Emily Dickinson, a short History
My first post in My Emily Dickinson will be a brief history of her life and poetry
I mean for this to be a casual introduciton/history lesson on her and her poetry.
Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst Massachusetts on December 10th 1830. Her father and brother were both politically active men. She lived at home her entire life along with her sister Lavinia Dickinson. Except for a brief stint at Mount Holyoke Women’s Seminary she really never left home. She never married and never had children.
Though she never married the number of love poems in her canon have lead some to speculate about her love life. There are three unsent letters found among her things posthumously that have lead to this speculation. I have read them and her gift for words is remarkable. Who they were intended for I am not confident I know. Who is complete speculation that I think adds little to our understanding of her poetry.
She wrote her poems mostly in secret from others. I am certain her gift with words was noted and there is some historical discussion around a publisher trying to get her to allow him to publish her work. But that never happened in her lifetime. After she passed there were found forty volumes of sewn chapbooks filled with her poetry.
She never titled her poems so each one is known by its first line of script. And it seems as if her most prolific years were during the Civil War years. Her influence is Yeats and Robert and Elizabeth Browning. She was never allowed to read Walt Whitman as he was so ghastly it was deemed in appropriate for her by her parents and especially her father.
There is an Emily Dickinson Museum that I had not previously known about. You can visit their website here. They have some virtual celebrations planned coming up to and around her birthday next month. She would be 191 years old this December.
Thank you for reading.
