home

**Elizabeth Dickinson- (December 10, 1830-May 15, 1886)**
====media type="custom" key="3171034" width="189" height="129"**Emily Dickinson** was born in 1830 to an Amherst, Massachusetts’s family. Her father, a political lawyer, was strict and didn't give Dickinson any independence or freedom. Emily went to school at Amherst Academy and then at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, she resisted enormously to join the Calvinist church.====  ====Dickinson wrote 1,800 poems when she was about 20 years old. Although she shared them with her sister Lavinia, her brother Austin and other family members and close friends, only a several were published during her lifetime. She often wrote about her annoying relationship with God, her fascination with death and immortality, her delight in nature and the power and limits of language to express her overpowering emotions and terrors. Her use of dashes, sporadic capitalization of nouns, off rhymes and eccentric metaphors made her one of the most innovated 19th-century American poets.====

====Although she read constantly, Dickinson began to be evanescent to the world and would barely step outside from her home at the age of 23. She dressed in only white clothing, spent most of her time in her room and it would be very rare if she saw guests being she rarely had visitors. At some point she may have had a disappointing love affair. Nobody knows who it might have been, but its a possibility that the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a famous Philadelphia preacher which Dickinson corresponded; Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, to whom she addressed many poems; Judge Lord, a friend of her father's; and her sister-in-law and Austin's wife Susan, who lived next door to her. They believe that Dickinson suffered an emotional trauma in her early thirties, some psychological crisis that resulted in the writing of more than a third of the total output of her compact, candid and enigmatic poems.====

====After her death in 1886 at the age of 56, her sister Lavinia found an enormous amount of poems assembled in packets of "fascicles," which Emily Dickinson had bound her self with needle and thread. Lavinia co-edited three volumes between 1891 and 1896, the first of which became a popular publication. In the early nineteen hundreds, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet's niece, transcribed and published more poems. Bolts of Memory appeared in 1945.====