DICKINSON, EMILY (183o-1886), American poet, was born on Dec. 1o, 183o, at Amherst, Mass., where her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, had been one of the founders of the town, church and college. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer and treasurer of the college; her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, a model New England housewife who "did not care for thought." In all her heredity, according to her biographer, traced back nine generations in America and 13 in England, there is nothing to explain her genius—nor to confute it. As a child she went to public school, went berrying and chestnutting, learned the household arts and crafts. As a girl she made a herbarium, embroidered the usual book-marks, and wrote sentimental letters in the verbose style of the time. In the fall of 1847 she entered South Hadley seminary, where she studied chemistry, physiology and English composition, and where she was "cramped, curbed and repressed in every natural desire or impulse." She left the sem inary in 1848, re-entered Amherst academy for a while, and then, except for the lectures of the resident and visiting professors and her own reading, her education was finished. The winter of 1853 she spent in Washington, where her father was serving two terms in Congress, and on a visit to Philadelphia in the spring experienced an unhappy love affair—she firmly renouncing the man because she would not "wreck another woman's life." This possibly influenced the change from an apparently normal, witty young woman, to an increasingly mystical poet. By 1862 she had practically withdrawn from the world, venturing out of her father's house only at dusk to attend to her plants, but remaining always the "ecstatic daredevil, shy paradox," to her brother's fam ily and to a very few intellectual friends. She died at Amherst on May 16, 1886. During her lifetime she had allowed only three or four of her poems to be published. In 1892 her friend, Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, published a small collection with a success almost unparalleled in American literature, but it was not until 1924 that her complete poems and her Letters were pub lished, making her work generally accessible. Her poetry has been described as suggestive of William Blake in its "flashes of wholly original and profound insight into nature and life." She her self has been described as the epigrammatical Walt Whitman, and she remains a strange and entirely original genius, "defiant of outward form, sometimes obscure, at times inscrutable," but more often with a perfection in the mating of word and idea that has rarely been achieved.
See The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Boston, 1925) ; Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson; T. W. Higginson, Carlyle's Laugh (Boston, 1909) . (W. Tu.)