Using original wordplay, unexpected rhymes, and abrupt line breaks, she bends literary conventions, demonstrating a deep and respectful understanding of formal poetic structure even as she seems to defy its restrictions. Her poems addressed emotional and psychological states such as loneliness, pain, happiness, and ecstasy death, often personified religion and morality as well as love and love lost.ĭickinson’s poems have had a remarkable influence in American literature. Dickinson’s seclusion allowed her to focus on developing her poetry. She did not cut off her contact with others entirely, as she received certain guests, traveled within New England to visit relatives, and wrote letters to friends and family, most often her sister-in-law and closest friend, Susan Huntington Gilbert, with whom she often discussed her poetry.
Beginning at age 23, however, Dickinson began to withdraw from society and by the age of thirty, she became a relative recluse, spending most of her days indoors. She spent her adolescent years studying locally at the Amherst Academy (1834–47) and at the Mount Holyoke Seminary (1847–48). Her Victorian upbringing included socializing with friends, doing domestic chores, and attending church. Nearly two centuries after Dickinson’s birth, her witty and frequently subversive poems are widely read, taught, and studied.ĭickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a prominent family. Her honest and uninhibited writing made her an early feminist voice, even as she maintained an outward appearance of submissiveness. Though socially shy, she was outspoken and emotional in her lyric poetry (short poems with one speaker who expresses thought and feeling), defying the nineteenth-century expectation that women were to be demure and obedient to men. Emily Dickinson is considered one of the most famous poets in the history of American literature.
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