Emily Dickinson :: essays research papers

Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth (1830-1886), the Statess best-known female poet and one of the foremost authors in American literature. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson was the middle child of a lawyer and one-term joined States congressional representative, Edward Dickinson, and his wife, Emily Norcross Dickinson. From 1840 to 1847 she attended the Amherst Academy, and from 1847 to 1848 she studied at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, a few miles from Amherst. Dickinson remained in Amherst, living in the corresponding house on Main Street from 1855 until her death. During her lifetime, she published only almost 10 of her nearly 2,000 poems, in newspapers, Civil War journals, and a metrical composition anthology. The notion that Dickinson was extremely reclusive is a popular one, yet it is at best a partial truth. Although she never married and certainly became more(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) selective over the years about the comp some(prenomina l) she kept, Dickinson was far more sociable than most descriptions would have us believe. Biographers are increasingly recognizing the spanking role of Dickinsons sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, in her writing. For more than 35 years the both women lived next door to each other, sharing mutual passions for literature, music, cooking, and gardening. Emily sent Susan more than 400 poems and letter-poems, twice as many as she sent to any other correspondent. In 1998 Open Me Carefully Emily Dickinsons Intimate garner to Susan Huntington Dickinson was published, documenting the two womens friendship.Dickinson enjoyed the King James Version of the Bible, as head as authors such as English writers William Shakespeare, bathroom Milton, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle. Dickinsons early style shows the strong influence of Barrett Browning, Scottish poet Robert Browning, and English poets John Keats and George Herbert. In the early stages of her career, Dickinsons handwritten lyrics imitated the formalities of print, and her poetic techniques were conventional, but she later began to attend to the visual aspects of her work. For example, she arranged and broke lines of verse in highly unusual ways to underscore meaning and she created extravagantly determine letters of the alphabet to emphasize or play with a poems sense.