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Emily Dickinson |
Emily Dickinson was deeply affected by the death of a childhood friend, and as a young woman, she slowly withdrew from social contact with others. By 1858 she had confined herself to her home in Amherst, Massachusetts and over the next ten years she wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems, showing only a few of them to her close friends.
In 1862, when she had written several hundred poems, she sent a selection to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, author of an Atlantic Monthly article about new poetry. He gave her kind encouragement but told her later that her verse was “too delicate” to publish. Undaunted, she resigned herself from that point on to write in private against the time when she would become immortal.
She was described as “a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair”, lively and indulgent with children, a warm and loyal correspondent, and a gifted gardener. But then her dog died. Other deaths piled up and by 1885 thoughts of death obsessed her. Now a complete recluse who rarely left her room, she said she felt a “great darkness coming”. After her death her family quarreled over the publication of her poems and it was another fifty years before the full extent of her work saw the light.
Much Madness is Divinest Sense
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |