English: Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, in full Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, (born December 10, 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.—died May 15, 1886, Amherst), American lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two leading 19th-century American poets.
Only 10 of Emily Dickinson’s nearly 1,800 poems are known to have been published in her lifetime. Devoted to private pursuits, she sent hundreds of poems to friends and correspondents while apparently keeping the greater number to herself.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was a poet with an exceptional ability to distill “amazing sense” from “ordinary meanings.” Her poetry is now considered among the finest in the English language.
Yet much about this fascinating figure’s life and work is misunderstood. Often caricatured in popular culture as a white-clad recluse who poured out morbid verse in the sanctuary of her bedroom, Emily Dickinson was a serious artist whose intellectual curiosity and emotional intensity are revealed in concise and compelling poems that capture a range of human experiences.

Emily Dickinson’s The Gorgeous Nothings offers an incredible inquiry into the material practice of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and an argument for why we should take not just the visual culture of poetry into account, as so many new editions of Dickinson’s poetry do, but also the materiality—as both constraint and possibility.

Explore LitCharts analysis and explanations of Emily Dickinson's poetry.

SparkNotes provides Study Guides and Further Reading for your study of Emily Dickinson's works, plus interesting facts, background, context and more.

Explore Emily's Dickinson's poetry and life via the Emily Dickinson Museum, which operates out of the Dickinson home.

Emily Dickinson Archive makes high-resolution images of Dickinson’s surviving manuscripts available in open access, and provides readers with a website through which they can view images of manuscripts held in multiple libraries and archives.

Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life.
Duration: 55:14 |: 1994 | Via ClickView (login required)

Arrows of Desire is a poetry series that explores the great diversity of English verse from the sixteenth century to the present day. This episode covers: Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas, At Grass by Philip Larkin, Musee des Beaux Arts by WH Auden, and I heard a fly buzz when I died by Emily Dickinson.
(Click forward to the timestamp 18:05 or Chapter 4 for the section about Emily Dickinson.)
Production Year: 2007 | Duration: 24:12 | Via ClickView (login required)

Unstructured poetic forms are a lot like cat videos: they’re unpredictable, people tend to love or hate them - and they’re full of clauses. This clip discusses the 19th century explosion of free verse poetry including famous pieces from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman; the phenomenon of spoken word (or performance poetry); and some common complaints against the multifaceted unstructured poetry genre.
Duration: 10:02 | Production Year: 2016 | Via ClickView (login required)