Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830 to Edward and Emily (Norcross) Dickinson. At the time of her birth, Emily’s father was an ambitious young lawyer.
She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her home and visitors were few. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she first met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure gave rise to the heartsick flow of verse from Dickinson in the years that followed. While it is certain that he was an important figure in her life, it is not clear that their relationship was romantic—she called him “my closest earthly friend.”
While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson’s poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.
Dickinson was familiar not only with the Bible but also with contemporary popular literature. She was probably influenced by Lydia Maria Child’s Letters from New York, another gift from Newton (after reading it, she gushed “This then is a book! And there are more of them!”. Her brother smuggled a copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Kavanagh into the house for her (because her father might disapprove)and a friend lent her Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in late 1849. Jane Eyre’s influence cannot be measured, but when Dickinson acquired her first and only dog, a Newfoundland, she named him “Carlo” after the character St. John Rivers’ dog. William Shakespeare was also a potent influence in her life. Referring to his plays, she wrote to one friend “Why clasp any hand but this?” and to another, “Why is any other book needed?”
In the fall of 1884, she wrote that “The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come.” That summer she had seen “a great darkness coming” and fainted while baking in the kitchen. She remained unconscious late into the night and weeks of ill health followed. On November 30, 1885, her feebleness and other symptoms were so worrying. She was confined to her bed for a few months, but managed to send a final burst of letters in the spring. What is thought to be her last letter was sent to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross, and simply read: “Little Cousins, Called Back. Emily”. On May 15, 1886, after several days of worsening symptoms, Emily Dickinson died at the age of 55. Austin wrote in his diary that “the day was awful … she ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the [afternoon] whistle sounded for six.”Dickinson’s chief physician gave the cause of death as Bright’s disease and its duration as two and a half years.
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