About the Author

Subversive to her narrow community and rebellious against the conventions of her tiny literary circle, Emily Dickinson remains one of the most innovative of all American poets. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to one of the most respected families of her small New England town—her father Edward was a member of Congress and treasurer of Amherst College for forty years—Emily Dickinson rarely left her home and community. Her educational excursion to South Hadley Female Seminary (Mount Holyoke) failed after a year, and with the exceptions of visits to Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, she made few trips outside Amherst.

While the social affairs of her life may have seemed confined, if not restricted, her genius and imagination defined her personal locus, much as it would for Whitman, as nothing less than the center of the universe. She orchestrated and managed an intensely rarefied and passionate world, stimulated, at least in part, by her penchant for forbidden readings and the tumultuous relationships within the circles of her own family. She maintained an active correspondence, but concentrated most of her attention on her more than 1,700 poems.

Emily Dickinson wrote much of her work, sitting at a small desk in the upstairs bedroom of her family’s homestead, the red-brick, two-story house at 431 Main Street. Peering out of the shuttered windows across the fields to the southeast or scanning the grounds and gardens, Emily Dickinson cultivated inspiration. Through her poetry, she explored every corner of a truth, telling it "slant," capturing it at the very flashpoint of revelation. Insights tripping over themselves at right angles, every fractured line of an Emily Dickinson poem is illuminated with wit that penetrates to the very quick of an experience. Never written expressly for publication, each short poem appears to have been composed as a private enterprise, eventually finding its place in little hand-stitched bindings she called "fasciles." Through the years, she sent a few of her poems to close friends and confidants, but less than twenty ever saw publication in her lifetime.

More and more, the details of Emily Dickinson’s life are emerging from behind the public image members of her family projected after her death, that of the Victorian spinster, outfitted to the neckline in flowing white gowns, ensconced between the rows of her flower garden. Closer to the truth, she nurtured several long and endearing relationships, including apparently, although she never married, at least one lover. Even though she chose not to address personalities in her works, her poems certainly reflect the vitality of those relationships, if little of their data.

Emily Dickinson regaled in life and the living of it. The deaths of close friends stunned her, and yet, their passing only seemed to intensify her own acute sense of life’s mystery, and sometimes, within only the turn of a phrase, her genius seemed to lift her well beyond its boundaries. Although she prickled at the conservative Christianity of her Amherst neighbors, Emily Dickinson settled comfortably and confidently into her own recognition of the immortality of every given moment. It was not without its own various shades of irony, then, that on her tombstone, she protests, "Called Back."