Emily Dickinson, the Poet in the Desk Drawer: 1,800 Poems, 10 Published, and the Dashes That Changed Poetry

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems, almost all of them in private in her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts; only about ten were published during her lifetime, yet after her death she came to be recognised as one of the most important poets in the English language. Her short, compressed poems, full of dashes, unusual capital letters and surprising rhymes, explore death, faith, nature, love and the inner life with startling originality.

A prominent Amherst family

Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in Amherst into a prominent but not wealthy family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer, treasurer of Amherst College and a politician who served in the US Congress, and her grandfather had been one of the founders of the college. She received an education that was ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl: seven years at Amherst Academy, followed by a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before she returned home.

A private life

As she grew older, Dickinson spent more and more of her life at home, seeing few visitors and often communicating with friends by letter. Legends grew up around her as the recluse in white, but her letters show a lively, witty and deeply engaged mind. She was troubled from a young age by the deaths of people close to her, and death became one of the great subjects of her work. Few people in her circle knew how much she was writing.

The poems in the desk

After Dickinson's death in 1886, her younger sister Lavinia discovered the poems in her desk: hundreds of them, many copied neatly and sewn into small handmade booklets. A first selection was published in 1890, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. The editors, however, made significant changes, smoothing her punctuation, regularising her rhymes and adding titles to make the poems fit the taste of the time. It was only in the twentieth century that scholars published her poems much closer to the way she actually wrote them.

What makes her poems different

Dickinson's poems are usually short, often in four-line stanzas based on the rhythm of church hymns. But she broke the rules inside that simple frame. She used dashes instead of normal punctuation, giving lines a breathless, hesitant feeling, and capitalised important nouns. She often used slant rhymes, words that almost but not quite rhyme, which create a quiet sense of unease. Famous openings like "Hope is the thing with feathers" and "Because I could not stop for Death" show her gift for turning abstract ideas into vivid, homely images: hope as a small bird singing in the soul, death as a polite gentleman driving a carriage.

From unknown to canonical

Largely unpublished and unknown during her lifetime, Dickinson's work is now widely regarded as part of the Western canon. Together with Walt Whitman, she is often seen as one of the two founders of a distinctly American poetry. Her home in Amherst is now the Emily Dickinson Museum, and her poems are read in schools around the world, partly because they are short enough to study closely yet deep enough to discuss for hours.

Reading Dickinson as a language learner

Her poems are excellent practice for advanced learners of English. They use simple words in unusual ways, so you must slow down and think about each line. Try reading one poem aloud several times, notice where the dashes make you pause, and ask yourself what single image the poem is built around.

Learn with Dickinson: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
a recluse	someone who lives alone and avoids people	She became something of a recluse.
a slant rhyme	words that almost rhyme	"Soul" and "all" make a slant rhyme.
to tell it slant	to say something indirectly	Sometimes it's kinder to tell it slant.
a thing with feathers	(from her poem) a poetic image of hope	Hope is the thing with feathers.
behind closed doors	in private	She wrote behind closed doors.

Try this: Write a three-line English poem about hope, using one dash and one slant rhyme.