Emily Dickinson

In her own lifetime, Emily Dickinson was known locally as nothing more than the town eccentric. A few of her poems found their way to publication while she was alive, but the majority of them remained secret. She wrote for her own sake and for her dearest friends, not for approval from the world. After she died, her family discovered hundreds of poems and published some of them. At the time, they had no idea that they would be so enormously popular. Today she receives recognition as one of the greatest American poets of all time.

Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 into a stern but loving home. Emily described the environment she grew up in as “pretty much all sobriety" (Myers). She once said that she found the “greatest pleasure to commune alone with the Great God and to feel that he would listen to my prayers,” which provides evidence for her Christian roots (“Wikipedia”). Since the age of nine, Dickinson expressed an interest in botany and later studied it. She collected over four hundred and twenty-four flower specimens in a herbarium and label and classified them using the Linnaean system. Although she had a reclusive nature, she kept correspondence with friends through letters. Susan Gilbert, one such friend, married Dickinson’s brother, Austin, and was the recipient of over three hundred letters from the poet. The deaths of several of her other friends profoundly affected her and put a morbid stamp on her writing.

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When her mother developed several chronic illnesses, Emily had to stay with her almost constantly. Having become accustomed to a secluded lifestyle, she preferred to live in the company of her garden, her books, and poetry, even after her mother passed away. In her later years, when she did see people, she usually wore white and become known as the “white lady” to some of the townspeople. She continued to exchange letters with her friends and sent flowers and poems along with the letter. Before she died at age fifty-five in 1886, Emily made her sister, Lavinia, promise to burn her papers. Her "coffin [was] not driven but carried through fields of buttercups" which was her wish (“Wikipedia”).

Dickinson wrote all the time, on scraps and the backs of envelopes and compiled them into facsimiles. Using vibrant language, she expressed her world with themes of love, nature, immortality and death (Myers). Fascinatingly, she penned poems about death, without making them depressing. Emily Dickinson defied conventional structure with her enigmatic use of dashes and capitalization. After her death, her family found forty hand-bound volumes containing over 1800 original poems. No one realized her talent until after she died. By the twentieth century, she had been recognized as one of the most exceptional poets in American history (“Poets.org”).

Emily Dickinson’s legacy lies in the fact that she was just an ordinary person who encapsulated her feelings and thoughts in rhyme. She never acted like some big hero. In fact, the people in her town considered her a weirdo! Today her work continues to captivate people all around the world. Along with fellow poet Walt Whitman, she is considered to be a founder of the American poetic voice. In other words, her work came to define American poetry. In her own lifetime, people hardly noticed her. If one examines her life, most people would not actually consider her a success. She did not have a career, she never married or had children, she did not make a fortune. Many of her poems have universal appeal. Emily Dickinson’s poetry contains beauty in its simplicity, in the notion that she was not so different from oneself.

Bibliography

Myers, Michael. "Biography of Emily Dickinson."Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Mar 2011. http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng384/emilybio.htm

"Emily Dickinson." Poets.org. N.p., 2011. Web. 17 Mar 2011.http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/155.

"Emily Dickinson ." Wikipedia. N.p., 14 Mar 2011. Web. 17 Mar 2011.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_dickinson#Posies_and_poesies.