Emily Dickinson

Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth (1830-1886), America's best-known female poet and one of the foremost authors in American literature. Dickinson's simply constructed yet intensely felt, acutely intellectual writings take as their subject issues vital to humanity: the agonies and ecstasies of love, sexuality, the unfathomable nature of death, the horrors of war, God and religious belief, the importance of humor, and musings on the significance of literature, music, and art. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson was the …

…sweetest" in the volume A Masque of Poets (1878), and Elizabeth Holland, whose husband was an editor at Charles Scribner's Sons, a prominent publishing company. Dickinson's method of binding about 800 of her poems into 40 manuscript books and distributing several hundred of them in letters is now widely recognized as her particular form of self-publication. She also read her poems aloud to several people, including her cousins Louise and Frances Norcross, over a period of three decades.