American poet, whose lyrics are personal, psychologically astute treatments of such themes as love, death, and immortality. Dickinson is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential American writers of verse.
She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Dickinson wrote profoundly original poetry. Her literary mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, recognized Dickinson's genius, but advised her not to publish her work because of its violation of contemporary literary convention. After Dickinson's death, Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd edited the 1800 poems found among her papers into the first published selection of her work, Poems (1890), which enjoyed great popular success.
Dickinson most frequently wrote her poems, compressed into brief stanza forms, in a few different combinations of iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines. She also employed partial rhyme schemes, which became common in the next century. Dickinson's complex syntax draws a rich variety of connotations from many common words. Her imagery and metaphors derive both from an acute observation of nature and from a powerful imagination.
In addition to the 1890 selection, her published works include Poems: Second Series (1891), Poems: Third Series (1896), and The Single Hound (1914). A three-volume edition of her letters appeared in 1958.
The subjects of Emily Dickinson's poems, expressed in intimate, domestic figures of speech, include love, death, and nature. The contrast between her quiet, secluded life in the house in which she was born and died and the depth and intensity of her terse poems has provoked much speculation about her personality and personal relationships. Dickinson's 1,775 poems and her letters, which survive in almost as great a number, reveal a passionate, witty woman and a scrupulous craftsman who made an art not only of her poetry but also of her correspondence and her life.
