poems were often altered significantly by publishers, as was common in that time, in order to ensure that they fit the conventional poetic rules of that time (such rules include short lines, no titles, or unconventional punctuation and capitalization). The rest of her poems were discovered by Lavinia following Emily’s death, finally showing the extent of the poet’s work. Although much of her work was reviewed unfavorably at the time, she is now considered to be “major American poet.”

It is easy to see that Emily Dickinson has had a considerable impact on American literature. Her poetry is taught in literature and poetry classes from middle school through college. Her work is frequently anthologized and has been used as inspiration for many songs. Her poetry tackles the standard themes of love, death, and nature. Critics have said that the strength of her poetry is in the fact that she has such personal honesty in her work and such a strong control on powerful emotion. As Michael Myers once said, “Dickinson’s poetry is challenging because it is radical and original in it’s rejection of most traditional nineteenth-century themes and techniques. Her poems require active engagement from the reader, because she seems to leave out so much with her elliptical style and remarkable contracting metaphors.”