In full Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, American lyric poet who has been called “the New England mystic” and who experimented with poetic rhythms and rhymes. Almost all her poetry was published posthumously.
Dickinson was the second of three children. The three remained close throughout their adult lives: her younger sister, Lavinia, stayed in the family home and did not marry, and her older brother, Austin, lived in the house next door after his marriage to a friend of Emily's. Her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, had been one of the founders of Amherst College, and her father, Edward Dickinson, served as treasurer of the college from 1835 to 1872. A lawyer who served one term (1853–55) in Congress, Edward Dickinson was an austere and somewhat remote father, but not an unkind one. Emily's mother, too, was not close to her children.
Emily Dickinson was educated at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Mount Holyoke, which she attended from 1847 to 1848, insisted on religious as well as intellectual growth, and Emily was under considerable pressure to become a professing Christian. She resisted, however, and although many of her poems deal with God, she remained all her life a skeptic. Despite her doubts, she was subject to strong religious feelings, a conflict that lent tension to her writings. --David J.M. Higgins
