Emily Dickinson, recognized as one of the most original poets of modern history, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830. She led a life that was both physically and spiritually hermitic, rarely venturing beyond her doorstep. Dickinson wrote her short, introspective verses without any intention of publication. It wasn’t until 1890, four years after her death, that the first volume of her posthumous poetry was published, with an introduction by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
“She habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends,” Higginson notes, “and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems.” Despite this, she wrote nearly five hundred of these direct and spontaneous illuminations, many of which she sent to friends in letters or delivered to her sister Sue on random slips of paper without further comment. Gradually, the unique, Blake-like quality of her thought attracted a growing audience. Her first collection, *Poems* (1890), was followed by *Poems—Second Series* (1892) and *Poems—Third Series* (1896), all compiled and edited by her friends Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. A few years later, a further substantial volume was assembled by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, titled *The Single Hound* (1914), which primarily documented Emily Dickinson’s romantic friendship with her sister and included a valuable personal preface by Mrs. Bianchi.
The sharp quality of Dickinson's work, characterized by remarkable precision and vivid imagery, aligns her with the later Imagists in technique. However, her passionate and almost mystical warmth brings her closer to the great poets of her time. A description of her as “an epigrammatic Walt Whitman” captures the essence of her art, though it may be overly enthusiastic. Technically, Dickinson’s poetry was strikingly uneven; many of her poems resemble rough sketches that are awkwardly filled in, and even some of her finest lines contain trivial conceits or forced “thought-rhymes.” Nevertheless, the best of her work is unparalleled in its unique cadence and quiet intensity. Her verses are akin to a box filled with many jewels, each sparkling brightly, delicately contoured like cameos, and revealing opalescent depths within.
Emily Dickinson passed away in the same place where she was born, in Amherst, on May 15, 1886.