Emily Dickinson was born into a prominent Amherst family and lived much of her life in relative seclusion, writing nearly 1,800 poems marked by unconventional punctuation, slant rhyme, and startling imagery. Almost none were published during her lifetime; her sister discovered the manuscripts after her death in 1886, and their posthumous publication revealed one of the most singular voices in American literature.
Emily Dickinson spent almost her entire life in the same house on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts, rarely traveling and, in her later decades, rarely even leaving her room. Visitors sometimes heard her voice from behind a door but never saw her face. This reclusiveness has fueled a century of speculation about her inner life, but it also produced one of the strangest and most powerful bodies of poetry in the English language.
Dickinson wrote obsessively, often on scraps of paper, envelopes, and the backs of recipes, folding her poems into small bundles she called fascicles and tying them with string. Her poems used dashes like gasps, capitalized nouns for emphasis, and approached death, immortality, and nature with unsettling directness. 'Because I could not stop for Death,' one of her most famous lines begins, treating mortality as a genteel carriage ride.
During her lifetime, fewer than a dozen of her poems appeared in print, usually altered by editors to fit conventional rhyme and meter. It was only after her death in 1886 that her sister Lavinia found the trove of nearly 1,800 poems locked in a box. Their publication, though heavily edited at first, gradually revealed the full radicalism of Dickinson's technique, and she is now ranked among the greatest poets America has produced.