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Emily Dickinson
1830-1886

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Short Bio from the Emily Dickinson Museum:

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst at the Homestead on December 10, 1830. Her quiet life was infused with a creative energy that produced almost 1800 poems and a profusion of vibrant letters.

Her lively Childhood and Youth were filled with schooling, reading, explorations of nature, religious activities, significant friendships, and several key encounters with poetry. Her most intense Writing Years consumed the decade of her late 20s and early 30s; during that time she composed almost 1100 poems. She made few attempts to publish her work, choosing instead to share them privately with family and friends. In her Later Years Dickinson increasingly withdrew from public life. Her garden, her family (especially her brother’s family at The Evergreens) and close friends, and health concerns occupied her.

With a few exceptions, her poetry remained virtually unpublished until after she died on May 15, 1886. After her death, her poems and life story were brought to the attention of the wider world through the competing efforts of family members and intimates.



"Emily Dickinson's Biography | Emily Dickinson Museum." Emily Dickinson Museum. Web. 17 Apr. 2012. <http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/emilys_biography>.




Have Questions about Emily Dickinson?  Check out this site for answers to the most commonly asked questions about her: http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/ed/node/66#die

"Tips for Reading Dickinson's Poetry," from The Emily Dickinson Museum

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Tips for Reading Dickinson's Poetry Emily Dickinson once defined poetry this way: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” (L342a, 1870)


Reading Dickinson's poetry often leaves readers feeling exactly this way, because she names so incisively many of our most troubling emotions and perceptions. But often, too, her poetry can make readers feel this way because it baffles and challenges expectations of what a poem should be. “All men say ‘What’ to me” she complained (L271), and many of her readers still cry “What?” in their first encounters with this dense and elusive poetry.

While every reader of Dickinson's poems has his or her own approach to the poetry, here are some suggestions for getting started on discoveries of her work:

  1. Stay open to linguistic surprise. The characteristics that help to make Dickinson's poetry so intriguing—the absence of titles, her dense syntax, unusual vocabulary, imperfect rhyme schemes, approaches to abstract ideas—can at first seem to obscure rather than illuminate her meaning.
  2. Read the poem again. Dickinson begins one well-known poem “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—” (Fr1263). The power of Dickinson's poetry often comes from her playful but potent sense of indirection. Trying to understand her poetry doesn’t mean solving it like a riddle, but rather coming to recognize its slippery strategies. Read the poem a third time. Set it aside and come back to it. Look at the poem with a friend.
  3. Review Major Characteristics of Dickinson's Poetry. How does the poem exemplify or confound these characteristics?
  4. Set aside the expectation that a poem has to "mean" one thing. A Dickinson poem is often not the expression of any single idea but the movement between ideas or images. It offers that rare privilege of watching a mind at work. The question of how we know anything comes alive as we read Dickinson.
  5. Try "filling in the blanks." Sometimes Dickinson's syntax is problematic—the poems are so compressed! In lines where a verb or another critical word seems to be missing, what words might create meaning? Don't feel that there is only one possibility. The variorum editions of her poetry reveal that she often thought of many alternative ways of expressing an idea. Looking at her variant wordings for a poem can help illuminate its possibilities.
  6. Don't try to make the poem "about" Emily Dickinson. Dickinson writes in the lyric style, in which the speaker of the poem is often referred to as "I." While the poem may represent the view of the poet, it also may not.
  7. Look for recurring themes, images, and strategies in Dickinson's poetry.
  8. Get out the dictionary. Emily Dickinson once wrote, “ . . . for several years, my Lexicon was my only companion” (L261). She had an exceptional command of the English language. Look up words that are unfamiliar, or that she uses in unfamiliar ways. Try the new Dickinson Lexicon, an on-line resource that defines all words used in Dickinson's poetry with definitions from the dictionary she herself owned, Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language.
  9. Consult a Bible concordance. Dickinson also had an exceptional knowledge of the Bible. Sometimes an unfamiliar word or image may be an allusion to a Biblical passage. A good concordance to use is James Strong's The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, which is keyed to the King James Version, the version that Dickinson read.
  10. Read the poem aloud. Poetry is an ancient, oral tradition. Often reading a poem aloud can help to elucidate its meaning. One of Dickinson's early editors, Mabel Loomis Todd, convinced Thomas Wentworth Higginson (her future co-editor) of the power of Dickinson's poetry by reading selections aloud to him.
"Tips for Reading Dickinson's Poetry | Emily Dickinson Museum." Emily Dickinson Museum. Web. 17 Apr. 2012. <http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/read_poem>.



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