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“If I feel physically, as if the top of my head were taken off,
I know, that is poetry.”
She was an odd woman—reclusive, almost monastic.
Except for one homesick year as an undergraduate at
Mt. Holyoke, she lived all her life in her father’s house in
Amherst, Massachusetts. After the age of forty, she never
left the family property. When visitors came, she would
often refuse to see them, and sometimes talked to them
through an ajar door. She cooked, she baked, she
gardened, and she wrote her poems.
Her efforts were mostly in secret. Of the nearly 1,800
gem-like poems she wrote, only 10 were published in her
lifetime, some of those against her will. Some she enclosed
in letters to family and friends. But no one suspected that
when Dickinson died at the age of 56, they would find
dozens of small booklets of the poems neatly tucked in a
drawer in her bureau.
The poems had been carefully copied out in longhand
and sewn together with needle and thread. Dashes were
the only punctuation. Capitals were used for emphasis.
They employed unconventional rhythms and rhymes. In
almost total isolation she’d revolutionized American poetry,
and written some of the greatest poems of her century. |
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Emily Dickinson
(1830–1886) |
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