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The Life of Emily Dickinson

This study will examine the life of Emily Dickinson, providing a brief overview of her life and then focusing on her relationship with Thomas Higginson and the impact of that relationship on her creativity and poetry.

Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her life is remarkable mainly for its lack of remarkability, at least in external terms:

Here she lived a life, outwardly uneventful, inwardly dedicated to a secret and self-imposed assignment--the mission of writing a "letter to the world" that would express, in poems of absolute truth and of the utmost economy, her concepts of life and death, of love and nature, and of . . . "the landscape of the soul" (Linscott iii).

Dickinson was unpublished during her life, had no fame at her death in 1886. Her poems were not known at all to the world she addressed until four years after her death, when her first book of poems was published. It was not until the early twentieth century that her poems were fully recognized.

Dickinson received from her family "love without understanding." She lived in a well-off household dominated by her lawyer-Congressman father, whose heart Emily would describe as "pure and terrible." Her mother was "gentle" and "colorless," her brother resembled her father in disposition, and her sister was "crotchety and outspoken" and "watchdog and protector of her shy, sensitive, and sometimes rebellious sister" (Linscott iv).

Dickinson, who never married, attended Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and then lived a "customary life of a New England village. Much of what we know today about Dickinson's life comes from her letters and poems, so that she played a major role in constructing the image we have of her. She began to write poetry seriously in her twenties, in one year producing three hundred and fifty-six, almost one a day.

Dickinson apparently had two profound emotional attachments, one with C...

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The Life of Emily Dickinson. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:40, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1708098.html