The Author

Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest and most innovative poets of 19th-century American literature, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. After the age of 30 she lived in almost total isolation in her father's house, a respected judge and congress man. "I do not cross my Father's ground to any House or town." But she carried on most of her friendships through a regular correspondence. She died in 1886 at the age of 56. Only seven of over 1700 poems were published during her lifetime. Early editors undertook to smooth rhymes, regularize the meter, delete provincialisms, alter 'sensible' metaphors, and substitute conventional grammar for the original syntax. In 1955 Thomas H. Johnson published a transcription of the original manuscripts for the first time.

The Work

Poems
Prose Fragment
Letters

Appendix

Emily Dickinson in the reading room of WomensStudies
Emily Dickinson's Letters by T.W. Higginson (1891)
The Emily Dickinson International Society
Dickinson Homepage
Sources/Colophon