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Biography:
Emily Dickinson was an American lyrical poet, and an obsessively
private writer -- only seven of her some 1800 poems were published during her
lifetime. Dickinson withdrew from social contact at the age of 23 and devoted
herself in secret into writing.
Dickinson was born in 1830 at
Amherst, Massachusetts, to a family well known for educational and political
activity. Her father, an orthodox Calvinist, was a lawyer and treasurer of
Amherst College, and also served in Congress. She was educated at Amherst
Academy in 1834 and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847. Around 1850 Dickinson
started to write poems, first in fairly conventional style, but after ten years
of practice she began to give room for experiments. From c. 1858 she assembled
many of her poems in packets of 'fascicles', which she bound herself with needle
and thread.
After the Civil War Dickinson
restricted her contacts outside Amherst to exchange of letters, dressed only in
white and saw few of the visitors who came to meet her. In fact, most of her
time she spent in her room. Although she lived a secluded life, her letters
reveal knowledge of the writings of John Keats, John Ruskin, and Sir Thomas
Browne. Dickinson's emotional life remains mysterious, despite much speculation
about a possible disappointed love affair. Two candidates have been presented:
Reverend Charles Wadsworth, with whom she corresponded, and Samuel Bowles,
editor of the Springfield Republican, to whom she addressed many poems.
After Dickinson's death in 1886, her
sister Lavinia brought out her poems. She co-edited three volumes from 1891 to
1896. Despite its editorial imperfections, the first volume became popular. In
the early decades of the twentieth century, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet's
niece, transcribed and published more poems, and in 1945 Bolts Of Melody
essentially completed the task of bringing Dickinson's poems to the public. The
publication of Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 edition of Emily Dickinson's poems
finally gave readers a complete and accurate text.
Dickinson's works have had
considerable influence on modern poetry. Her frequent use of dashes, sporadic
capitalization of nouns, off-rhymes, broken meter, unconventional metaphors have
contributed her reputation as one of the most innovative poets of 19th-century
American literature. Later feminist critics have challenged the popular
conception of the poet as a reclusive, eccentric figure, and underlined her
intellectual and artistic sophistication.
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